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Parenting Plan

Mom and Dad, Here’s What I Need During Your Divorce

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by Jann Glasser, Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), Coach/Psychotherapist, Collaborative Coach

For children, divorce can be stressful, sad, and confusing. At any age, kids may feel uncertain or angry at the idea of their parents splitting up.

As a parent, you can make the process and its effects less painful for your children. Helping your kids cope with divorce means providing stability at home and attending to your children’s needs with a reassuring, positive attitude. It won’t be easy, but these tips can help your children cope.

A Child’s Wish List During Their Parents’ Divorce

  • I need both of you to stay involved in my life. Please communicate with me. Make phone calls, send texts and ask me lots of questions, but respect my right not to answer all the time. When you don’t stay involved, I feel like I’m not important and that you don’t really love me.
  • Please stop fighting and try hard to get along with each other. Try to agree on things that have to do with me. When you fight about me, I think that I did something wrong and I feel guilty.
  • I love you both and want to enjoy the time that I spend with each of you. Please support me and my separate time with each of you. If you act jealous or upset when I am with my other parent, I feel like I need to take sides and love one of you more than the other.
  • Please communicate directly with my other parent so that I don’t have to send messages back and forth. I don’t want to be your messenger.
  • When talking about my other parent, please say only nice things, or don’t say anything at all. When you say mean, unkind things about my other parent, I feel like you are expecting me to take your side.
  • Please remember I want both of you to be a part of my life. I count on my mom and dad to raise me, to teach me what is important, and to help me when I have problems. Please choose not to be another one of my problems!

It’s normal to feel uncertain about how to give your kids the right kind of support through your divorce. It may feel like uncharted waters, but you can successfully navigate this uncertain time—and help your kids emerge from it feeling loved, confident, and strong.

Your patience, reassurance, and a listening ear can minimize tension as children learn to cope with new circumstances. By providing routines kids can rely on, it reminds them they can count on you for stability, structure, and care.

As you establish a working relationship with your co-parent, you help your kids avoid the stress that comes with watching parents in conflict. During this transitional time, you can’t be without some feelings of uncertainty and stress yourself, but you can greatly reduce your children’s pain by making their well-being your top priority. Put them at the center of your interests – not in the middle of your battlefield.

The Last Thing A Man Needs To Hear When He’s Going Through A Divorce

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by Diana L. Martinez Collaborative Lawyer and Mediator, Law and Mediation Office of Diana L. Martinez with Dr. Marvin Chapman, Collaborative Coach, LMFT

“Real men don’t cry,” right? BS!

I have represented many strong and successful men in divorces. The skill set which creates business success often does the opposite when seeking conflict resolution in a personal relationship.

Too often, men tend to handle negotiations in their divorce as they do in the boardroom. They become frustrated when their previously successful tactics do not work. Frustration often shows itself as anger, stubbornness, yelling, or complete withdrawal. The real obstacle to their successful divorce resolution is grief, or, rather, the failure to work through the grief.

Divorce is the second most traumatic event a person can experience, second only to the loss of a loved one. While there is plenty of information and support for women to work through the trauma of divorce, there is very little available to men. Why? Because “real men don’t cry.”

The reality: men do grieve the loss of their marriage, but their grief is expressed so differently it appears as aggression, arrogance, or as a complete lack of empathy to the untrained eye

To better understand what’s really influencing this behavior, we turned to Dr. Marvin Chapman, a military veteran, divorce coach and founder of United Fathers, for some answers.

When a man experiences the grief inherent in divorce, his stress comes from many sources. Some of them can include the following:

  • His role as provider and protector as he knows it is ending. Providing and protecting his family is now someone else’s business: the divorce court or perhaps a new partner. Either way, an overwhelming sense of helplessness engulfs many men.
  • He quickly realizes his role as a father, teacher, coach, and mentor to his child(ren) will soon be changing.
  • His self-esteem is challenged by allegations and accusations in papers filed with the divorce court, an entity he now sees as having intrusive control over his current and future life and livelihood.
  • He will quickly become overwhelmed by the legal process and requirements of going through the legal procedures totally and completely foreign to him, and therefore out of his control.
  • He sees his financial security threatened by legal fees, costs and expenses. Splitting one household into two households will cause extreme hardship and an expensive transition.
  • His status and standing in the community is changing, and not for the better unless he “fights it with all he’s got.” He must “win at all costs” if he wants to preserve what and who he is, or, at least, how he identifies himself.
  • He can’t show emotion and be weak. He must be strong, aggressive, and confrontational. Only weak men fall apart.

