Where will the children live?
Sometimes the answer is obvious to you both. Sometimes this is a really hard decision.
You may want the children to live part of the time with you, and part of the time with their other parent. This is sometimes called “shared residence” or “shared care”. You may feel that it is only fair if the child lives with you for 50 per cent of the time. But, if you are thinking like this, you may not be putting your children's needs first. You need to consider what is best for them at this point in their lives.
Some parents are able to manage shared residence because they both have enough room at home, and both have the time (or money) to spend on childcare. If you as parents can manage to be friendly and cooperative, it can be a success.
Hot tip!
"I got a big write-on calendar with lots of stickers for planning contact. It meant that everyone could see what was happening."
However, if it is because you both regard the children as “yours” and you make the arrangement because you want to “own” their time, then it is less likely to be good for them.
Try to put yourself in your children’s shoes. How would you feel if you had to move backwards and forwards between two houses?
Contact - What worked for me
- "The handover’s really hard at first. You can’t seem to look at each other even. But I tried hard to be nice about it, and it helped Amy, my daughter, that we could speak to each other, and I could come to the door."
- "It really bugged me when he didn’t bring the kids back on time. Or when he was late turning up and they were all ready in their coats. We used to have dreadful rows. But now he just phones or texts me if he's running late, and its okay."
- "We’d never been very organised before. We found that we had to each get a calendar and write it all down. At first, it felt like a horrible bind."
- "You’ve both got to be flexible; you won’t generally know about things like their friends’ birthday parties a long way in advance. We found that once we’d sorted out the main things like holiday times and key weekends, it helped."
- "I made the mistake at first of always trying to take the children out for a treat. I wanted it to be special. But they like being at home too – just us being together."
- "Children know when you’re trying to buy their love. And they exploit it! We found that they were playing us off against each other a bit, and we started to buy bigger and bigger presents for them."
- "I went to a dads’ group and found out lots of things to do with the kids. And sometimes the fathers and the kids all got together which was fun."
- "The children used to come back from weekends with Mark all hyper and tearful. I was really worried about it. But my sister said her kids were like that anyway if they’d been out for the day, and I realised she was right. I talked to Mark about it and he agreed to try to get them to chill a bit for the last hour or so."
- "Children have their own lives too. It took us a while to strike the right a balance between ensuring we have enough time together and making sure the kids still get to do the things they want to - like going to football or Brownies, and seeing their friends."
- "Activities that have weekend classes can be a problem if the children see their other parent every other weekend. We solved the Sunday football problem by Tim saying that he would always take them, even if it was not ‘his’ weekend."
- "Looking back, I realise that any arrangement that we made had to change every six months or so, because the children’s lives were always changing. There’d be new swimming lessons, or they’d need to go to something on a Saturday, just when you had everything planned."
