Easy Shared Family Calendar for Co-Parents
As you transition to a two-home family, it can be frustrating skating the line of not wanting to "nag" your co-parent or be responsible for helping them keep track of their share of child responsibilities, whilst ensuring your kids' needs are met, and your co-parent has the critical information to hand exactly when they need it.
Sharing Details, Not Drama
Setting up a shared calendar with your co-parent is a great way to keep track of child-related events and to share additional details, such as location, costs, and things the child needs with them on the day.
You can even set recurring events and event reminders – for example, a reminder at the start of the day for things that need to be packed in the bag for after-school activities.
Easy Tracking for Financials
As an added bonus, if shared expenses are coming up, you can schedule when those are due. Keep your co-parent in the loop with without having to send any additional reminders!
How to Set up Your Free Shared Calendar
We recommend Google Calendar for simplicity and ease, however, similar functionality is available with Apple iCloud and Microsoft.
For this example let’s use the following fake email address:
- coparent@gmail.com: this is your co-parent's email address
Here's how to do this in Google, Apple iCloud and Microsoft. We recommend using a desktop browser to make these changes.
1. Open your Google Calendar and create a new Calendar by clicking the + button.
2. Provide a name for the Calendar and an optional description and then go ahead and create it.
3. Once created click on the new Co-Parenting calendar in your list of Calendars, select Share with specific people or groups and then click Add people and groups
4. In the Share with specific people dialog add your Co-Parents email address, ensure permissions are set to Make changes to events, and then click Send.
5. Google will send an email to your Co-Parent with instructions to accept the shared calendar.
6. Optional: We recommend you configure your default notification settings on your new calendar. The times in the screenshot are suggestions - please modify to suit your personal circumstances.
Apple iCloud
1. The steps are very similar to those provide above for Google. First you will need to create a new calendar in iCloud. Helpfully Apple provide a guide for that.
2. Once you have your new calendar, follow the iCloud instructions to Share a calendar privately, ensuring that you select Allow editing in the privileges section.
3. Optional: Setup notifications as outlined in the section Receive Shared Calendar updates and invitations as in-app notifications or emails to make sure you are notified when events are created/cancelled/etc.
Microsoft Outlook
1. The steps are very similar to those provided above for Google. First you will need to follow the instructions to create a new calendar in outlook.com - let's call it Co-Parenting again.
2. Once you have your new Co-Parenting calendar follow the instructions to Share an Outlook calendar with other people.
3. In the Sharing and permissions dialog enter your co-parents email, select Can edit from the permissions and then click share
4. Optional: Setup notifications as outlined in the section Receive Shared Calendar updates and invitations as in-app notifications or emails to make sure you are notified when events are created/cancelled/etc.
What about "built-in" Family Calendars?
Google and Apple (and probably others!) offer family calendars that are automatically setup as part of configuring a Family Group within the respective platforms. Unfortunately these often do not work well for separated families as the Family Groups come with additional features (such as content sharing, purchase management, account management, etc) that are often not suited to separated families.
For this reason, we recommended creating one or more, specific calendars to share with your co-parent.
Co-Parenting Resources
This, and other tips, are available in our Free Six Steps to Reduce Co-Parenting Stress course. Please check out our range of other free resources and tech tips to help your co-parenting journey.
Cameron Rochester
Tech Guy
Cameron is passionate about technology and has decades of experience in the software industry across many sectors and in many roles. He believes software is not just a tool; it should make a real difference to peoples lives. Whether it is helping you find a job, improving your quality of life, or helping kids grow up safe and slow across two homes.
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