Most men do not see a divorce as the death of a relationship. They do not realize they are going through the grieving process. Men have no idea what to do with their feelings of pain, anguish, guilt, hurt, confusion, frustration, and a complete sense of being overwhelmed.

Then along come well-meaning family, friends, co-workers and others who want us to “feel better” or at least not so “confused.”  Their advice is the same today as it always has been:  “Man up!”

What can a divorcing man do to work through the grief and be the man he needs to be, for himself and his children? Grief needs to be addressed with time, patience, honesty, congruency, and support from someone willing to walk beside a man without judgment. This one person can acknowledge the pain and the life changes to come. It can be anyone, as long as it allows the grieving person to cut through the macho façade and find a safe place to be himself.

Male military veterans often say they feel safer in combat than after they return to civilian life because they know their buddies in arms always have their back. Divorce can be very isolating. More than ever, a voice of support, not judgment, is needed.

As a Collaborative lawyer and mediator, I have worked with many men in high stress careers. They are tremendously successful professionally, often because of the resources supporting them, including co-workers, employers, and employees.

But such successful business men frequently struggle in resolving their divorces. When working with a divorce coach, my clients can rely on a support team to help resolve challenging and personal conflicts in a way that promotes faster healing and productive parenting relationships (with the children and the other parent). It allows them to be the men they want and need to be for themselves and their families.

Everyone needs someone who has their back during difficult times in their lives, not to carry us through hardship but to give us the focus, encouragement, and resolve to do it ourselves and to do it right. Your coach, your buddy in arms, has your back, to help you keep your eyes wide open, and help you be the man and/or father you want to be.

A Divorced Parent’s Holiday Gift Guide: Your Child’s Wish List

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by Jann Glasser, Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), Coach/Psychotherapist, Collaborative Coach

Holiday season is here again. If you are divorced with children, the season can be challenging as you attempt to coordinate two households and extended family, trying to meet everyone’s needs simultaneously. As you begin to review your child’s wish list for the season, there is something more precious every child wants that you won’t find in any store or even on Amazon.

It’s time with both parents during the holidays, the kind of quality time that helps your children feel reassured that while their parents might not be living together anymore, your relationship with your child remains the same.

If your child could write out their wish list for the things to make it easier, the list would look like this:

1. Help me shop for or make a gift for my other parent, if I’m not old enough to do it myself. It feels good when I can give you each gifts that you like.

2. Don’t make me feel guilty about the gift I got or what fun I had with each of you.

3. Let me celebrate family traditions that are fun and important to me. Don’t make me give them up because they’re inconvenient to you or interfere with the parenting plan schedule. People first!

4. Let me be free of drama, bickering, or fighting about holiday plan scheduling, or other details of the season.

5. Please remember that I’m not property to be divided up. I have my own needs and feelings about my family and the holidays.

6. Ask me what I might like to do with each of my parents during the holiday season that is special to me, and help make it happen.

7. Please avoid asking questions about what I did while I spent time with the other parent.

8. I don’t want to rush through opening my presents or eating a meal or visiting with relatives because I have to be at my other parent’s house. If all we’re doing is hurrying, the holidays will be ruined for me.

9. Support me making my own decisions about when I will be staying with each of you when I’m home from college so I don’t get stressed out about it when I ought to be studying for finals.

10. Please enjoy time with me while I’m with you rather than complaining that you didn’t get the exact times or amount of time with me that you wanted. There is no scorecard that keeps track of the amount of my love for you. Relax. Love me back. Let go of the details.

 Wishing you and your family peace this holiday season.

 

The Honey Experiment: Can It Help Your Co-parenting Relationship?

