Planning for Parenting Time: Ohio's Guide for Parents Living Apart

Child Development and Suggested Parenting Schedules
It is important
for parents to
be flexible
when creating
a parenting
schedule with
a teenager.
Your teen may benefit from a primary home base, with specific
evenings, weekends and activities at the other home scheduled on a
regular and predictable basis. More than anything, your teenager will
usually want a say in the parenting schedule, but the teen should not get
to choose. Regardless of your teen’s needs, the parenting schedule should
include the considerations listed below:
• work
• extracurricular activities
• social life
• increased schoolwork
• jobs
• peer relationships
• sports.
Many teens prefer one primary home (close to their friends), and
weekends or evenings with the other parent. Some will prefer a balanced,
50-50 schedule with their parents. Much of this will depend on the
relationship history with each other, the distance between parents and the
parents’ availability to meet their child’s needs.
DESIGNING A SCHEDULE FOR TEENS
Parents of teens should think about the child’s schedule and
commitments, distance between the parents’ homes, each parent’s work
schedule or other obligations, the child’s temperament and wishes, and a
teen’s need for unstructured time.
Parents may need to think about many circumstances when making
schedules for teenagers. Their involvement with school, friends, clubs
sports, or other commitments can create an exhausting schedule. The
result may be that the teen is home for little more than sleeping and
eating, leaving no time for family or parents.
Parents may lose a lot of time with their teens because activities or
friends take even more of the teen’s time. Planning the schedule of a teen
that can balance all of these areas may require the help of professionals,
such as counselors, mediators or parenting coordinators, who create such
schedules if the parents are unable to do so.
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