Co-parenting | Mediation Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Co-parenting’

What if We Can’t Agree?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Once you understand the emotional issues and possible variations of parenting schedules, it will begin to become clearer to you whether or not you and your spouse are headed toward a custody dispute. Because divorce is a time of great emotional turmoil and feelings of loss, sometimes parents are afraid that they will lose their children. Both you and your spouse will be spending less time with the children (in the rare case when a spouse disappears, of course, this would not be true), but in all likelihood, you will continue to have sufficient quality time with your children, and you will also have some free time for yourself. While this may not sound attractive in the middle of your divorce, soon afterwards you may be grateful for a little bit of adult time to pursue your own interests. Most parents, given time and the place to talk, are able to resolve disputes about their children. Sometimes, however, they need help. Click here for a parenting plan overview. Another terrific article is listed here.

Excerpted from Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (Simon & Schuster/Fireside 2001). For more information: http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com/.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Changes in Parenting Styles, Co-parenting, Disagreeing on a Parenting Plan
Posted in Emotions During Divorce, Pareting Plans, Sensivity to Children, children of divorce | Comments Off

The Necessary Elements of a Parenting Plan

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Although your plan will be as unique as your own family, each plan has some basic elements upon which to build. In addition to legal and physical custody, you will set forth additional provisions to be followed by each parent, such as picking the child up from school if he or she is ill, and how daycare will be selected. The less you plan to share parenting, the less detail you will need in your plan. The following components cover various possible arrangements, so some elements may not be pertinent to your situation. Click here for a great article on the components of a parenting plan.

Components

Legal Custody: Sole or Joint
Decision Making Authority: Who has final say for…
Schooling: private vs. public, special needs
Religion: where, when and through what level
Medical: routine vs. emergency treatments, medications, mental health treatment
Routine Needs: medical/dental appointments, transportation to activities, homework checks, child care arrangements that cross transition times
Physical Custody: Joint or Sole; one primary residence or two
Residential arrangements: how often, how long, with each parent?
Holidays/Summer/School vacations

List of major holidays

New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Day, Valentine’s Day, Good Friday, Easter, Passover, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, 4^th of July, Labor Day, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, Birthdays

Finances: who pays for what?

Click here for a parenting plan template.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Parenting Plan, Protecting the Children
Posted in Co-parenting, Sensivity to Children, children of divorce | Comments Off

Some Common Shared Parenting Schedules

Monday, July 12th, 2010

For parents who want to share their children’s time more equally, there are many possible schedules. Some common ones are:

every other week,
every two weeks,
Monday morning through Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon through Monday morning,
Wednesday morning through Saturday morning and Saturday morning through Wednesday morning,
September through June and summers for parents who live in different states.

Every schedule has different pluses and minuses associated with it. Which schedule works for your family will depend on how close you live to the other parent, your work schedules, ages of your children, the children’s individual temperaments, school demands, and their hobbies and activities. The schedule you choose should depend on how important it is for the children to be in the same house during weekdays (i.e., school nights) and how well your children adapt to the transition between homes. Can your children organize their school work when they make transitions between homes during the school week? If they have religious, sports, music, or other training on a regular basis, then maintaining the consistency of such classes is important. Children shouldn’t have to miss activities on a regular basis because they have to be at the other parent’s house. For a great article on shared parenting, click here.

How children go to school and return home also will affect your schedule. Do they need to be driven, can they switch busses, are they in a carpool?

Do your children have a maximum amount of time they tolerate being away from either of you? The length of time may differ from their primary caretaker and their secondary, if that is how your family has been arranged in the past. All of these factors are considerations in determining the best parenting schedules.

Are There Alternatives to the Typical Shared Parenting Plans?

Some less common, but important, variations on schedules also deserve mention. For reasons that will become obvious in the descriptions below, these arrangements are harder to maintain than more common ones, and they often require greater cooperation and sacrifice on both parents’ parts. However, when values or circumstances dictate creative solutions, these are worth considering.

Parents who can successfully do it report great satisfaction with “nesting”. In this arrangement, the children stay in one place, and the parents move out of the home and into an apartment or family member’s home. Sometimes the parents share one other dwelling, other times they can afford to rent or own two different ones. Sometimes they each return to a parent’s or friend’s home as their secondary residence. Parents then move in and out of the family home according to the dictates of schedules that work best for them. Click here for an article on nesting.

Sometimes parents live far away from one another. In these situations, children may spend school years with one parent, and longer holiday periods, vacations, and summers with the other parent.