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by Suanne I. Honey, Certified Family Law Specialist, Law Offices of Suanne I. Honey

Let me start this blog by letting you know I am a family-law attorney who, unfortunately, still litigates cases. I prefer the Collaborative Process for many reasons. This means I work with couples who at times can be very angry with each other.

This post, however, has to do with attitudes. A recent Facebook post keeps popping up frequently about a teacher of mentally challenged students. He started each school day telling each student compliments specific to that student. There were both expected and unexpected results with her experiment. Most impressive, the students began giving each other compliments and their academic grades improved.

Being a strong believer in the concept of positive energy spreading just as quickly as negative energy, I decided to start my own experiment. A few months ago I started asking my clients who are engaged in a high-conflict relationship with the other parent to give the other parent a compliment. Daily seems too often and rings of insincerity and ulterior motives. I requested once a week or if that was too onerous, once a month.

There is an old saying that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And since my name is Honey, let’s call this The Honey Experiment.

Sometimes it is a real struggle to find something – really anything – to compliment. It could be as simple as “That pink shirt looked good on you,” to “I appreciate how you give each child individual attention.” The only requirement is that it be completely sincere. If it is just a chore, it will sound hollow and may be worse than saying nothing at all.

You can do this, too, no matter what the status of your relationship is, from loving to friendly to hostile. Find something you truly like about the other parent, be it physical or a character compliment. Just find something. Send a text or an email or even say it in person if you are comfortable doing so.

My sampling of clients are too small to have any scientific basis attached to the outcome, but I too was surprised at the early results. All of the clients I suggested do this agreed. Some followed through on a regular basis, some not so much.

What happened with each of those clients (even the ones who did not actually give the compliments) resulted in less calls to my office voicing complaints about the other parent. I suspect that this newly positive attitude among my clients (even those who did not give the compliments but who clearly gave it some thought) carried over to body language, to tonal qualities in their voice, and in facial expressions at parenting exchanges. It is difficult to be angry with someone who is nice to you. This is not a panacea, but there have been remarkable and noticeable changes in my clients.

Going through the stressors and pressures in a custody battle makes you forget the good qualities that you once appreciated in the other parent. Sometimes those qualities are so buried under bad conduct that it is difficult to dig them out. The compliment project is yielding benefits in their relationship with the ex-spouse or co-parent. Surprisingly, the biggest benefit seems to go to the person giving the compliment, not the one getting the compliment like you might expect. In addition, because the parents are happier, their children are happier, and this is something everyone wants to see.

You cannot give a compliment with expectations of getting one in return, because most likely that will not happen. More importantly it diminishes the point of the experiment. Give an honest, unsolicited compliment to the other parent regularly without expectations of any kind and pay attention to the changes in your life and in the lives of your children.

Isn’t The Honey Experiment worth trying? What have you got to lose? If you try it, post a message on our group’s Facebook page and let us know how it worked out for you. Or send me an email at honey@honeylaw.com

 

Children Must Be Heard and Not Seen During a Divorce: The Advantages of the Child Specialist

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by Bart Carey, Family Law Attorney

Law Office of Bart J. Carey, Mediation and Collaborative Family Law

“Divorce is a different experience for children and adults because the children lose something that is fundamental to their development – the family structure. The family comprises the scaffolding upon which children mount successive developmental stages, from infancy into adolescence.” — “Second Chances: Men Women and Children a Decade After Divorce”

How many times have you taken your child through a divorce? Helped your child navigate an emotional and transitory life experience that is difficult and opaque for you? Successfully rebuilt the family structure in ways that support your child? And all at a time when you and your spouse are not on the same page.

When it comes to helping your child through a divorce, consider turning to a child specialist to get the best advice and counsel based on the advantages of their specialized education, training and experience.

