Divorced parents know the importance of being prepared for child custody court. This is the place where crucial decisions are made about custody and visitation. For example, the court can decide if a parent will see the child three days a week or one day a month.

Developing and being able to present an in-depth custody agreement is the best way to prepare for court. A thorough parenting plan will be impressive and help persuade the court to make a ruling in your favor. Here are three suggestions of things to include in your agreement that will make it thorough and impressive.

1. A written and calendar form of your custody and visitation schedule. You need to decide on a basic, repeating custody and visitation schedule and write it out in your agreement. For example, you could write, the parents alternate weeks of custody with one evening of visitation for the other parent during the week.

You also want to include a calendar that shows your schedule. This is nice because it gives the visual for how the schedule plays out during the year. Showing the court both versions is very helpful.

2. A holiday and vacation schedule. Include a written out schedule of the holidays in your parenting plan. The holidays should be divided between the parents with both parents getting the same number of big and small holidays. It’s nice if the holiday schedule is also included in the calendar.

You can schedule out exact times that the parents can take the children on vacation, or you can put in an unspecified vacation provision in your agreement. An unspecified vacation means that a parent can take the child for a certain amount of days when they give enough notification to the other parent. For example, you could include that both parents may take the children for up to seven days, twice a year, when they give thirty days notice to the other parent.

3. Parenting provisions and stipulations. If there are certain terms that you want to make sure the other parent adheres to, you need to put them right into your parenting plan. This could be something like you receive an itinerary when the other parent takes the child on vacation. Put in anything that is important to you.

If your custody agreement includes all of these details, the court will be very impressed. You can also feel confident going to court with all of this information worked out and thought through. Doing this work beforehand will help you get the result you want.