Practical guides for documenting your parenting time
Calm, factual answers to the questions people actually search when they're figuring out how to document for a custody case — no fear-mongering, no legal jargon.
Documenting for a custody case
The practical how-to: what to capture, how to organize it, how often.
A calm, practical guide to what to capture, how to organize it, and the habits that hold up over time.
What contemporaneous actually means, why timing outweighs detail, and how a record differs from a custody calendar.
How to record a missed exchange factually, what parenting time interference means, and how to keep the record without escalating things.
What a high conflict custody case asks of your records, what to write down when nothing gets agreed on, and why a private log needs no one else’s participation.
Whether text messages count as evidence, when they’re hearsay, how to save screenshots and photos clean, and what to know before recording audio or video.
Whether a father can get full custody, what a court actually weighs, and how a record of your everyday parenting time shows you were present.
Ten things to set up in your first week: where the record lives, what goes in an entry, what to gather from the past, and what to leave out.
What changes about your records with no attorney, what courts expect from a self-represented parent, and how to organize a record you have to present yourself.
What the right of first refusal means in custody, what actually counts as a violation, and how to record one without investigating the other household.
What counts as a violation of a custody order, how civil and criminal contempt differ, and how to keep a dated record of your own side of it.
What parallel parenting is, how it differs from cooperative parenting, what goes into a parallel parenting plan, and why your own record matters more when two households run separately.
What basic child support is meant to cover, who pays for medical bills, child care and activities, and how to keep a dated record of every payment and shared expense.
What 2-2-3, 2-2-5-5, 3-4-4-3 and week-on-week-off actually look like, how unequal schedules differ, and why the schedule in your order is a plan rather than a record.
How a nesting rotation works, what a parenting plan has to spell out for it, and why a child who never changes homes makes your own record the only proof of whose nights were whose.
What holds up in court
Credibility, admissibility, and the honest answer to "would a judge believe this?"
What judges actually weigh, why timing and consistency matter more than who made a record, and what "tamper-evident" really means.
Why no app can honestly call a record tamper-proof, how a record becomes tamper-evident, and what that does and doesn't prove.
Why a steady custody log carries more weight than a burst of entries before a hearing, what a realistic rhythm looks like, and what to do if you’re starting late.
Comparisons
How Documented differs from the shared platforms separated parents are often ordered onto.
What the two platforms cost, where they actually differ, what both do well, and the one thing neither records — your own everyday parenting time.
Fair, factual write-ups of the tools separated parents use to keep records, and where a private record fits alongside them.
Coming soon
More guides are in progress — what actually strengthens a custody modification case, and documenting virtual visitation and long-distance parenting time.