When parents live near each other, they may choose to alternate the child’s primary residence every other year. The children do not spend much time living between homes, but they do visit the other parent regularly. However, each parent gets to be the primary parent some of the time, smoothing over the sense of one parent being the less central figure. This schedule, though often proposed, is counter to children’s best interests in most situations. This arrangement erodes consistency in discipline across phases of life, as well as the child’ sense of belonging in a home.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody, Parenting Schedules, Protecting Children
Posted in Creative Problem Solving, Custody, Life After Divorce, Living Arrangements, Pareting Plans, Sensivity to Children, children of divorce | Comments Off

How Shared Parenting Affects Children

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Like so many areas pertaining to the psychology of family law, our clinical wisdom far outstrips empirical knowledge based on research. Despite this limitation, we have some ideas about ways in which shared parenting benefits children and families.

Parents and children living in shared parenting arrangements, in which children spend significant amounts of time with both parents, report greater satisfaction with the arrangements than do their sole custody counterparts. The children see both parents more often than do children in sole custody arrangements, and the children like staying close to both parents. Children in families with joint legal custody, as well as those with joint physical custody, report greater father involvement than do children in sole custody families. The parents, both mothers and fathers, are happier with the arrangements, even when they were not initially in favor of them. Click here for a website of shared parenting resources.

It is important to note, however, that these families may be self-selected, meaning that they were able to work out these arrangements between themselves as part of their divorce. Most of these families were not involved in bitter custody disputes. Parents in shared parenting families generally have lower conflict from the beginning and describe their ex-spouse as an involved parent. Thus, in most studies people chose shared parenting voluntarily because of the values they share about mutual parenting.

Although studies are sparse enough to be suggestive only rather than conclusive, there is some evidence that shared parenting arrangements benefit children in several ways. The children have fewer behavioral and emotional problems and report fewer negative experiences with the divorce. Boys derive special benefits from shared parenting, and the contact it affords them with their fathers. Adolescent boys, in particular, choose shared custody arrangements over more traditional ones. In addition, dual residence teens of both genders report less depression and better grades than their sole custody counterparts. However, the research on this group also shows that children can do well in various types of arrangements as long as the parents provide support and firm guidance, combining closeness with parental control. This parenting style may be facilitated by shared parenting arrangements.

Mental health researchers have been especially interested in the effects on very young children, as this is the fastest growing segment of the divorcing population today. For young children, frequent father-child contact and the fathers’ sustained involvement before and after divorce were associated with a positive father-child relationship. Interestingly, fathers losing contact with children was less frequent among infants and toddlers who stayed overnights with their fathers. This would seem to recommend overnights as a vehicle for fostering paternal responsibility and closeness to their infants; yet many experts recommend forestalling overnights until children are older. This paradox requires that parents take into careful consideration how well their children are able to tolerate separations from their mother, the child’s temperament, and the strength of the father-child bond prior to divorce, and weigh all this against the likelihood of the father staying in the child’s life over time if the paternal role is established as central early on. Children can bond with more than one person, but creating a secure environment with both parents necessitates that parents organize childcare roles as soon as possible after separation, so that fathers establish themselves as another primary figure in the child’s life. Click here for more on shared parenting.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody, Protecting Children
Posted in Custody, Pareting Plans, Sensivity to Children, children of divorce | Comments Off

What are the Benefits and Drawbacks of Shared Parenting?

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Benefits of shared parenting accrue to both parents, as well as children. Some of the most salient advantages are:

The non-residential parent is less likely to feel like a visitor or a money-making machine. The non-residential parent is given ample opportunity to express his/her commitment to parenting, as well as love for the child. Feeling like an equally important parent leads to less hostility and resentment over time. It also leads to greater involvement in the child’s life. Both parents maintain independent relationships to their children.

Both parents feel good about their ability to work together for their children. It helps them feel less grief or guilt about the ending of the marriage, as they are concentrating on positive ways of continuing the family rather than the losses they all are experiencing.

The child has ongoing contact with both parents, and is less prone to feel like he/she must choose a favorite.

There is less chance that the family will have to return to court to re-litigate or enforce modifications. This results in less stress and money spent on the divorce process itself.

Both parents have more time to pursue personal interests and goals, such as school, work, time with friends, or hobbies.

Both parents get more support for parenting. When one needs help in a pinch, the other parent is more likely to step in and assist. Click here for an article on shared parenting. The disadvantages of shared parenting stem from the difficulty it can place on parents to disengage from the marriage and the past. Specifically:

More contact with the other parent can trigger jealousy, hostility, and resentment. This in turn can result in children being exposed to more conflict. Ongoing conflict and animosity between parents has been linked to long-term emotional problems for children.