Here are nine reasons why you should have a child specialist assist you through your divorce process:

  1. It’s not therapy. No one is going to mess with your child. The child specialist’s role is to listen to you and your child and provide you with assistance with developing the best co-parenting plan to meet your child’s needs during and after the divorce transition process.
  2. You don’t know what you don’t know. The child specialist can help you uncover and identify your children’s unspoken needs and concerns, so they can be acknowledged and addressed. A child specialist can help your child navigate the uncertainties of the family transition and illuminate deeper insights for you regarding all of your child’s needs and concerns.
  3. Parents often disagree. Your child specialist works to increase parental consensus building by centering and keeping discussions focused on options that address the child’s needs and concerns.
  4. The devil’s in the details. There are many intricacies to tailoring co-parenting plans to best serve your child an experienced child specialist understands. Your child specialist can educate and expand your knowledge of the ins and outs and the options available.
  5. Children should be heard and not seen. A child is always ‘present’ in the room during negotiations. The child specialist gives your child an independent voice in the room and provides you as parents the insights you might otherwise miss.
  6. You know what you know – until you know better. Your co-parenting plans will go much deeper and be more durable than simply laying out a ‘schedule,’ and you and your co-parent will share a deeper understanding of how the plan serves your child’s best interests.
  7. Your child specialist is the child specialist so your Collaborative attorneys don’t have to be. The Collaborative child specialist is neutral in their relationship to a child’s parents and is only interested in your child’s long term well-being. Need we say more?
  8. Parents become the experts. You learn and develop new and diverse co-parenting skills tailored to your new family structure and circumstances from an expert.
  9. Tomorrow is just a day away. Your child specialist will be available post-divorce for consultation, on as needed basis, as kids grow up and the family changes with new relationships, new spouses, step children and blended families.
  10. It’s all upside. There is no risk. All consultation is confidential, for your use only. You ultimately control decisions and neither the child specialist nor their work may be used in court now or in the future.

It’s not just about a schedule. Decisions about your child’s future have significant and lasting consequences. It’s time to consider your Collaborative child specialist as indispensable to your family’s divorce as your Collaborative attorney.

Six Ways a Collaborative Divorce Supports Your Family Values

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by Bart Carey, Attorney/Mediator and Family Law Attorney
Law Office of Bart J. Carey, Mediation and Collaborative Family Law

Why do so many people behave so poorly when they separate and divorce? You know what I mean. As people choose to separate and divorce, as we get caught up in emotions and conflict, we say and do things that, in our everyday lives we’d never do or say.

Worse, this behavior is often condoned, counseled and/or supported by well-meaning family friends and even professionals. We fight for control or justification by speaking to and treating our children’s mother or father in ways we’d never condone under any other circumstance. We’d certainly never teach our children such behavior is acceptable, except they actually are learning from observing what we do.

This reality became personal for me when after a number of years as a litigator, I experienced my own divorce. I learned that divorce is not a legal process. It is a life experience.

As a life experience, I had to ask myself how I could square my own behavior with my values as a husband and father. Like many, I can’t say I was proud of everything I said and did.

A big part of the problem was the court process, which pitted parents against each other as adversaries in a win-lose fight while placing the decisions regarding their most precious treasures of their hearts in the hands of lawyers, judges and other professionals.

This experience launched me on a life and career changing journey: how to find, and offer my clients, a process that can be shaped to reflect their values:

  • A process in which spouses are supported and encouraged to work together, not against each other, to plan the family’s future while protecting their respective rights.
  • A process which allows the family to fashion a financial plan that provides for everyone’s needs yet still focuses upon the family’s goals and priorities.
  • A process which helps spouses address and manage their fears and emotions while still being able to choose to behave the way we would teach our children to behave, with respect and dignity for each individual.
  • A process that allows them to remain a family throughout and after the divorce process.
  • A process that supports and teaches co-parenting tools so they can better raise their children after transitioning to two households.
  • A process that supports parents to set a living example for their children of the values they have already worked hard to instill in them during the biggest crisis their family will likely ever face.

There is good news. Collaborative Divorce is that process. Review the information on this website for more information. The Collaborative Divorce process allows me to align my career with my personal values. You will find it a process which allows you to live up to your values.

Did I mention Collaborative Divorce can be easier on the pocketbook than a stressful, contentious litigated divorce, too?

Tips for Talking With Young Children About Your Upcoming Separation or Divorce

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by Carol R. Hughes, Ph.D., LMFT

Note: To avoid the clumsiness of using “child/children,” “children” is intentionally used throughout this article

It is clear you care about doing the best you can for your children through the separation and divorce process, because you are reading this article. Give yourself permission not to be perfect. No one is. Remember to keep taking slow, deep breaths. You and your children will get through this difficult time.

