October is Conflict Resolution Month, anchored by Conflict Resolution Day on the third Thursday — a tradition the Association for Conflict Resolution started in 2005 to draw attention to mediation and other ways of settling disputes without a fight. It’s a fitting moment to talk about the questions to ask in custody mediation, because the ones that matter are almost never the ones parents arrive prepared to argue about.
Most people walk in braced for a fight over the calendar. Who gets which weekend. Whether it’s week-on, week-off or a 2-2-5-5. That part usually gets settled faster than anyone expects.
What causes trouble two years later is everything nobody thought to raise.
Start where Maryland starts: the parenting plan
Under Maryland Rule 9-204.1, when parents have a dispute about decision-making or parenting time, the court gives each of them the Maryland Parenting Plan Instructions and the Maryland Parenting Plan Tool — and tells them they can build the plan on their own, together, or with a mediator. A parenting plan, in the rule’s own words, is “a written agreement about how parties will work together to take care of a child.”
If you can’t reach a comprehensive plan, you complete a Joint Statement instead, and the open items go in front of a judge.
The rule also lists sixteen best-interest factors that parents may consider. They’re worth reading before mediation, because they’re a map of what matters — including a few that rarely come up on their own: how you’ll place the child’s needs above your own, how you’ll protect the child from the effects of conflict between you, and how the two of you will “resolve any disputes in the future without the need for court intervention.”
That last one is the subject of most of the questions below.
The time questions that go deeper than the calendar
A schedule tells you where a child sleeps. It doesn’t tell you how the week actually works.
- What does a regular Tuesday look like? Who supervises homework, who handles bedtime, who drives to practice, who deals with the project that’s due tomorrow?
- What happens when one of us is late? Fifteen minutes is nothing. What about forty, repeatedly?
- Whose vacation wins when our requests overlap, and how far ahead do we have to claim weeks?
- How much notice does a schedule change need — and if the other parent doesn’t respond, is silence a yes or a no?
- What happens to all of this when our child is fifteen and has a job, a travel team, and opinions?
That last question catches people out. A plan built around a six-year-old has to survive a teenager.
The decision-making questions people skip
“Joint legal custody” sounds like an answer. In practice it’s a category that still needs filling in.
- Which decisions genuinely need both of us, and which don’t? Haircuts, ear piercings, a first phone, social media accounts, a learner’s permit — pick the ones that actually matter to you and say so out loud.
- If we disagree about a medical recommendation, what breaks the tie?
- Can either of us start our child in therapy alone, or does that need both signatures?
- Who is the school’s point of contact, and does the other parent get copied on everything automatically?
- If we’re raising our child in a faith, what happens if one of us stops practicing?
The money questions that aren’t child support
Child support is calculated from a worksheet. Almost everything else is negotiable, and that’s where the friction lives.
- Who pays for what the guidelines don’t cover — braces, summer camp, the instrument, the travel team, the phone bill, driver’s ed?
- Does one of us need the other’s agreement before committing to an expense we’ll share? What’s the dollar figure where that kicks in?
- Who claims our child on taxes, and does it alternate?
- College. This one deserves its own line. A Maryland court generally cannot order a parent to pay college costs for an adult child, because the support obligation ends at eighteen, or at nineteen if the child is still in high school. But parents can agree to share those costs, and a written agreement to do so can be enforced. If college matters to you, mediation is where it gets handled — not a courtroom later.
The questions about each other
- How will we communicate, and where? Email, text, or a co-parenting app — and what’s a reasonable window to reply?
- What are we telling the children about why this is happening, and are we telling them the same thing?
- When do new partners get introduced, and does the other parent hear about it first?
- What do we do when someone in one of our families says something about the other in front of our child?
These feel like the soft questions. They are the ones that determine whether the rest of the plan survives contact with real life.
The question almost nobody asks
What happens when this stops working?
Every parenting plan is written on a day when both people are motivated to agree. Circumstances change — a job, a move, a new school, a new partner, a child whose needs shift.
- What’s our process before either of us calls a lawyer? Many parents build in a step: return to mediation first.
- What triggers a scheduled review of the plan — a certain age, a change of school, a relocation?
- If one of us wants to move, what then? In Maryland, a court may order a parent to give at least 90 days’ advance written notice before relocating a permanent residence, under Family Law § 9-106 — and a judge can waive that requirement where notice would expose a child or a party to abuse. It isn’t automatic, which is exactly why it’s worth addressing in your plan rather than assuming.
How to use the questions to ask in custody mediation
Don’t bring this list to the table as a demand sheet. The questions to ask in custody mediation work best as homework.
Sit with it beforehand and mark three things: the questions where you already know your answer, the ones where you genuinely don’t, and the one or two where you suspect you and your co-parent are furthest apart. That third category is where mediation earns its keep. A mediator’s job isn’t to split the difference — it’s to get the real disagreement into the open while there’s still goodwill to work with.
Parents who prepare this way tend to finish faster, not slower. The hard conversation happens once, in a room built for it, instead of in a parking lot three years from now.
If you’re weighing mediation
Our mediation is fully virtual, so you don’t have to be local to work with us. We work with families across Maryland, DC and Virginia.
If you’re not sure whether mediation fits your situation, that’s a reasonable thing to talk through before you commit to it — and worth knowing that where there’s a genuine issue of abuse or coercive control, a Maryland court cannot order you into mediation at all. Book a consultation.
