What Should a Co-Parenting Agreement Include?

Planning to raise a child with a friend, a partner, or someone you met through a co-parenting platform? A co-parenting agreement sets out roles, responsibilities, and parenting arrangements, ideally before your child arrives.

The families who do this well treat the agreement as a shared plan rather than a defensive document. The conversations it forces are the conversations you want to have anyway, and having them early is considerably easier than having them later.

This page covers what belongs in a co-parenting agreement, what BC law lets an agreement do, and where it stops.

What a co-parenting agreement does, and where it stops

A co-parenting agreement records what everyone agreed to while they were still seeing things the same way. It gives your family a reference point, it makes daily logistics workable, and it shows a court what the adults intended if a disagreement ever gets that far.

There are limits worth understanding up front.

• An agreement cannot change legal parentage. Parentage is set by the Family Law Act, and in assisted reproduction situations, by a written agreement made before conception.
• An agreement cannot waive child support. Support belongs to the child, and a clause that trades it away will not bind a court.
• A court can set aside all or part of a parenting arrangements agreement if it is not in the best interests of the child.
• Under section 44 of the Family Law Act, formal agreements about parenting arrangements are made between a child's guardians, and only once the guardians have separated or are about to separate.

The point most co-parents miss

A pre-conception agreement between two people who were never a couple is not a section 44 parenting arrangements agreement, so it cannot be filed in court and enforced as though it were an order. It still carries real weight as evidence of what everyone intended, and it is not the same thing as an enforceable order. Anyone telling you your co-parenting agreement is automatically enforceable is skipping a step.

Start with who the legal parents are

Every other clause assumes this question is settled, so settle it first.

Where a child is conceived through assisted reproduction, the birth parent is a legal parent, and a person married to or in a marriage-like relationship with the birth parent at conception is the other parent if they consented before conception. A donor is not a parent by reason only of the donation.

Where the co-parents are not in a marriage-like relationship, which describes most co-parenting arrangements, a written pre-conception agreement is what establishes the second co-parent's status. It has to be signed before conception, and it cannot be created afterward.

BC also allows more than two legal parents where the child is conceived through assisted reproduction and everyone is named in that pre-conception agreement. The Act does not set a clear numerical cap, and views differ in the profession about how many parties an agreement can cover, so build this one with advice.

Guardianship and parental responsibilities

Being a legal parent and being a guardian are separate things in BC, and this is where co-parents most often have a gap without knowing it.

Guardianship carries parental responsibilities: day-to-day care, decisions about health care and education, decisions about religious and spiritual upbringing, extracurricular activities, culture, language and heritage, the child's name, and legal proceedings on the child's behalf.

Under section 39, each parent is a guardian while the parents live together and after they separate. A parent who has never resided with their child is not a guardian unless the multi-parent provisions apply, all of the child's guardians agree in writing, the parent regularly cares for the child, or a court appoints them.

Many co-parents have never lived together. Confirm guardianship rather than assuming it, and where everyone agrees, an agreement between the parent and all of the child's guardians can resolve it without going to court.

Your agreement should then set out which responsibilities each of you exercises alone, which need consultation, and which need joint agreement. Vague language here is where the arguments start.

Parenting time and the schedule

The schedule is where an agreement earns its keep day to day. Cover:

• Where the child lives and the regular rotation, with dates and times rather than general descriptions.
• How the schedule changes as the child grows, particularly through infancy and the start of school.
• Holidays, birthdays, and cultural or religious observances, and how they alternate.
• Vacation and travel, including notice periods, itineraries, and consent for travel outside the province or country.
• How exchanges happen: where, when, and who does the driving.
• How to handle short-notice changes, illness, and work emergencies.
• Communication with the child when they are with the other co-parent.

Where there is more conflict, be more specific rather than less. Detail reduces friction. Where things are working easily, flexibility is fine, provided you have a clear default to fall back on when you disagree.

Money

Child support in BC is calculated under the Federal Child Support Guidelines, using tables based on the paying parent's income, the number of children, and the province.

• Where one parent has the child more than 60 percent of the time, the other parent pays support under the tables.
• Where parenting time is shared, meaning roughly between 40 and 60 percent each, an offset calculation applies and the higher earner usually pays the difference.
• Special and extraordinary expenses, known as section 7 expenses, are shared in proportion to income. These typically include child care needed for work or study, medical and dental costs not covered by insurance, counselling or therapy, post-secondary costs, and significant extracurricular expenses.

Beyond support, your agreement should say how you will handle everyday costs, how expenses get approved and reimbursed, what documentation you will exchange, and when you will update income information. Annual exchange of tax returns is a simple clause that prevents years of friction.

Communication and resolving disagreements

Decide in advance how you will talk to each other and what happens when you disagree. Cover the channel you will use for scheduling, the response time you expect for non-urgent messages, how urgent matters get flagged, and what information gets shared about school, health, and activities.

Then build a dispute resolution ladder: a direct conversation first, then mediation, and court only if everything else fails. Naming mediation in the agreement makes it the obvious next step rather than an escalation, and it keeps most disagreements out of a courtroom entirely.

Court is a last resort, and a contested parenting matter can run many months, and sometimes years. A well-drafted dispute clause is one of the cheapest protections in the document.

Change over time

Your agreement should anticipate that life moves.

• Relocation, including how much notice is required and how a proposed move gets discussed.
• New partners, and how and when they are introduced to your child.
• How the agreement gets reviewed, and on what schedule.
• What happens if one of you dies, which is a question your wills should answer as well.
• How the agreement can be amended, and in what form.

A yearly review costs an hour and prevents the slow drift between what the document says and how your family lives.

What happens without an agreement

Without something in writing, you are relying on memory and goodwill, and the law fills the silence with defaults you may not have chosen.

Parentage may not include the co-parent everyone assumed was a parent. Guardianship may sit with one of you and not the other. Schedules and money become a negotiation every time they come up, which is exhausting long before it becomes a legal problem.

Families do resolve these situations after the fact, and it takes longer, costs more, and happens at the worst moment rather than the calmest one.

We would be glad to draft this with you

Co-parenting agreements are among the most useful documents a family can have, and among the most specific, because no two families share the same structure or intentions.

We draft co-parenting agreements for families across British Columbia, including two-parent, three-parent, and more complex arrangements, from our offices in Victoria, Nanaimo, Vancouver, and Surrey, and by video anywhere in the province. Journey, our beacon of hope and care, is part of how we remind families that they are not walking this road alone.