Parents in separate households with joint custody of their children face a daunting task to coordinate schedules. It’s hard enough tracking who gets the children on which day. When activities for the children or the parents cause adjustments, the communication and cooperating gets even harder.

Several companies have created software to help parents communicate and coordinate their joint custody and parenting time. Some of the software installs on your own computer, but I recommend the software that runs over the web. With web software, both parents can access the data and hopefully avoid conflicts.

Here are a few links. If you have any experience with these or can suggest any others, please post a comment to this post.

• Jointparents.com Raising a child after a divorce or separation is challenging for parents. JointParents.com provides the tools to keep parents well organized and communicating effectively.

• Parentingtime.net (Optimal) OPTIMAL is an online custody calendar that allows you to easily schedule and track parenting time as well as monitor compliance with your custody arrangement. OPTIMAL reduces conflict between you and your child’s other parent by providing a shared tool for scheduling parenting time, and by providing an unbiased, easily accessed record of scheduled time versus actual time.
  
  
• Google calendar Though not specifically targeted to managing joint custody, Google’s on line calendar hosts enough tools to make it useful for any situation. Best of all, it’s free.

• Custody Toolbox Custody Toolbox features a calendar, a journal, a child information database, an address book, and a to-do list.

• Shared Ground Unlike the web calendars, this software runs on your own computer. So, you can use it to keep yourself organized, but not to coordinate with your co-parent.
• Kidmate Another program that runs on your own computer instead of the web. Helps you visually display parenting schedules and calculate percentages.