Supporting the Grandparent-Grandchild Relationship After Divorce

When divorce takes place, everyone in the family is affected. Often the impact on grandparents is overlooked amidst the turmoil involving parents and children. But the affect can be devastating for grandparents who want to help and also stay in the lives of the children they love.

How do you cope as grandparents when the consequences of divorce limits or ends physical visits with the grandkids?

You do that by maintaining and strengthening the relationship you already have using the technology available and your best communication skills with your grown child’s former spouse.

In this excellent article, Rosalind Sedacca offers seven ways you can stay in the lives of your grandchildren despite the distance between you and the divorce.

Why It May Be in Your Best Interest to Settle a Divorce Out of Court

In the context of a divorce, litigants are emotionally entrenched in their positions, and they may think: How could the judge possibly not see that what my spouse is doing is wrong? Don’t they see that my spouse is an idiot? Oftentimes, a person going through a divorce believes that if he or she gets into the courtroom and tells the judge their version of the story, all of a sudden the lights, bells, and whistles are going to go off, and the judge will see their side and “get it.” It rarely works that way.

In this article, Debra Rubin writes that the court is overburdened with all the proceedings that come before it. More likely than not, the court has heard many versions of your story over the years, only with different names attached. Furthermore, judges are people, and they all come to these cases with their own personal biases. Those bells and whistles that you expect to go off in a trial? More likely than not, you will be disappointed.

If you and your spouse go to trial, it will only serve to increase the hostility between you. If you have children together, you are still going to have to work together going forward. It will be much harder to establish or to re-establish a cordial and civilized relationship if you have hashed out all of your dirty laundry in court. If you settle, at least you have a starting point that you’ve both agreed upon, even if it’s not the ideal.

The First 3 Critical Steps on Your Road to Divorce

In this excellent blog posting, Katherine Miller writes about the first three critical steps in getting a divorce.  These steps have nothing to do with negotiation. They are about understanding the problem and they are crucial to a good result.

• Choose a path and commit to it.  The overwhelming majority of divorce cases settle before the judge hands down a decision after a trial. The decision is not whether or not you’re going to settle, but how you’re going to do that.  Will you settle because the terms make sense and you are ready to move on with your life?
• Get perspective.  Get an understanding of what the facts of your life are. You need to develop a shared understanding of your economic reality.
• Get grounded.  Deepen your understanding of what’s important to you and why.  Then, once you more fully understand yourself (and not before), see if you can understand—not agree with, but understand—what’s important to the other person and why. 

If you or someone you know could benefit from assistance in decision making during a divorce, contact Falmouth Mediation at 508-566-4159 for a free, no-obligation, private, confidential consultation. We will be happy to discuss the key details of your situation, address any concerns, and help you decide if divorce mediation would be beneficial.

20 Things to Know About Divorce Mediation

In this excellent blog posting, Dana Westreich Hirt lists twenty things that people going through a divorce - and the many people who know them - might find helpful about divorce mediation:

1. Divorce is complicated.
2. Fighting makes everything worse. 
3. Make sure your mediator is neutral. 
4. Informed decision-making is key. 
5. Mediators are trained to reflect your “interests”, not your rights. 
6. Something can be inequitable, but still be legal. 
7. Lawyers get a bad rap. 
8. Mediation is a delicate balance. 
9. Enough with the venting. 
10. One partner is always further along than the other.
11. Emotional uncoupling is a process. 
12. Mediators are people, too. 
13. It’s not the mediator’s job to solve your problems.
14. Mediators are bound by ethics of confidentiality.
15. Co-parenting is not the same as parallel parenting. 
16. “Be brief; be informative; be friendly; be firm.”
17. Be as positive as possible. 
18. Listen to understand, not to react. 
19. Focus forward. 
20. No parenting agreement is ideal.