A parenting plan built around your children.

A custody formula can be applied to any family. A parenting plan is written for one: yours. In mediation, you and your co-parent work out the arrangement together, against the actual shape of your lives, which the two of you know best.

What a parenting plan covers

The details vary by family, and a plan usually addresses:

• The regular schedule: school weeks, weekends, and exchanges, worked out against school pickups and both work calendars
• Holidays, school breaks, and vacations, and how they alternate or split
• Legal custody and decision-making: education, medical care, and religion
• Communication between households, and between each parent and the children
• How changes get handled as children grow and schedules stop fitting

Why work this out in mediation

Where you share children, the parenting relationship carries on long after the divorce is done. The sessions are practice at making decisions together, which is something you will be doing for years. And because mediation is conducted between the two of you, the details of your family life are worked through privately.

Jessica has spent thirteen years as a matrimonial attorney, which includes seeing which parenting arrangements hold up in practice and which ones generate conflict. As your mediator she is neutral: she does not represent either parent, and her job is to help you both get to a plan you can live with.

How it fits into a divorce

Custody and parenting time can be mediated as part of a full divorce, alongside assets and support, or on their own. Either way, the process starts with a complimentary consultation of up to thirty minutes. If the plan is part of a broader settlement, it is written into the Matrimonial Settlement Agreement; the full process is described on the divorce mediation page.