Summer Parenting Time in New York: Planning Vacations, Camp, and Travel Before School Ends

Before you negotiate anything with the other parent, pull out your stipulation of settlement, judgment of divorce, or Family Court order and read the summer provisions carefully. Most New York custody orders fall into one of a few patterns: a “school-year schedule continues” approach, a block schedule giving each parent one or two uninterrupted weeks, an alternating-week summer schedule, or a negotiated “vacation weeks” provision layered on top of the regular schedule.

What controls is the written order — not what the two of you did last summer, not what one parent remembers agreeing to, and not what feels fair in the abstract. If the order is ambiguous, that ambiguity is itself a problem to solve, and it is much easier to solve in April than in the middle of a dispute in July.

In our Western New York practice, we see a handful of summer schedules repeat across most orders:

• Regular schedule, plus two weeks of vacation each. The school-year rotation continues through the summer, but each parent can designate one or two continuous weeks for a vacation — typically with written notice by a set date (often May 1 or May 15) and a deadlock-breaker if both parents pick the same week.
• Alternating weeks all summer. From the end of school to the start of the next school year, parenting time alternates week-to-week, with exchanges on Sunday evenings.
• Split summer blocks. The summer is divided into halves or thirds, and each parent has uninterrupted blocks with shorter visits for the other parent.
• Camp-driven schedules. Where children attend overnight camp, the parents adjust pickup and drop-off around the camp calendar, and the remaining days are split by some agreed method.

None of these is inherently better than the others. The right structure depends on the children’s ages, the parents’ work schedules, the distance between households, and the realistic amount of travel each parent is likely to do.

A great many summer disputes involve travel. A few rules that tend to apply across New York custody orders:

• Written notice of travel is almost always required. Most orders require the traveling parent to provide an itinerary — dates, destinations, flight numbers, addresses where the children will be staying, and contact information — a set number of days in advance (often 14 to 30). Even if your order is silent, providing this information in writing is both courteous and legally protective.
• Out-of-state travel is generally permitted during a parent’s own parenting time unless the order says otherwise. A parent taking children to a family wedding in Ohio during their regular week does not ordinarily need the other parent’s consent, though notice is usually required.
• International travel is different. Federal passport rules require the consent of both legal parents for a minor’s passport. If the other parent will not sign, a court order specifically authorizing the travel and the passport application may be necessary — and those applications take time.
• Do not confuse travel with relocation. A summer vacation — even a long one — is not a relocation and is not governed by the Tropea analysis. Relocation refers to a change of the child’s residence, not a trip.

Summer camp is where parenting time and money tend to collide. A week of day camp can run several hundred dollars; sleepaway camp can be thousands. Two issues come up every year:

Whose parenting time does camp fall in? If the children are at camp during one parent’s scheduled week, that parent’s time is not automatically reassigned. Camp happens during that parent’s time. But if camp runs across both households’ weeks, the order (or the parents’ agreement) needs to say who handles drop-off, pickup, and communication with the camp.

Who pays? In New York, basic child support under the Child Support Standards Act is a statutory calculation intended to cover routine living expenses. Camp — particularly when used as child care — is often an add-on expense treated separately. Whether it is a required shared expense depends on the language of your order. Many orders require agreement in advance before a camp expense can be submitted for contribution, and registering a child for a $2,000 camp without the other parent’s consent is a good way to end up eating the whole bill.

If camp serves as work-related child care for the custodial parent, it is typically allocated between parents pro rata to income under DRL §240(1-b)(c)(4). If it is elective enrichment, it more often requires specific agreement. Read your order.

Long summer blocks — a full week or two with one parent — can feel like a long time to the children, even when both parents are doing everything right. Many New York orders include a provision for reasonable phone or video contact with the other parent during extended parenting time: often a daily call at a set time, or open access that the children can initiate.

From a practical standpoint, the best summer exchanges are the ones that are boring. Pack in advance. Agree on the exchange location and time in writing. Do not use the handoff to relitigate anything, and do not send the children as messengers. If the other parent does something that concerns you during their time, document it and address it through counsel — not at the next exchange in front of the kids.

Sometimes the summer section of an order simply does not work anymore. The children have aged out of the activities the schedule was designed around. A parent has moved, changed jobs, or remarried. Camp enrollment has shifted. If the summer provisions of your order are genuinely no longer workable, a post-judgment modification may be appropriate — but it requires showing a substantial change in circumstances, and a judge will want to see that the parents tried to resolve the issue themselves before litigating.

Short of modification, many families benefit from a written summer addendum each spring — a one-page document, signed by both parents, that fills in the specifics for the coming summer without reopening the underlying order. When both parents sign and both parents keep a copy, it can prevent most of the routine summer disputes that otherwise end up in front of a judge.

If you want to get ahead of summer disputes, do the following between now and Memorial Day:

• Re-read the summer, vacation, and travel sections of your custody order.
• Calendar the last day of school, camp start and end dates, and any planned vacation.
• Send the other parent written notice of any vacation week you plan to designate, by the date your order requires (or by May 15 if the order is silent).
• Confirm passport status for any international travel, and request signatures in writing early.
• Agree in writing on camp enrollment and payment before registering.
• Put any holiday-weekend agreements (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day) in writing.
• If a dispute is brewing, call your attorney in April — not in July.