The Parenting Plan Handbook

A Comprehensive Guide to Skillfully Building a Strong, Child-Centered Parenting Plan

by Karen Bonnell, ARNP, MS with Felicia Malsby Soleil, JD

If you’re going through separation or divorce, you’ll want a parenting plan. If you’ve never lived together, but intend to raise a child together, you’ll want a parenting plan.

The Parenting Plan Handbook provides the guidance and tools to help parents design a strong, child-centered parenting plan for their children without court battles. Every page contains wisdom and advice on how to design a parenting plan that’s in the best interest of your kids.

A skillful parenting plan describes the structure, predictability and rhythm that ensures both parents can emerge from the uncertainty of separation/divorce into stable two-home family life. The agreements and guidelines set-out in your parenting plan establish clarity about your responsibilities to one another, specify essential co-parenting tasks, delineate decision making and minimize unnecessary conflict.

Video coaching seminars now available.

Kids First | Build a Strong, Child-Centered Parenting Plan contains over four hours of video coaching broken into 16 segments that complement and follow the planning steps in The Parenting Plan Handbook. Karen and Felicia walk with you through the parenting plan worksheets explaining the considerations important to you for your family and your children. Available through Covestream.

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A Message from the Author

As a co-parent coach and attorney team, we know kids do best — physically and emotionally — when parents understand their children’s deep need to stay connected to and be cared for by both of them when that’s possible. Children thrive when confidence and security are present and parents think through parenting plan decisions, come to agreements, and implement changes to their family in a mature, non-adversarial manner. Divorce is a significant family change. When at all possible, we help parents come together to make the best decisions for their children’s future rather than rely solely on attorneys or the courts.

Come learn with us. We’ll share with you our 25 plus years of experience working with families facing difficult transitions as they emerge into secure futures with well-adjusted children. We’ll help you maintain control over your family’s future.

Wishing you the very best,
Karen Bonnell

Meet the Authors

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Features of the Book

Welcome to The Parenting Plan Handbook — newly expanded and complemented by the the coaching seminars available through Covestream. We invite you to watch the coaching seminars if your learning style is enhanced with an audio/visual component.

You will find the following assets included in your Handbook:

Lighthouses — important information that emphasizes how to stay child-centered while building a skillful parenting plan.

Insights & Inspirations – a chorus of voices from professionals and parents around the world to support you in your process.

Journal Pages – thought provoking questions that deepen your thought-process and prepare you for the final step.

Your Parenting Plan Worksheets – a comprehensive set of worksheets that once completed provide a solid foundation for constructing a “strong, child-centered parenting plan.”

We’re so glad you’re here. We look forward to walking with you through The Handbook and the coaching seminars. We hope you feel our support as you explore your workbook and complete your parenting plan worksheets. We acknowledge the influence of practicing in our region, our state, and our country on our language and understanding of parenting plan elements. Children are children everywhere—how you plan to care for them as you restructure your family has many shared elements, and how you document those for a parenting plan will be specific to your jurisdiction. We trust you’ll translate as needed the concepts and principles to fit your particular jurisdiction and importantly, your family’s needs.

Karen & Felicia

Let Us Help Add Value to Your Practice

As a family law professional, do you find yourself wishing you had better resources for parents facing divorce and emotionally struggling with creating a parenting plan?

It can be difficult to convince parents that the conflict – the upset, anger and grief they’re experiencing – will negatively impact not only the divorce process, but specifically their parenting plan process – and their children. The Parenting Plan Handbook will become your “go-to” resource for helping couples understand the emotional terrain of divorce, set thoughtful and constructive goals, and implement practical steps toward designing their parenting plan. This Handbook along with the Kids First companion coaching seminars, allow clients to affordably learn firsthand how to discern what’s best for their kids, how to create a residential schedule that works for their family, and teaches them effective ways to communicate, handle decision-making, and reduce conflict, all within the privacy of their own homes, on their own time.

Once they’ve completed The Handbook and coaching seminars, they can come back to you with their Parenting Plan Worksheets completed – prepared, informed and much more ready to craft a legal parenting plan. You will have helped them take their first step toward working together, toward successful co-parenting and two-home family life for themselves… and their children.