Your Child Custody Agreement: Pick the Right Start Date

You're making your child visitation agreement. While you're making the big, important decisions like who gets Johnny during the week, how to set up alternating custody on the weekends, and who gets the kids on Christmas and Thanksgiving it's easy to overlook the little details.

However, if you want to get the most time possible with your child, it is crucial that you notice the little things that are going on--because paying attention to those little details at the beginning can make a big difference at the end in your child custody agreement. One very important detail that is generally ignored comes right at the beginning--the start date (and even end date) of your visitation plan.

Let's say the court order comes down as follows: "...with a time-share percentage of 17% for Father and 83% for Mother (for the period of time from 04/01/08 - 03/31/09)." And, "The regular parenting schedule begins on 4/6/008, starting within week 1, described..". This nails down your visitation schedule to a rigid method for calculating timeshare. It has start and end dates, and a starting date for the basic cycle.

In this case, it's exactly one year, starting with the first of April in 2008. And the first week of the basic repeating cycle lines up with the week beginning the 6th of April. So? So, this sort of legal text defines the plan exactly: but really you could have put up a yearlong calendar on the wall, thrown a dart and use the date where the dart stuck to start the visitation agreement and it wouldn't have made any difference.

Except that it can make a difference. Holidays change drastically even when the basic schedule is advanced by a week. And, holidays are crucial in affecting your time-share percentage. And, your time-share percentage determines your child support...and, of course, how much time you spend with your child.

If we set up a scenario with a custody agreement with alternating weekends for the non-custodial parent and a default holiday setting (the days are evenly distributed between parents) that started on Jan 1, 2008, the non-custodial parent gets 25.1% and the custodial parent gets 74.9%. Now, if we change the date to Jan 8, 2008 the non-custodial parent's time share jumps over two percentage points--without doing anything! Just changing the start date of the visitation agreement gives a boost of 2.6% which is over 200 hours of visitation for that cycle.

Do you want an easy way to get more time with your child? Start right at the beginning. The extra work in trying to decide what day to start the agreement will definitely be worth it. And, if you want an easy way to experiment with the start dates, get a child custody software that allows you to set up child custody agreement calendars. There are software programs available that allow you to set up your schedule exactly how you want and it will calculate the time-share percentage for you so you know the best way to set up your child visitation agreement calendar.

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