New school year, new schedule: are your parenting arrangements still working?
New school year, new schedule: are your parenting arrangements still working?
There you are again. On the Caracasbaaiweg, stuck in traffic. The new school year has started, and you can notice it not only from the children having to head out the door with their bags again in the morning, but also from the traffic. The quiet holiday weeks are over, and suddenly we all have to be somewhere at roughly the same time.
With three school-age children, the start of the school year also means that the logistical puzzle at our home has to be put together again. Who takes whom, who picks them up, who has to go to sports, music lessons or another activity, and who can be where at what time? In Curaçao, children are often dropped off and picked up, so as a parent, alongside all your other roles, you are also a chauffeur for a considerable part of the week. And that is while we simply live together… I often think about the parents we support who no longer live together. Because if getting everyone to the right place on time can already be a challenge within one household, doing so from two homes requires even more coordination.
More than a schedule of days
This immediately brings you to something I consider important about a parenting plan. Of course, it covers the division of care: when the children are with whom, who picks them up and drops them off, and how holidays and special occasions are divided. But good parenting from two homes involves much more than that.
Who receives information from school and sports? Which decisions do you make together? Who arranges medical appointments? How do you divide the costs? What do you agree on regarding a phone and social media, new relationships or travelling abroad with the children?
A parenting plan is not mandatory in Curaçao, but in practice it can be enormously helpful to discuss these kinds of topics together and put agreements in writing. We draw up such a plan together with parents, tailored to their family and situation. It is not only about care arrangements and picking up and dropping off, but also about the other issues that come with parenting from two homes. And perhaps the start of a new school year is a good time to revisit it, not because everything has to change every year, but because family life naturally changes.
And your child grows too
An arrangement that worked well when a child was six may simply no longer be suitable years later. As children grow older, their lives change, as does what they need from their parents.
Responsibility for the arrangements remains with the parents; a child should not have to choose. However, what you as parents need to take into account changes with age. When making or revisiting parenting arrangements, we therefore always keep the child’s perspective in mind, without placing responsibility for those arrangements on the child.
Sometimes it is time to put the arrangements back on the table
Perhaps you made a parenting plan years ago and it has been sitting in a drawer ever since. Perhaps there are arrangements, but you have never really put them all down on paper. In both cases, it can be useful to compare them with your current life.
You can certainly sit down together to do that, but sometimes it helps to have someone take a look. At Hoek & Steen, we support parents in making new arrangements and revisiting existing ones. So that you do not only seek help once something has become a conflict, but can also simply make adjustments because your lives (and those of your children) are changing.
And the next morning, there will probably still be traffic on the Caracasbaaiweg. But hopefully, at least it will be clear who is taking which child where ??
