Part One of the Series is here.
The children ALWAYS come first, no matter what.
Let’s say you are the custodial parent, and you have a responsible job with people depending on you at the office. The school calls with an emergency – your son / daughter got hit in the eye with a hockey puck and needs to be taken to the ER. But you have an important pitch meeting in an hour. What do you do? Call non custodial parent to deal with child emergency so you can go to your meeting? Or cancel meeting because your child comes first? (If you are out of town on business it’s another matter, but arrangements would have to be made for you to get home asap). OR you are getting ready for work, the kids are getting ready for school, and the radio announces a snow day (cause for great celebration in our house, I will attest to that), that school is cancelled. You are expected at work – what do you do? Insist the other parent take time off work so you can go to work? To me it’s a no brainer. Kids are home, in your home, therefore you miss work. If this happened at a time when they were physically staying with the non-custodial parent, I would expect that parent to also miss work, as the children are physically in his/her custody at that time. What if one of the kids was sick and couldn’t go to school – you’d stay home? Right?
As with everything when both parents are still involved in their children’s lives – even if you are the one taking care of them, if the kid is going to the ER – you need to inform the other parent, if the kid is sick, inform the other parent – the other parent, custodial or not, has a right to know everything about his / her child.
In the Pink 