What Is a Florida Parenting Plan and What Should It Include?

A Florida parenting plan is the court-approved document that governs how parents share decision-making and time with their child after a divorce or paternity case. In Florida family-law proceedings where the court must establish parental responsibility or a time-sharing arrangement, a parenting plan is generally required, and it must address several statutory subjects, including the time-sharing schedule, how parents will divide daily responsibilities, and how they will communicate.^[1]

A generic template may cover the basic requirements, but it may not address the practical issues that come up in a particular family’s life: a schedule conflict, a disagreement over which pediatrician to use, a holiday neither parent wants to give up. This guide walks through what belongs in a parenting plan built around your actual family, building on the broader Florida child custody and time-sharing framework, so the plan you end up with actually fits your children rather than a form someone else filled out.

Required Plan Elements

Florida law sets a floor, not a ceiling, for what a parenting plan must cover in any Florida child custody case. Fla. Stat. § 61.13(2)(b) ^[2] establishes several required subjects that a parenting plan must address, including:

• How parents will share and be responsible for the child’s daily tasks
• A time-sharing schedule specifying the time the child spends with each parent
• How parents will share responsibility for healthcare, school-related matters, and extracurricular activities
• The methods and technology parents will use to communicate with the child
• Where the child will be exchanged between parents

These five categories make up the statutory minimum in § 61.13(2)(b). Within them, Florida law also requires specific detail — for example, the address used for school-boundary determination and registration, and, unless both parents agree otherwise in writing, authorized locations for exchanging the child. These are among the statutory subjects a parenting plan must address — a plan that only covers this much usually leaves gaps that surface later, which is why the sections below go further than the statute requires.

Weekly and Holiday Schedules

The right weekly schedule depends on your children’s ages, school commitments, and each parent’s work life, not a one-size-fits-all rotation. A plan for a toddler who needs frequent contact with both parents looks different from one for a teenager balancing sports and a part-time job.

Holiday and school-break schedules deserve just as much detail as the weekly calendar. Well-drafted plans typically spell out:

• Which parent has the child for specific holidays, and whether they alternate by year
• How winter, spring, and summer breaks are divided
• What happens on the child’s birthday and each parent’s birthday
• How far in advance a parent must request travel or a schedule change

Florida law provides a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing is in the child’s best interests. Fla. Stat. § 61.13(2)(c)1 ^[3] That presumption doesn’t mean every family ends up with a 50/50 schedule — the specific calendar still has to be built around your situation, not assumed.

Decision-Making

Beyond the schedule, a parenting plan addresses how parents will share responsibility for health care, school-related matters, and extracurricular activities.^[4]

These arrangements don’t have to be all-or-nothing. Parents can share responsibility for major decisions jointly while one parent handles day-to-day calls, or split categories so one parent leads on medical decisions and the other leads on school matters. If you’re unsure how to divide these categories, our family law attorneys in South Florida can walk through the options during a consultation.

Getting specific here prevents a common source of conflict: a parent enrolling a child in a new activity, switching doctors, or making a school choice without the other parent’s input, then arguing later about whether that was allowed.

Communication and Exchanges

The plan must describe the methods and technology parents will use to communicate with the child, and it must address authorized locations for exchanging the child, subject to the specific provisions of § 61.13(2)(b). ^[5]

For lower-conflict co-parents, this might be as simple as a shared calendar app and pickup at school. For higher-conflict situations, Florida law allows the court to require a neutral, safe exchange location when it finds a risk of harm to a parent or child during the exchange, and communication can be routed through a co-parenting app that logs messages rather than direct texts.

Naming the specific method now, rather than leaving it vague, can prevent one of the more common sources of conflict later.

Handling Future Disputes

A parenting plan isn’t meant to be reopened every time something changes. Modification of an existing parenting plan or time-sharing arrangement generally requires a substantial and material change in circumstances and a determination that the requested modification is in the child’s best interests.^[7] That standard is intentional — it keeps the plan stable instead of relitigated every few months, whether your case started as a divorce or a Florida paternity case.