When Parenting Time Conflicts With Extracurriculars
When parenting time conflicts with extracurricular activities, the fight is almost never really about the activity. It is about who gets to decide. In Colorado, that is a question the law answers separately from parenting time, and most parenting plans never answer it at all.
That gap is why the same argument keeps happening. Your plan says who has the child on Saturday. It probably says nothing about who signs her up for the Saturday league.
Who decides whether a child does an activity?
Whoever holds decision-making responsibility for that issue, and in most plans nobody has been given it.
Colorado splits parental responsibilities into two separate things. One is parenting time, meaning who the child is with and when. The other is decision-making responsibility, meaning who chooses. They are allocated separately and they do not have to match.
Under , a court allocates decision-making based on the child's best interests. The part most parents have never read is what comes next. The court may allocate decision-making "with respect to each issue affecting the child". It can go to both parents jointly, or to one parent alone, or any combination of the two.
Issue by issue. That means activities can be carved out and given to one parent, in writing, as its own category. Most plans say "joint decision-making" and stop there, which works right up until the two of you disagree.
Is my parenting time protected from the other parent's scheduling?
Your parenting time is a court order. What happens inside it is mostly yours to run.
If an activity falls on your day and you were not consulted, you are not usually in breach of anything by not taking the child. That is the honest legal answer, and it is the one that makes parents feel they have won.
It is also the answer that gets them into trouble, for reasons that have nothing to do with the schedule. Keep reading.
What happens if I refuse to take the child?
Nothing immediately. The cost arrives later, in how it reads.
Colorado's best interests test is a list of factors a court weighs, and three of them land directly on this situation.
The first is the child's adjustment to home, school and community. A child pulled out of a team mid-season has had their community disrupted, and the record will show which parent did it.
The second is the ability of each parent to encourage the sharing of love, affection and contact between the child and the other parent. Refusing to take a child to an activity the other parent arranged is often read as refusing the connection rather than refusing the activity.
The third is the ability of each parent to place the needs of the child ahead of their own. That factor was written for exactly this. Whatever else is true, the child wanted to play.
None of these makes you lose custody over a missed practice. What they do is build a pattern. Our post on goes through how patterns like this get assembled.
What if the other parent signs the child up without asking?
That is the more common complaint, and it is a decision-making problem rather than a parenting time one.
Say your plan gives you joint decision-making. Enrolling the child in a commitment that eats into your time, without consulting you, breaches that allocation. It does not breach the schedule. That is a different thing to raise and a different thing to prove.
Keep the enrolment confirmation, the date, and any message where you were told rather than asked. The useful record is not how you felt about it. It is that the registration was dated the fourth and the first you heard was the ninth.
How do you actually fix this permanently?
Ask for activities to be allocated as their own decision-making issue, and write the rules into the plan.
A parenting plan that works on this has four things in it. First, it says who decides whether the child enrols at all. Second, it says what happens when a joint decision deadlocks. That usually means a tie-breaking mechanism rather than another trip to court. Third, it says who transports to activities that fall in whose time. Fourth, it says who pays.
A plan with those four lines does not produce this argument. A plan with "joint decision-making" and nothing else produces it every season.
If you are rewriting your schedule anyway, our post on covers the common arrangements and which ones absorb activities best.
What if the other parent simply will not cooperate at all?
Then stop negotiating and start documenting, because you are in a different situation.
There is a real difference between a parent who disagrees about soccer and a parent who blocks everything. The first is a scheduling disagreement. The second is a pattern, and it gets handled differently. exists precisely for the second situation, where the two of you cannot make joint decisions and the plan has to remove the requirement to try.
If activities are being missed in breach of an actual court order, that is an enforcement question. There is a specific process for it, with a deadline attached. Our post on sets out what that requires.
Does the child's own preference count?
Yes, with age and maturity, but less than parents expect.
A court can consider a child's wishes where the child is sufficiently mature to express reasoned and independent preferences. The word independent is doing most of the work there. A twelve year old who has played the same sport for six years and wants to continue is giving an independent preference. A twelve year old repeating an argument they clearly heard at home is giving something else.
Never ask your child to choose between you and the activity. It is the fastest way to turn a scheduling disagreement into something a court takes seriously, and it is the child who carries it.
What does this look like from the outside?
Smaller than it feels, and more revealing than either parent expects.
A parent reading a file about missed practices is not deciding who was right about Saturday. They are watching two people and asking a narrower question. Which of these two can put this child's ordinary childhood ahead of their own position?
One parent says "it was not my choice, but I took her." Then asks for the plan to be changed so they are consulted next time. That answers the question. The parent who says "it was not my time to spend driving" has also answered it, just not the way they intended.
Frequently asked questions
Do extracurricular activities take priority over parenting time? Not automatically in Colorado. Parenting time is a court order and the activity is not. In practice a court weighs the child's adjustment to school and community, and a parent who repeatedly blocks established activities is unlikely to be viewed well.
Can my ex sign our child up for activities during my parenting time? If decision-making is joint, enrolling without consulting you is a breach of the decision-making allocation. The remedy is to raise that, not to withhold the child. Keep the enrolment date and the date you were told.
Who pays for extracurricular activities after divorce? Whatever the parenting plan or support order says. Where it says nothing, the parent who enrolled the child generally carries the cost. That is one more reason to get activities written into the plan as their own category.
Can a court order a parent to take a child to activities? Yes. A court can allocate decision-making on activities to one parent and build transport obligations into the parenting plan, which makes attendance an order rather than a request.
What if we have 50/50 custody and disagree about activities? Equal parenting time does not mean equal decision-making. Under C.R.S. 14-10-124 the two are allocated separately, and activities can be assigned to one parent as a single issue even in an even schedule.
Where this leaves you
If this argument keeps returning, the plan is the problem, not the season. A document that names who decides, what happens in deadlock, who drives and who pays will end it. One that says joint decision-making and nothing more will not.
Need help working out what to ask for, and how to say it without another fight? through disputes like this one.
Disclaimer. This article is general information about Colorado law and court process. It is not legal advice and does not create a professional relationship. For advice about your own case, speak to a licensed Colorado family law attorney.
Sources
Colorado Revised Statutes section 14-10-124, Parental responsibilities, including the best interests factors at subsection (1.5)(a) and the allocation of decision-making responsibility at subsection (1.5)(b).