Children often want two involved parents, but one primary home where their possessions and friends are located. This holds true especially for many teenagers, who don’t want to miss a moment of their social life because they are making transitions between homes.

Shared parenting gives children more opportunities to play one parent against the other, as they do among married parents. This requires that the two of you realize what they’re doing and that you don’t allow them the power to manipulate you.

The more involved both parents are, the more difficult relocation issues can be down the road.

In situations where there is real or threatened physical abuse, contact between parents can be dangerous. Click here for an article on the disadvantages of shared parenting. Excerpted from Your Divorce Advisor: A Lawyer and a Psychologist Guide You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (Simon & Schuster/Fireside 2001). For more information: http://www.yourdivorceadvisor.com/.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Protecting Children, Talking to Children
Posted in Custody, Pareting Plans, children of divorce | Comments Off

Shared Parenting (Co-parenting) versus Custody

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Custody refers to a legal arrangement, while shared parenting describes the actual activity between the adults. Often shared parenting, also called co-parenting, is interpreted to mean that parents are able to raise their children together, even if the parents are no longer marital partners. Cooperative and communicative parenting is optimal, but co-parenting can be effectively accomplished in less optimal circumstances, as long as parents can put aside their differences and stay focused on what their children need and deserve. This can take the form of parents discussing most aspects of child rearing. Or it can take the form of having each parent contribute primary decision making and authority in certain areas, with shared discussions when the parents are faced with complications or uncertainties. Click here for a terrific co-parenting website.

For example, Juan and Maria agreed that through their co-parenting arrangement they both would spend significant amounts of time with their daughter, Valerie, each week. Juan would take primary responsibility for religious upbringing since that was of utmost importance to him; as an elementary school teacher, Maria would take primary responsibility (with input from Juan) for decisions about what kinds of preschool experiences Valerie should have before Kindergarten. They would discuss any medical and mental health decisions, leaving fewer areas open to potential disagreement.

Researcher Constance Ahrons found four types of postdivorce relationships between spouses:

Perfect Pals
Cooperative Colleagues
Angry Associates
Fiery Foes

Two of the four types can create an effective co-parenting alliance. Perfect Pals maintain close personal ties; Cooperative Colleagues are civil and cooperative, though their relationship requires frequent negotiation. Angry Associates and Fiery Foes, on the other hand, do not contain their conflict, and therefore, children are incorporated into it in a way that makes co-parenting problematic, if not impossible. Click here to visit Constance Ahrons’ website. Successful co-parents:

Communicate and negotiate with each other about the children
Respect each other as parents despite adult disappointments and personal differences
Put past disagreements aside and concentrate on the children
Share control with each other and adopt a hands-off attitude toward how the other person parents
Tolerate differences in child rearing practices and values without labeling them as harmful to the child, and distinguishes between important and unimportant differences
Value what the other has to offer as a parent

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody, Protecting Children
Posted in Conflict Management, Custody, Sensivity to Children | 1 Comment »

Physical Custody

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Physical custody describes where the child physically lives. Most children live primarily with one parent (called sole physical custody), spending a specified amount of time with the other parent (called either visitation or parenting access).When children spend fairly equal amounts of time with both parents, the court refers to this type of living arrangement as Joint Physical Custody.

Joint physical custody

Joint physical custody takes various forms. Some children spend one week with one parent, and the next week with the other parent; others spend 3 nights one week with one parent, and four nights the next week. Various other permutations are also used (discussed later in this chapter), and as long as the children spend nearly equal time with each parent, the specific arrangement is not germane to the title. In this arrangement, children often think of themselves as having two homes. Click here for an article on joint physical custody.

Compared to joint legal custody, joint physical custody is a relatively rare event, with national estimates ranging from about 10-20% of divorced families. It is also a difficult arrangement to maintain; studies show that many families who begin in dual residence arrangements move to more traditional schedules over time. This is due to the difficulty of maintaining such arrangements, as they require cooperation, organization, and flexibility. This scenario typically works best when the parents live near each other and transportation to and from school and extracurricular activities is easily resolved, logistically speaking. It also works best when parents are able to communicate and cooperate with each other about scheduling matters, and the child’s temperament is organized and relaxed when faced with multiple transitions. The pluses and minuses of such arrangements are discussed below.

Split custody arrangements: separating siblings

Generally courts will avoid separating siblings and placing them in different households. Under some circumstances, siblings are split up. This is a practice better off avoided if possible, but there are certainly circumstances in which it makes sense. For an article on split custody, click here.

