Co-Parenting & Extracurricular Activities

Spring activities begin to fill the calendar: soccer, baseball, basketball, recitals of all sorts, graduations. Issues with schedules, especially after a divorce, crop up when meeting the demands of visitation and extracurricular activities. Be mindful of these three issues:

• Dividing transportation. Whether your ex spouse takes the kids to ballet and baseball, or you do, or you split up the responsibility, this needs discussion. Some divorced couples cannot work together and the responsibility falls to standard visitation days. The downside of this is that sometimes, if you get the weekdays and your former spouse has weekends, one parent feels resentful of always running the child(ren) about and not having the same amount of quality time as the other parent. If possible, work out days where parents rotate responsibilities.
• Dividing expenses. Along with the cost of lessons comes the expenses for clothes, shoes, and necessities like equipment. All of this gets pricey. Try to evenly divide the monthly tuition or fees between parents and rotate or decide who buys what and when. Again, this just makes co-parenting easier and helps your kids see you working together for their good. It’s a win-win.
• Sharing schedules for better communication. Communication might have been one of the issues you struggled with in your marriage, but if you have children together, working on your communication becomes paramount after the marriage as well. Getting your children to and fro from school, to all of their activities can make life stressful. Thus, one can easily slip up and forget to tell the other parent about the beginning of a tournament or a birthday party. That’s why schedules and calendars for families were created. We’ve taken time to look at these apps before, but one of the favorites was Our Family Wizard.This app includes a messaging system and message board, as well as an expense log and calendar. It has more, just check it out: https://www.ourfamilywizard.com/ofw.

 Hopefully, this information helps. Through the myriad of concerns, both practical and emotional, as you co-parent, just knowing your trajectory, your needs as a new kind of family, and what’s available to simplify your situation, can ease stress .Less stress equals more time to enjoy your family and your life together!