Parenting Plans, Hurricanes and the Unknown

Parenting Plans are required to be filed in Florida if you have kids. In a nutshell the Parenting Plan is supposed to be your road map when it comes to all kid related issues when you are divorced. Most parenting plans have basic information like regular schedules, holiday schedules, division of extracurricular activity costs, and other basic parenting essentials. What most parenting plans don't have are things like........what to do when there is a hurricane. For most of my clients when Hurricane Irma hit it wasn't an issue and the parents were able to work out amongst themselves their contingency plan. For my higher conflict cases, there were issues and there wasn't a way to amicably decide what was going to be done since some exchanges were supposed to occur either in the midst of the hurricane or while there was still a curfew in place. For the past five years, we have put more and more things in the plans in order to account for any situation which might come along with kids. Clearly you cannot plan for everything, however, for those of you that are creating parenting plans right now, its not a bad idea to put in a hurricane plan so that when a disaster comes along, there are no questions as to where the kids are going to be. You want your Parenting Plans to be as complete as possible and to plan for as many contingencies as you can to help insure that there are no problems in the future. While you cannot plan for everything that comes along when you have children, you can try to tie up as many loose ends as possible.