Kids in the rotation
The rhythm of 50/50. Your house as their second home. The long view across years, not weeks.
In progress6 min↓ 1,170 words
§ Journey
The rhythm of 50/50. Your house as their second home. The long view across years, not weeks.
The first time my kids walked into the new place and asked where their toothbrushes were, I realised I'd built the new house for adults. Not deliberately. By default. The towels were grown-up towels. The cupboards were grown-up cupboards. The dinner plates were grown-up plates. The toothbrushes were in a bag, not in a cup on the bathroom shelf.
That night I bought a green-handled toothbrush and a blue-handled one and put them in a cup, where their mother's house had a cup, where every house I'd ever lived in as a kid had a cup. The cup is the smallest detail in this module and the most important.
Fourteen months in, the rhythm is set. 50/50, week on week off in our case, with a Wednesday-night dinner across the swap.
Half the time, you are a single father full-time. Half the time, you are a man without your kids. Both are real. Both take getting used to.
The week-on weeks are intense. The week-off weeks are quiet in a way that, in month three, feels like grief and, in month fourteen, feels like a feature. You'll have feelings about the off weeks for a long time. They get more useful and less painful in roughly that order.
A small honest list of what 50/50 actually demands:
The kids handle 50/50 better than most adults expect, but only if both houses feel like home. Your house is not a hotel. It is their second home.
This is the difference between a place the kids tolerate and a place the kids belong.
When their friends start asking to come over without prompting, you've built it right.
Sundays at 6pm, in our case. Other rhythms work for other families. Whatever yours is, the protocol matters more than the timing.
What I've landed on:
The handover is the most likely flashpoint of the week. Reduce its surface area. Make it boring on purpose.
Each house has a duplicate of the cheap stuff (PE kit, library bag, lunchbox), and the expensive stuff (school shoes, blazer) travels with the kid. The travelling-with-the-kid stuff lives in a labelled spot at each house: a hook by the front door, a basket in the laundry. Same spot, every time.
The thing that sinks this isn't the system. It's a Sunday night where neither of you packed the school bag. Build the rule that the parent dropping off packs the bag the night before. Write it down.
If your kids are 12+, the phone is the third member of every family conversation.
Teenagers respond to consistency more than any other adult intervention.
The single most useful reframe in month fourteen was this: 50/50 is not a phase. It's the architecture for the next decade.
Design it like architecture, not like a holiday rental.
If you build the rotation into the architecture, year four feels like a life. If you build it as a series of weekly heroics, year four feels like a treadmill.
The kids you're parenting now will be young adults by the end of this decade. The version of you they remember is the one you're being on the Wednesday-night dinner, the Saturday morning at the soccer sideline, the bedtime story on the on-weeks. The architecture is the parent.
Build a real second home. Make the handover boring. Plan for ten years.
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