Another aspect of custody that the court is going to make orders in your court-ordered parenting plan is what's called legal custody. Legal custody is a term that means major decision-making for your children. In your parenting plan, the court has the option of awarding joint legal custody or sole legal custody, or there's a third option that we will discuss. Joint legal custody means both parents have equal decision-making rights. And both parents are obligated to confer and agree about major decisions. Joint legal custody is the typical type of legal custody that the court orders.
If we are looking at sole legal custody, or we're looking at that third option where there's carve-outs, we are going to need to generate specific evidence to support that position and try to get the court to order that, because that is not going to be their inclination. Mm-hmm. So that is something that you're going to use your communication record with, and we're going to use your evidence gathering with to try to get sole legal custody. So that's a topic we can definitely discuss in meeting, but just know it's, it's atypical for there to be sole legal custody. Joint legal custody is an obligation to confer and agree.
So when would we not have that? When would we have sole legal custody? That would typically be situations where parents are unable to reach joint decisions, there is significant conflict about joint decisions, um, or there is uncivil behavior that makes joint decision-making impossible, or we have a largely absent parent who just doesn't respond. And there are ways that we can deal with that within your parenting plan. So if you're thinking about sole legal custody, You need to think about what are areas that we don't agree on. So let's talk about the topics in legal custody that you do need to agree on to share joint legal custody, or you don't agree on and you need sole legal custody.
These are major decisions. These would be what doctor your child sees, what dentist your child sees, if your child's in therapy, if your child's seeing a counselor, um, if your child has been diagnosed with ADHD and needs medication and one parent doesn't want medication and the other parent does want medication. Mm-hmm. Having your child evaluated for ADHD or evaluated for any kind of learning disability, that is a joint decision. Your child has an IEP at school, um, one parent might agree, one parent might not agree. Uh, extracurriculars are a big area. Some parents don't want to agree to extracurriculars. Some parents don't want to incur the cost of extracurriculars. Other parents want lots of extracurriculars. Sometimes there's disagreement about that. Mm-hmm. Uh, choice of school is generally going to be decided in your parenting plan under residential parent. If your child goes to public school, your child's going to attend the school in the district of where the designated residential parent is.
So you shouldn't have a dispute about school after you have a parenting plan and a residential parent's been designated. But if you're doing a private school or a parochial school or homeschool, that would be a topic that you would need to agree on. So if we are doing joint legal custody, think carefully about all of those major decisions and make sure that you feel confident that you're going to be able to successfully reach joint decisions on those. If you are thinking about pursuing sole legal custody, think about what are the areas we disagree and what evidence do I have of about areas of disagreement, and how can we generate that to show that to the court to justify an order of sole legal custody? The third option that I brought up is joint legal custody with carve-outs. So sometimes we might have joint legal custody, but one parent has final decision-making authority over medical, or one parent has final decision-making over extracurriculars. If you and your co-parent largely agree about everything but one topic, there might be a carve-out for that because of the court's inclination to give parents joint legal custody.
So that is a way that we can sometimes address if it's joint, a joint situation that works most of the time but doesn't work some of the time. Another way that we can address parents who don't respond or are uncommunicative is we can have carve-outs where if a legal custody decision is being proposed on a communication app or whatever your written method of communication is, that if the other parent doesn't respond within a certain amount of time, the parent proposing the, the decision can just make the decision. So there are ways we can deal with most of the situations that are going to come up. So we can take a look, now that you've educated yourself about legal custody, and look at what the options are and what your evidence is. Another topic that is important in joint legal custody or sole legal custody is differentiating major decisions from day-to-day decisions. I find a lot of co-parenting conflict is more about day-to-day decisions than major decisions. In most instances, you're not obligated to confer and agree about day-to-day decisions. So what you serve your child for breakfast, what bedtime your child has, um, you know, who they socialize with from school during your custody time.
You may be in a co-parenting situation where you want to make joint decisions about that and you can't, or one parent wants to control what's going on during the other parent's time. So let me work with you if day-to-day decisions are causing a lot of your conflict. There are ways we can address that. We might need court orders addressing that. It might be a physical custody issue more than a legal custody issue because If a parent is concerned about the day-to-day activities or the day-to-day management of the other parent's household, it might be a schedule issue. It probably is not a legal custody issue.
So for instance, I might have someone come in to me and say, "I need sole legal custody because I don't like the structure of my co-parent's house. I don't like how they're managing things." That is really a physical custody issue. That is an issue of how much time should that child be in that environment? Do we need to take a look at that environment as problematic? How can we kind of finesse that? So differentiating what is a physical custody issue and what is a legal custody issue will help you develop a parenting plan that's going to work for your family long-term, and it's going to hopefully bring some co-parenting peace to you because you've educated yourself on what we actually need to be in conflict in and what we don't.