Is it my turn or your turn?

Nowadays, it seems like everyone has a busy schedule, including your kids. Between soccer practice, violin lessons, and school plays, it gets to the point where your kids are the ones keeping you on top of their schedule.  As a parent, you have your own hectic schedule to manage, but you have to know where your kids need to be every day.  Trying to handle this when your family is split between two homes with a custody schedule involved makes it even more difficult to keep everything straight.  Both you and your co-parent need to know one thing quickly and accurately: is it my turn or your turn? 

Co-parents living in two separate homes often find themselves asking, “is it my turn or your turn?” when they are not clear as to which parent will have their child on a particular day.  While they may know how their schedule rotates or who had the child last weekend, many families must make frequent adjustments to their parenting schedules which change the way the schedule will be played out.  Planning out a change in parenting time may be simple to do by phone or email, but if one parent does not remember this agreement, things can get messy quickly.  This mess could have been easily avoided if both parents were able to answer, “is it my turn or your turn?”

The OurFamilyWizard website offers tools for parents to combat the stress and confusion that surrounds your child’s varying schedule, day and night.  The parenting schedule tool is an easy-to-use solution to help fight the frustrating issue of “is it my turn or your turn?”   You and your co-parent can customize your calendar to reflect your family’s parenting schedule, whether you use an every-other-weekend schedule, 2-2-3 schedule, etc.  This will detail which parent your child will be spending their nights with over the course of your normal schedule.  If your family plans to keep the same overnight schedule for several years, you will only need to put that information onto the calendar once, and you can post it as far into the future as you need it to.  Once saved, your schedule will appear as a colored bar above each of the dates it has been assigned to on your calendar; one color will reflect your time, and the other will reflect your co-parent’s time.  Also, coordinating adjustments in your parenting schedule is made easy by using the schedule change request tool.  Using this tool, you can propose which days and/or nights you need to change the schedule, and when your co-parent approves this request, the proper adjustment will be made to your calendar for the days you have selected. This way, you can clearly see your typical schedule with all of the corrections at a glance without having to muddle through past emails or rack your brain for information. 

If your parenting schedule is not what causes you and your co-parent to ask, “Is it my turn or your turn?” perhaps issues arise when you are trying to coordinate your kid’s events and who will be taking them where.  The OurFamilyWizard Calendar lets you post all of the events and appointments that happen for your child, assign which parent will drop off and pick up your child, and make notes about the event.  If your child has a regular event every week, you can assign that event to reoccur every week at the same time so that you do not have to keep plugging in the same information.  When you already have enough to discuss with your co-parent, keeping the question, “Is it my turn or your turn?” out of your conversations is made easy with the tools available on the OurFamilyWizard Calendar.

 

 

NOTE: Many state and federal laws use terms like ‘custody’ when referring to arrangements regarding parenting time and decision-making for a child. While this has been the case for many years, these are not the only terms currently used to refer to these topics.

Today, many family law practitioners and even laws within certain states use terms such as ‘parenting arrangements’ or ‘parenting responsibility,’ among others, when referring to matters surrounding legal and physical child custody. You will find these terms as well as custody used on the OurFamilyWizard website.