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Reply to "When can shared custody end?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It seems like this is a situation created by the parents.  If this young person had so much trauma around shared custody, that he can't handle negotiating this, then that's the parents' fault.  So, putting on him to fix isn't fair.

I can't imagine what it would be like being a little kid and not knowing what the holidays would be like.  That sounds really terrible, and yet your DH clearly created that situation, since it's not that hard to create a predictable custody schedule.   It sounds like both adults put their need to conflict over the need of a young child.  Now, when they're dealing with a small fraction of what he went through they're whining?  [/quote]

I tend to +1 this.

I grew up with joint custody, and in thinking back, by the time I was in high school, the holiday plans were solid and the same every year. Thanksgiving with Mom and her family. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Dad, Fake Christmas the next day with mom. We'd been doing that for like a decade. I'm sure that at one point it was contentious, but not for years and years and years. So once I went away to school, we just continued on, and eventually, as I got older and moved and had fewer vacation days, it fell to me to talk to my parents and adjust as needed. I stopped traveling for Thanksgiving, for example, and started seeing my mom over easter. Christmas now alternates with my husband's family. But these all became 1:1 conversations between me and the parent I was changing things on.

But it sounds like you guys never got into a groove - you were still fighting (or at least negotiating) holidays when your kid was a teenager, even though the divorce was over a decade ago. So OF COURSE your kid didn't want to step into the fighting!

So my question would be - why on earth haven't you guys long since landed on a standard schedule? If you had that, something long term everyone agreed to, then you'd do that a few years, and any future changes would of course be handled by (and probably driven by!) your stepson as his life and needs change.

But no, it's not fair to have him step in and handle a contentious issue.

So why is it still changing every year??[/quote]

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