Consider the following tips to help you prepare to talk with your minor children.

Agree on a time when you and your spouse can talk with your children together. Siblings need the support system they can provide each other. Divorce is a major life crisis for all family members and should be treated as such. Ideally, it is best to share the news with your children when they will have adequate time to absorb what you will be telling them; for instance, when they do not have to go back to school in a day or two after hearing the news.

Plan your presentation to your children in advance. Make some notes about what you plan to say and review them so that you are familiar with what you intend to say. Anticipate what they may say to you. You can have the notes in front of you, if you wish, and simply say, “We have made some notes because what we are going to be talking about is very important for all of us and we don’t want to forget anything.”

Remember that your children will likely be in emotional shock after you tell them your intentions to end your marriage and they will not be able to absorb everything you say this first time. Be prepared to have the same conversation with them numerous times. Their shock and grieving will interfere with them being able to fully take in all that you are sharing.

Tell them that the two of you have decided to end your marriage and live in different homes because you have adult problems between you that you haven’t been able to resolve. Avoid using the word “divorce” because it is laden with negative connotations. Assure your children this is NOT THEIR fault. Children often automatically assume responsibility for family issues.

Reassure your children you love them, you will always love them and you will always be their parents. Avoid saying that you don’t love each other any more. Children then think perhaps their parents could stop loving them one day as well. This unsettles them and the stable foundation having two loving parents provides.

Avoid blaming each other. This is the time for the two of you to show a united front to your children. This news will shatter their view of their family as they have known it. Blaming each other puts them in the middle of your pain and conflict, causes them to experience divided loyalty and feel they need to choose sides, as well as feel guilt for loving both of you. Children often report they hate being put in this position and feel each parent was attempting to form an alliance with them against the other parent.

Tell them what is going to remain the same. Tell them that you are all still family, you will always be their parents and you will always love them. Explain you will be amicable so you can both attend their activities and family gatherings and not create tension for them, other family members or their friends. Explain your living situation (who is staying in the family home, etc.). Describe what will remain the same (school, activities, etc.). Assure them that they will continue to have the emotional support of both parents in the newly restructured family.

Next, tell them what is not going to remain the same. Tell them if you both will be moving into new homes. If feasible, involve them at the appropriate time, for example, once you have narrowed your choices down to two options. It’s important to be neutral and factual. Resist being a victim or martyr. It will only make children feel guilty and angry at their other parent.

You are still their parents. It is your job to put their feelings above yours and provide them with the support they need to hear, feel and understand what you are sharing with them. Acknowledge the announcement is a shock and their feelings (anger, sadness, grief, shock, etc.) are normal. Focus on and be empathetic with THEIR feelings. Don’t talk about your feelings, (how you haven’t been happy for years, how you deserve to be happy). Having just received such painful news, they will be unable to express their happiness for you, and it is unreasonable for you to expect them to do so. Remember, their familial foundation has just been rocked and their family history is being rewritten. They are losing their world.

Tell them that you still believe in family and that you hope they will too. Tell them that you don’t expect them to take care of you emotionally or physically. This is your job, not theirs.

Avoid telling them that you stayed together or delayed restructuring your family because of them. This will make them feel guilty for your unhappy marriage. Depending on their ages, your children may recall their childhood memories and wonder: ‘What was real and what wasn’t real? Were you really happy on those family vacations?’ Divorce destabilizes the family system and inevitably shakes every family member’s perception of their past, their present and their future.

Assure your children this is a process for all of you to move through, at your own pace and in your own way. Assure them you will always love them and you will always be there for them in whatever ways will be most helpful to them. You want them to know that they aren’t alone so they don’t become isolated and depressed. Encourage your children to speak with a counselor or youth pastor about their feelings. Tell them you have spoken with or intend to speak with a counselor as well, to talk about your feelings.

Take advantage of the Child Specialist available to you and your children as part of the Collaborative Divorce process to give your children a safe, healthy outlet to express themselves and begin the journey toward a positive, happy future.