Over 19 years of family law practice, I’ve watched parents spend enormous energy negotiating a number — 40% of the time, 50% of the time, every other weekend — before ever asking whether that number is actually workable for their children’s lives. The two questions get treated as one, when they’re really two separate things: how much time a child spends with each parent, and who gets to make the big decisions about that child’s life. These are legally distinct, and confusing them is where a lot of unnecessary conflict starts.
1. Two different questions, two different answers
Parenting time is exactly what it sounds like — the schedule of when a child is physically in each parent’s care. Decision-making responsibility is different: it’s the authority to make significant decisions about a child’s health, education, religious upbringing, and other major life matters. A parent can have substantial parenting time and share very little decision-making authority, or the reverse — modest parenting time paired with full decision-making input. Neither one automatically determines the other.
Both, though, answer to the same master: the best interests of the child. Not what feels fair to either parent. Not who wants more time. What actually serves the child.
2. Time on paper isn’t the same as time that works
This is where I see the most disconnect. A parent can genuinely want, and even be legally entitled to negotiate, something close to 40% of the time — but wanting it and being able to actually provide for it during that time are two different things.
If a parent’s living situation doesn’t have adequate space, stability, or basic conditions for a child to actually live there for that portion of the week, that reality has to come before the percentage. The child’s interests aren’t served by a schedule that looks balanced on paper but doesn’t hold up in practice. This isn’t a judgment on either parent — circumstances change, finances shift, and building suitable accommodation takes time. But the arrangement has to reflect where things actually stand, not where either parent hopes to be.
3. Proximity matters more than people expect
Here’s something I bring up often, and it tends to surprise parents who are focused entirely on the time split: where each parent actually lives relative to the other can matter as much as how the time is divided.
A child’s stability isn’t just about which house they’re in on a given day — it’s about staying connected to their school, their friends, their routine. Two parents living reasonably close to each other, even with an uneven time split, can often serve a child better than a 50/50 arrangement between two homes far enough apart that the child is pulled out of their school district, loses easy access to friends, or spends significant time commuting between two lives instead of living one, continuously, across two homes.
4. None of this is a formula
I want to be direct about something: there’s no worksheet that spits out the right answer here. The law asks decision-makers, and parents negotiating on their own, to weigh the child’s actual circumstances — their needs, their stability, their relationships, and yes, each parent’s real capacity to provide for them — not to default to whatever percentage sounds the most equal.
What I encourage parents to do
Before negotiating a number, look honestly at capacity: Is the space adequate? Is the location workable for school and routine? Is the arrangement something that will hold up in six months, not just something that resolves this week’s disagreement? A parenting plan built around these honest questions tends to be more stable — and more genuinely in the child’s interest — than one built around matching a percentage either parent believes they’re entitled to.