The named patterns everyone encounters, what each one actually involves, and the trade-off each is making.
One parent has the child most of the time; the other has alternating weekends and often an evening midweek.
It is the most common historical pattern. It is simple and it produces a large imbalance in ordinary weekday time, which is where most of the relationship actually happens.
Two days with one parent, two with the other, three with the first, then it reverses the following week.
Nobody goes more than three days without seeing either parent, which suits younger children. The cost is frequent transitions — more handovers, more logistics, more opportunity for friction.
Each parent has the same two fixed weekdays every week, then alternating five-day blocks covering the weekend.
Weekdays are predictable, which helps school-age children and working parents. Fewer transitions than 2-2-3, longer gaps than 2-2-3.
A full week each, usually exchanged on the same day.
Fewest transitions and the longest continuous time in each home. A week can be a long gap for a younger child, which is why some families add a midweek contact.
Every schedule trades transition frequency against time away from each parent. There is no arrangement that gives you both.
Younger children generally do better with shorter gaps. Older children usually cope with longer blocks and increasingly have their own commitments that the schedule has to accommodate.
Teenagers often want a say, and how much weight that carries varies by jurisdiction and circumstance.
Whether it is predictable and whether handovers are calm. Families do well on all of these patterns and badly on all of them.
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The handover is the hard part →