The weekly schedule is the part everyone negotiates hardest. Which nights, which pickups, who handles Wednesday. Parents spend hours on it. Then December arrives, and it turns out the plan says holidays will be shared as agreed between the parties, and now you’re texting your ex on the eighteenth about Christmas Eve while neither of you is in a generous mood. Here’s the part that catches people off guard: Florida law does not require your parenting plan to address holidays or summer at all. That gap is yours to fill or yours to live with. Here’s what the statute actually requires, what it leaves to you, and why the language you choose determines whether a court can help you later.
What Florida Law Actually Requires
Florida Statute 61.13(2)(b) sets the minimum contents of every parenting plan, and the list is shorter than most parents expect.
A plan must describe in adequate detail how the parents will share and be responsible for the daily tasks associated with raising the child. It must include the time-sharing schedule arrangements specifying the time the child will spend with each parent. It must designate who is responsible for health care and for school-related matters, including the address used for school-boundary determination and registration. It must describe in adequate detail the methods and technologies the parents will use to communicate with the child. And unless both parents agree otherwise in writing, it must designate authorized locations for exchanging the child.
Read that list again and notice what isn’t on it. Holidays aren’t named. Summer isn’t named. Spring break, birthdays, and teacher planning days aren’t named.
Why the Statute Leaves This to You
The requirement is a time-sharing schedule, and a schedule that runs the same rotation every week technically satisfies it. Florida Family Law Rule of Procedure 12.995 prescribes a standard parenting plan form, and parents can also submit customized plans addressing matters the form doesn’t reach.
That flexibility is deliberate. Families observe different holidays, live at different distances from each other, and have children whose school calendars vary. A statute that dictated a holiday structure would fit some families badly.
The consequence, though, is that whatever your plan doesn’t say, nobody said. There’s no statutory default waiting in the background to resolve a December disagreement.
Whether Holidays Override the Regular Rotation
Parents often assume that a holiday automatically outranks the ordinary weekly schedule. It doesn’t, unless the plan says so.
Many well-drafted plans include a provision stating that holiday time-sharing takes priority over regular weekday and weekend time-sharing, and that provision exists precisely because the priority isn’t automatic. Without it, you have two schedules pointing in different directions and no stated rule for which wins when Thanksgiving lands on your co-parent’s regular Thursday.
Plans that address this well also account for the knock-on effects, such as what happens when a holiday assignment creates three consecutive weekends for one parent.
Ways Parents Divide Holidays
None of the following is required by law. These are structures parents choose, and knowing the options is useful mainly because it helps you pick deliberately rather than accepting whatever appears in a template.
Alternating and Fixed Assignments
The simplest approach assigns each holiday to one parent in odd years and the other in even years, which is predictable and easy to verify years ahead. Some holidays instead go to the same parent every year, which is how most plans handle Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
Splitting the Day Versus Splitting the Break
Splitting the day gives one parent the child until a set hour and the other from that hour forward. It works when parents live close together and becomes difficult when they don’t.
The alternative divides the winter break itself into halves that alternate annually rather than carving up a single day. Fewer handoffs and more continuous time, at the cost of one parent missing the holiday morning entirely in a given year.
Whichever structure you use, specific start and end times do work that day names can’t. Thanksgiving is ambiguous. Nine in the morning Thanksgiving Day until seven that evening is not.
Summer and the Question of Who Picks First
Summer is where thin plans fail most visibly, because the school-year routine stops anchoring anything to a calendar.
A plan that handles summer well says what the summer schedule actually is, whether the regular rotation continues or shifts to something else. It says how much consecutive vacation time each parent gets and whether that time comes in one block or several. And it says whether vacation time overrides the regular schedule, which it generally needs to, or the provision undercuts itself.
The Selection Deadline
If each parent picks weeks, somebody has to pick first, and there has to be a date by which choices are made and communicated in writing. Plans commonly give one parent first selection in odd years and the other in even years with a firm notice deadline. Without that mechanism you get two parents claiming the same week in June and nothing in the document to resolve it.
Travel Provisions
Miami-Dade families frequently have relatives abroad, and summer travel to see them is ordinary life here. Travel isn’t among the statutory minimums, so a plan that says nothing about out-of-state or international trips, notice requirements, itineraries, or passports leaves that trip subject to negotiation every single year.
Specificity Is What Makes Enforcement Possible
Here’s the practical reason detail matters, beyond avoiding arguments. A court can enforce a term that states exactly what was supposed to happen. A court can do very little with a term that says the parties will share holidays as agreed.
Florida’s best-interests factors under Section 61.13(3) include the demonstrated capacity and disposition of each parent to honor the time-sharing schedule and to be reasonable when changes are required. That factor only has something to measure against when there’s a schedule concrete enough to honor or violate.
Fixing a Plan That’s Already Vague
Where a co-parent is cooperative, an agreed change adding specificity is usually straightforward and costs far less than repeated annual conflict. Where the vagueness has become leverage and every holiday turns into a negotiation you lose, the path may run through a modification, which requires showing a substantial and material change of circumstances, or through enforcement if specific provisions are being violated outright.
Either way, the time to address it isn’t the week before the holiday. Courts don’t move on that timeline.
Drafting for the Year You Aren’t Getting Along
Parents resist detailed plans because writing everything down feels adversarial when things are still amicable. Cooperative parents can always agree to deviate from a detailed schedule, and nothing prevents it. The detail is there for the year that goodwill runs short.
Since the statute won’t supply any of it for you, getting those time-sharing terms drafted so they still function on a bad year is the practical work our team at Reynoso Erickson Trial Law focuses on with parents building or revising a plan.