For example, if one child has special needs and the other child taunts or torments that child, or if the children have unique educational needs that are best met in different districts, split custody may be the preferred option. In some cases, a female child is very identified with Mother and a male child with Father to such an extent that they request living apart to stay with the parent with whom they have sided. If your children are old enough to know what they want, and the situation makes sense given all other circumstances, consideration could be given to this option.

However, the children should not be divided for the sake of parental compromise. No matter how siblings do or don’t get along, childhood bonds between siblings are most likely to form in enduring ways when the children grow up together. This aspect of the children’s development should not be sacrificed for the parents’ wishes.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody, Physical Custody
Posted in Cost of Divorce, Life After Divorce, Moving On, children of divorce | Comments Off

Joint Legal Custody

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Joint legal custody is a label which was popularized in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s as a way to give both parents an equal opportunity to continue to be involved in decision making about their children’s lives. One motivation behind the term was the belief that if the non-custodial parent remained involved in decision making processes related to the child, that parent would be more likely to pay child support over time. Also, a growing fathers’ movement spoke out about men’s interests in continuing to have authority and a stake in their child’s life through involvement in decisions about their upbringing. For more information on joint legal custody, click here.

Joint legal custody grants both parents equal power in making major decisions concerning the children’s welfare. Typically, these are the health, education, and religious upbringing issues described above. The more day-to-day decisions about the children are usually made by the parent with whom the children live most of their time.

Joint legal custody works best when parents are able to cooperate with each other about decisions regarding their children. Parents who fight and use every opportunity to disagree about the decisions which affect the children may be viewed as poor candidates for joint legal custody, although most states have statutes either allowing or encouraging joint legal custody unless the conflict is at such a high level that the parents are incapable of any joint decision making.

The types of situations in which joint legal custody might not be appropriate are the following: one parent is incarcerated, one parent lives very far away from the other, one parent abuses drugs and alcohol to the extent that it impairs his or her judgment, there is a history of violence between the parties and any unnecessary contact should be eliminated, or one parent suffers from a psychiatric illness which makes it impossible for that parent to use good judgment pertaining to the child’s welfare.

For parents who are able to put their own differences behind them and work together for the benefit of their children, joint legal custody is a preferred outcome. Ideally, parents cooperate in making decisions, and they negotiate and compromise when they disagree. Not all parents can cooperate easily, and many parents write into their agreements that when they are stalemated in making a decision, they will use a mediator or therapist to help resolve the impasse.

Whether or not you are a joint legal custodian of your children, you need to make every effort to try and involve the other parent in decision making. Failure to do so often increases the other parent’s sense of isolation, leading to hostility and retaliatory behavior. Obstructing your child’s relationship with her other parent could thus turn into a legal problem for you or a psychological problem for your child. For a terrific article on the value of joint legal custody, click here.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody
Posted in Life After Divorce, Moving On | Comments Off

Finding a Schedule that Fits Your Family

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Now that you understand what your children are the divorce, you are ready to being thinking about creating a parenting plan that will work for both parents and is optimal to meet your children’s needs.

What Are Our Legal Options for Raising Our Children After Divorce?

Increasingly, personnel associated with the courts are in accord that the terms used to connote parenting arrangements after divorce– custody, access, and visitation — are antiquated and pernicious. harkens back to a time when children were parents’ property, and suggests that one parent is more of a visitor than a family member. These terms are being replaced with new ones such as “decision making responsibility” and “parenting plans”, which emphasize parental responsibilities over their rights. Nevertheless, the older terms are still in use and need to be understood. Legal and physical custody are the primary designations after divorce. Technically, custody means the safe caring of a child. The courts have the power to confer both legal and physical custody. Click here for an article on legal custody options.

Legal Custody

The parent or parents with legal custody have the legal right to make major decisions regarding the child. Major decisions typically refer to those pertaining to the child’s health, education, and welfare. Commonly specified types of decisions include: religious upbringing and education, choice of schools and/or special education decisions, medical decisions such as elective surgery, choice of doctors, and whether or not to have a child receive mental health counseling and/or medications. In sole legal custody, one parent has primary decision making rights. In joint legal custody, such decision making is shared. For an article on legal custody, click here.

For more information contact Peace Talks www.peace-talks.com

Tags: Co-parenting, Custody
Posted in Life After Divorce, Moving On | Comments Off

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Posts Tagged ‘Co-parenting’

What if We Can’t Agree?

The Necessary Elements of a Parenting Plan

Some Common Shared Parenting Schedules

How Shared Parenting Affects Children

What are the Benefits and Drawbacks of Shared Parenting?

Shared Parenting (Co-parenting) versus Custody

Physical Custody

Joint Legal Custody

Finding a Schedule that Fits Your Family