Parenting arrangements in British Columbia

You are separating, or already separated, and you need to settle where the children live and how decisions about them get made. It applies whether or not you were married, and whether you are agreeing something or facing a dispute. It also covers grandparents and others seeking contact with a child.

1. 01Establish who is a guardian, which is not the same question as who is a parent. Parents who lived with the child after birth are usually both guardians. A parent who never did is not automatically one, and that has to be dealt with by agreement or by order.
2. 02Use the language the legislation actually uses, because it changes what you are asking for. The Family Law Act works in guardianship, parental responsibilities, parenting time and contact; the Divorce Act now works in decision-making responsibility, parenting time and contact. Older orders still written in custody and access have to be read against these.
3. 03Separate the decisions from the schedule. Health, education, culture, extracurricular activities and travel can each be allocated differently, and one person holding all of them is not the only option.
4. 04Write the schedule in enough detail that it does not need renegotiating every week: the regular pattern, school breaks, holidays, birthdays, where and when exchanges happen, travel and passports, and how changes are requested.
5. 05Work out child support under the Federal Child Support Guidelines, including how special or extraordinary expenses such as childcare, therapy and activities are shared, and what happens where the children spend substantial time with each of you.
6. 06Where there is family violence or a safety concern, address it directly rather than designing around it. There are protection orders and conduct orders, and the Act requires those circumstances to be taken into account.
7. 07Where you cannot agree, take it forward through mediation, a parenting coordinator, or the court process that applies in your registry, and consider a report on the child's needs or views only where the file genuinely calls for one.
8. 08Put the result into an agreement or an order that can be enforced, filed in the right registry, and say in it what happens if someone does not follow it.

• Two pieces of government-issued identificationOne has to carry your photograph.
• Each child's full legal name, date of birth, and birth certificateThe birth certificate is what establishes parentage on the record, and it is needed for orders, for travel documents, and sometimes for a school or a doctor.
• The schedule the children have actually been followingWrite out the last few months as they really ran, not as they were meant to. What has been happening in practice carries real weight in how an arrangement is assessed, and reconstructing it later from memory is much harder than writing it down now.
• Income disclosure from both parentsTax returns, notices of assessment, recent pay statements, and where someone is self-employed or has a company, the business financial statements. Child support is calculated from income, so an unresolved income question stalls everything downstream of it.
• The children's expenses beyond the ordinaryChildcare, medical and dental costs not covered by a plan, therapy, tutoring, and significant activities. These are shared separately from the base support amount, usually in proportion to the parents' incomes, so they need to be documented rather than estimated.
• Any existing agreement or order, from anywhereIncluding from another province or another country. An existing order changes what has to happen next, and in some cases changes which court can deal with it at all.
• Anything affecting safetyProtection orders, police involvement, ministry involvement, or a history of family violence. This is difficult to raise and it is important that we know at the start, because it changes both what we ask for and how the process is run.