6 Proven Co-Parenting Strategies for Divorced Parents

While moving through divorce can seem like an insurmountable obstacle, for many parents it is just the beginning of a new and equally intimidating challenge: co-parenting your children.  Divorced parents who choose to live relatively close to one another so as not to disturb the school, sports and other related schedules of their children, certainly deserve credit and acknowledgement.

In this excellent blog posting Rosalind Sedacca offers six guidelines to remember that will help make your new co-parenting relationship work:

• Don’t bad-mouth your ex around the kids, ever!

• Never fight around your children. 

• Always offer your ex the opportunity for special times with the kids – before involving a new relationship partner, i.e.: taking your teen for their drivers test or tryouts for a new sport.

• Prioritize Mom and Dad being together for special occasions: celebrating birthdays, graduations and other significant events. 

• You and your ex won’t agree on all things so decide to pick your battles regarding parenting issues. 

• Use an online scheduling tool to keep straight about visit swaps, school activities, sports, vacations, holidays, parties and who is doing what – when! 

The Importance of Life Insurance in the Divorce Settlement

In this excellent blog posting, Roseann Vanella writes that life insurance policies are typically used as security to ensure that full child and spousal support payments will be made in the event that the paying ex-spouse dies.

Life Insurance to Secure Child Support Payments

If there are younger children at the time of the divorce, child support payments will continue for many years. The life insurance policy needs to have enough to compensate the custodial spouse until the last child turns 18  paid as a lump sum death benefit to the custodial spouse (for the benefit of the children).

Life Insurance to Secure Alimony

After a divorce, alimony may be required until the receiving spouse is deemed to be able to become self-sufficient or to receive the education and/or training necessary to become self-sufficient.

Who Should Own the Life Insurance Policy?

One of the most important details is which spouse should be the actual owner of the insurance policy. In some divorces, the paying spouse owns the policy, and provides frequent updates to the receiving spouse to prove the policy is still in force. To provide additional security, some receiving spouses insist on being the policy owners, with the paying spouse still making the premium payments as part of their support payment.

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.