Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

Louise J. Kaplan

The teenage years bring some new complications. The first is that the child starts having strong opinions of his or her own. And to be honest, they should be considered.

However, it doesn't mean they get to decide.

Often the court will pay a lot of attention to the child's opinion starting around fourteen or fifteen years old. By sixteen or seventeen, the judges really hesitate to try to order the child to do something that the child really doesn't want to.

Now in this module, we are just talking about schedules.

We're not talking about special issues, like a child who's alienated and doesn't want to see one parent, or a child who's been abused by a parent, or cases where there needs to be supervision because of abuse, substance abuse or domestic violence.

Some of the new issues in that age group are what the child's opinion is. Also you may have issues with your co-parent, as you try to share dealing with driving, dealing with dating, dealing with sex, dealing with texting, dealing with a lot of other issues that teenagers are going to bring up.

One of the important things to consider is that you are less important to the teenage child, given the teenage child’s developmental goals as we discussed in Module Seven.

For this age group, the issue is not how many hours you are each going to have with the child.

In many ways, it's more about whose house is the child going to spend the night at, because most of the day, they are going to be exploring and more involved in other activities with their friends. So parents feel less important, but it's not because the other parent is making you less important.

In general, it's that developmentally, the child is getting ready to move into being an adult in the outside world.

It's, usually, not either parent’s fault that the child wants more independence. Of course, it's ideal if you will work together over how much independence you'll agree to give the child.