Building a Parenting Time Plan Around a Child's Routine

The situation

Andriy, an electrician in Wasaga Beach, separated from Keisha, an office manager, about two years before he came to us. They had never gone through a formal separation agreement — after they split, they simply agreed between themselves to alternate weeks with their daughter, Simone, then eight years old. It worked well enough for the first several months. Then it did not.

Simone has autism spectrum disorder. She thrives on predictability: the same bedtime routine, the same order of activities after school, the same words used to describe what happens next. An alternating-week schedule meant she spent every other week adjusting to a different home, a different set of transition cues, and a different way of winding down at night. Her school reported more meltdowns during the first two or three days after each switch. Her behavioural therapist, who worked with her twice a week under a provincially funded autism program, noted the same pattern in session notes.

Andriy did not want to cut Keisha out of Simone's life — he was clear about that from the first call. What he wanted was a schedule that reduced the number of transitions Simone had to manage, and a clear, written way of making decisions about her therapy, her school placement, and her medical care so the two parents were not renegotiating from scratch every time something came up.

The problem

Under Ontario's Children's Law Reform Act, separated parents divide two things: parenting time, meaning the time a child spends in each parent's care, and decision-making responsibility, meaning who has the authority to make significant decisions about the child's health, education, religion and major extracurricular activities. These terms replaced the older language of "custody" and "access" in amendments that came into force in 2021, and the underlying test for any parenting arrangement is the same one it has always been: what serves the best interests of the child.

That test is deliberately open-ended, and it is where Andriy's case had real strength. The Children's Law Reform Act directs decision-makers to consider the child's own needs, including any special needs, and the stability of the arrangement being proposed. A court — or a negotiation conducted with a court's likely reasoning in mind — does not treat an equal division of time as a default that must be justified away. It asks what arrangement actually works for this child.

The complication was that Keisha did not initially see it that way. She had agreed to the alternating-week schedule at the start and read Andriy's proposal to change it as an attempt to reduce her time with Simone. That reaction is common and understandable: a parent hearing "the schedule needs to change because of the child's needs" can hear "you are the problem" even when no one has said that. Getting past that reaction, without a contested motion in family court that would take months and cost both of them money neither had budgeted for, was the real task.

What we did

1. Anchored the proposal in evidence, not opinion. Rather than asking Andriy to argue his own view of what Simone needed, we asked him to gather what her therapist and her school had already observed and, where appropriate, written down — the pattern of post-transition meltdowns, the therapist's general observations about consistency for children with autism. This meant the proposal was not "Andriy's opinion versus Keisha's opinion," but a shared body of observation about Simone specifically.
2. Proposed a routine-preserving schedule, not a reduced-time schedule. The draft we prepared kept the total time roughly balanced between both parents but restructured how it was divided: longer, less frequent blocks anchored to the school week, a fixed mid-week dinner visit with the non-residential parent to avoid a hard week-long absence, and identical bedtime and after-school routines written into the agreement itself so Simone would encounter the same sequence of steps in either home. Keisha's time with Simone did not shrink; it was reorganized around fewer handoffs.
3. Built a decision-making framework specific to Simone's care. We drafted a clause giving both parents joint decision-making responsibility for major decisions, but with a default rule for therapy and school-related choices: absent agreement within a set number of days, the recommendation of Simone's treating professionals would govern. This took the disagreement out of the space between the two parents and put it onto a neutral, qualified third party neither of them had reason to distrust.
4. Negotiated directly with Keisha, not around her. Because Keisha was not represented by a lawyer, we were careful to communicate in writing, plainly, and to invite her to have the draft reviewed independently before signing — both because it was the right thing to do and because an agreement one party later claims they did not understand is an agreement that can unravel. Keisha ultimately did have the draft reviewed by another lawyer, who suggested minor wording changes to the holiday schedule, which we accepted.
5. Converted the agreement into a signed separation agreement. Once both sides agreed on terms, we prepared a full separation agreement covering parenting time, decision-making responsibility, and child support calculated using the Child Support Guidelines based on Andriy's and Keisha's respective incomes. Each parent signed with independent legal advice on record, which matters: a separation agreement signed without each party having had the chance to get their own legal advice is far more vulnerable to being challenged later.

The outcome

Keisha signed the agreement about six weeks after the first draft went to her, once she had seen it did not reduce her time with Simone and had her own lawyer confirm the terms were fair. The new schedule started at the beginning of a school term, which both parents felt would ease the transition for Simone.

Andriy checked in with us roughly four months later. Simone's school had reported a marked drop in the post-transition behavioural incidents her teacher used to flag almost weekly. Her therapist's notes, which Andriy still received copies of under the terms of the agreement, showed the same trend. Neither parent had needed to invoke the professional-recommendation clause in the months since signing — the framework existed, but the fact that it existed at all seemed to reduce the number of disputes that reached the point of needing it.

The financial cost to Andriy was the fee for drafting and negotiating the agreement, plus the modest cost Keisha incurred for her own independent review — both well below what even a single contested motion in family court would have cost either of them, and without the months of delay a court application would have added before any schedule change took effect.

Andriy also pointed to something less measurable: the agreement gave both households a shared reference point. Before, a disagreement about a therapy appointment or a school meeting could turn into a phone call neither parent wanted to make. Afterward, the answer was usually already written down, or there was a clear, agreed-upon way to reach one. That predictability mattered to Simone's parents almost as much as it mattered to Simone.

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