Today's Parenting Arrangements After Divorce

The days of divorced fathers pick up their children every Friday night and bring them home to mom's house on Sunday nights may not be completely over yet, but they are declining. Today's divorced parents are changing the landscape of childcare through continued cohabitation, nesting, and other creative, non-traditional co-parenting arrangements.

Nesting

Divorce can be difficult for children, regardless of their age. While dealing with their parents' separation is by far the most difficult thing to deal with, going back and forth between homes is almost equally disruptive. To combat this, some parents give children custody of the family home in an arrangement called nesting.

Instead of bringing the children in and out of the house, each parent takes turns living in the family home with the children. This allows children to stay in familiar surroundings, to continue attending the same schools, to stay involved in their established extracurricular activities and to keep in close contact with their friends. Mom and Dad maintain separate residences where they live temporarily while the other stays with the children, raising them in the "nest" for specified periods of time.

Shared space

Maintaining two or three residences is prohibitively expensive for many divorced couples. Instead, some divorced parents choose to continue to share their former "marital home" with their children after the divorce. They can live together as roommates while co-parenting simultaneously or they can set up a schedule that allows them to take turns. If the house is large enough, they can each have their own smaller "space" in which they take turns living while the "custodial" parent lives in the main part of the residence, the parent of the children.

Neighbors

The nesting arrangement requires adequate finances to accommodate multiple residences and the arrangement of the shared space requires the ability to continue to live together in harmony. Somewhere in between these two concessions is the neighboring option.

For these ex-spouses, living apart from each other, but close together, allows them to continue to be parents of their children on a daily basis with minor disturbances for the children. They can have houses on the same street or apartments in the same complex. Children can roam freely between their parents' residences, which gives them open access to both mom and dad and eliminates many of the problems present when divorced parents live further apart from each other.

Put children first

Obviously, these types of parenting arrangements require an extremely friendly relationship between the ex-spouses. They are clearly not for everyone. Whether parents are able to choose one of these newly popular, modernized new co-parenting structures or develop their own creative childcare arrangement, the important thing is that they serve the best interests of the children.

At Mejias Milgrim Alvarado, we are committed to helping our clients achieve this by exploring their unique situations and negotiating childcare arrangements that work best for all. Come talk to us about your family law requirements.