Your parenting plan will not likely remain in place forever. If it doesn't work well or if your child's needs are not being met, you can reassess them. In fact, you should reassess your parenting plan if needed because the best interests of your children need to be maintained all the time.

You can make organic changes to your plan as part of an ongoing decision-making process, or you can ask for a more formal change and review to be completed if need be. Either way, the best interest of the child is paramount. So, if the agreement doesn't work for the child, you can and you should make appropriate changes. You're not locked into it.

So, rest assured that if you try something that doesn't work for them, you can seek an adjustment. Think about trying something for a period of time and then having a review to assess how it might be working. Or you can take an incremental approach so that change doesn't feel so drastic.

Sometimes people try one approach for one month and then they try another approach for another month and they make a decision based on how the child responded.

When you're thinking about how to create Parenting Responsibilities and Parenting Time, you can think about making specific terms or general and flexible terms. A parenting plan at its core should establish boundaries and clear expectations for how the two of you are going to act as co-parents moving forward. And that way you can both rely on the terms of the agreement and plan your lives around it.

Some people favour general flexible terms because they know that their lives are constantly changing, they don't have a clear work schedule, or the child is older and the parents have less control over their plans. These types of agreements are great and you'll have lots of options with Divii to choose general terms or build-in flexibility.

One thing to note though is that the more flexible an agreement is, the more communication you might have to have and the more effective your communication has to be because you're going to continue to talk to each other and problem solve as things come up in your plan.

On the other hand, specific arrangements will be very clear, very predictable, and consistent. So people who have more strained communication tend to favour specific agreements because once the agreement's made, they don't have to continue discussing and changing the agreement.

Really specific agreements don't account for change in your lives and sometimes opportunities get missed because the arrangements were so rigid.

Overall, most people are looking to balance predictability and consistency with flexibility. So try to consider where that balance is for your family. Often it means having a very good default to work off of and then allowing flexibility where needed.