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Help Your Child Cope with Long Distance Parenting

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If you or your ex are relocating after your divorce or separation, you know it is going to be hard for your child to stay close to the non-residential parent.  However, as the residential parent, there are many things you can do to encourage them to interact and many ways to provide support during this difficult adjustment.

Plan It Out

The most important thing you need to do, when your child is no longer going to be living near the other parent, is to sit down and have a detailed talk together as parents about how you’re going to make this work.  If you’re the one moving, you may have had to get court permission and a court-approved plan for visitation, but even so, there are details that need to be worked out.  It’s essential that, as the residential parent, you make it clear to the other parent that you want his or her relationship with the child to thrive, despite the distance.  You need to emphasize that you want to support their relationship.

Spell It Out

Once you and the other parent have a plan, share it with your child.  Your goal is to reassure him or her that the long distance parent is still going to have an parenting important role.  For younger children, it can help to use to a calendar to show when they will go visit the other parent.  Color this area of the calendar in or use stickers to make it stand out.  Share all the details of the different ways child and parent will be able to stay in touch in between visits.

Plan Expenses

Discuss travel expenses.  If your child will be traveling to visit the other parent, who is going to do the driving, or who is going to pay the airfare?  Arguments over these costs are the most common stumbling blocks to long distance visitation and if you can negotiate them now, you’ll save yourselves, and your child, a lot of heartache later.  Many parents share these costs, but if there is a large financial disparity between your incomes it may make sense for the wealthier parent to pick up the cost.

Rely on Technology

The best way to keep kids in touch is to let them have direct contact with the other parent via cell phone, Skype, FaceTime, or at least an instant messenger app on an iPad. Empower your child to be able to contact the other parent himself is he is old enough.

Share

Non-residential parents often feel out of the loop even when they’re living in the same town with their children, and it can be worse if they are across the country from their child.  As the residential parent, make a point to share things that are happening in your child’s life with the other parent.  Instead of throwing out homework papers that come home, stuff them all in an envelope and mail them every week or send a photo of the really good ones over to the other parent.  Send along the school or classroom newsletter.  Email photos you take of your child and videotape events the other parents misses.

Reach Out

Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone, or encourage your child to do so, to ask the other parent for suggestions for school projects, sympathy over a sprained ankle, or help with a friendship problem.  Remember that a lot of the time our work as parents happens when our children reach out to us with a problem.  The other parent won’t have the opportunity in those moments unless you encourage your child to reach out.

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Teens and Divorce

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Photo by Sujin Jetkasettakorn

If you and the other parent divorced while your child was younger, the teen years can present some challenges in terms of your visitation schedule.  A schedule that worked for an elementary school age child is not going to fit a teen.  And, if you and the other parent have split during your child’s teenage years, it can be difficult to devise a plan that will work for everyone involved simply because the teenage years are so difficult to parent during.

Big But Not Big Enough

The first thing to remember is that teens may look and act a lot like adults, but they aren’t yet completely mature.  They still need to have two parents and they still need to have those parents involved in their lives.  Teens are working hard at learning to be independent, and this means that they do need special consideration, but it does not mean that you and the other parent should throw up your hands and say “there’s nothing we can do.”  It can be difficult to continue to parent someone who doesn’t want to be parented, but that’s your job right now.

Flexibility Is Key

Friends, school, sports, activities, dating, and jobs are essential to teens.  If you have a visitation schedule that severely restricts your child’s ability to enjoy those essential activities, all you’ll end up with is resentment.  Instead, you need to try to create a balance in your teen’s life.  He or she should have plenty of time to do the things that matters to him, but he’s also got to make some room for spending time with his parents.

When you all lived in one house you probably did not tell your daughter she had to skip the field hockey game because you wanted to spend time with her.  You didn’t tell your son he couldn’t hang out with friends on Friday night because your spouse wanted to spend time with him.

As the divorced parent of a teen, you’ve got to flex the parenting schedule to incorporate the things that make your kid who he is.  If your spouse has visitation this weekend, but your teen has a dance to go to, the parent whose scheduled time it is should take the teen to and from the dance, and spend the rest of the available time with him.  You need to find a balance between your teen’s need to be a kid and the need for him or her to have time with both parents.

Create a Minimum

Since teens schedules are busy and your and the other parent’s schedules are also probably pretty packed, it’s important to agree to some kind of minimum time per month with the non-custodial parent. For example, decide that you’ll try to arrange things so that the non-custodial parent sees your child for at least four overnights per month and 4 other evenings or afternoons – this is the flexible way to fit in the “every other weekend and one night a week” plan into a busy life.  Fit parenting times in where they go the easiest.  Be creative with your time sharing.  Take turns taking your daughter to basketball practice.  Have one parent commit to teaching him how to drive.  Have the other parent be involved with weekend band or cheerleader activities.  Some parents have a hard time being so flexible because it feels like a loss of control.  In fact it is just the opposite – you set a minimum and then work with your child to make it work for everyone.  It takes a bit more cooperation, but in the end, you will both have a better relationship with your child and he or she will feel more fulfilled and connected.

Stay Connected

Teens are big on technology, so the non-custodial parent can maintain a close relationship with text messaging, cell phone calls, andSkype.  Non-custodial parents can have a difficult time staying connected during the teen years – teens certainly aren’t know for being open with their parents!  And, if a family divorced when the daughter was 7, she’s a very different person at 15 and it can be hard to stay in the loop.  Find out about her interests and activities and make yourself a part of them – either by showing up to cheer, by offering help, or just by asking friendly, non-intrusive questions.

Surviving the teen years requires a mutual understanding – you take your teen’s life seriously and he or she will take both parents seriously as well.

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Divorce and the Adopted Child

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As if divorce isn’t hard enough, it can be even more complicated when you are trying to work out custody of an adopted child. Adoption often makes the situation emotionally more difficult for the child, and may make you concerned about what your rights are.

Legal Rights

If you and your spouse adopted your child together, or if one of you did a step-parent adoption, you may be wondering how the adoption impacts custody. Technically, it doesn’t. If you are both legal parents, you both have equal rights in the eyes of the court. If one of you is also a biological parent though, there’s a good chance the court will take that fact into consideration when making a decision. It’s unlikely a court would award custody to a step-dad who recently adopted the child over her bio mom, however it is possible because the decision is always made based on what is in the best interests of the child. If the bio mom is shown to be a poor parent, custody could certainly be given to the adoptive father.

Attachment Issues and Divorce

If your child is one of the many adopted children who has dealt with attachment issues, you may find divorce to be a very difficult time for him. He may have spent years coming to grips with the adoption itself and the loss of his biological family. Now he has to deal with another loss.

Having his family split up can cause an adopted child to regress and re-experience the feelings of loss and grief that were related to the adoption. The upset of the divorce may cause him to act out in ways you have not seen in years. Keep in mind that ALL children of divorce deal with anger, loss, sadness, and confusion. Your child’s reaction may be compounded by attachment issues, but his reaction is likely not outside normal boundaries.

Therapy is almost always a good idea for children who are going through a divorce, and this is even more the case for adopted children in a divorce. A good therapist can help your child work through his emotions and find coping strategies for the situations he experiences.

Reassuring Your Child

If you and your spouse can talk to your child together about the divorce, you will be able to set the tone for her. Tell her how much you both love her and explain that the divorce cannot change that. Talk about how you are going to work together and still be her parents. Yes, you will live in separate homes, but you will still always be a family. Make it very clear to her that the parent moving out is not deserting her or moving out of her life. Adopted children often carry a deep fear that their adoptive parents will one day give them up just as their biological parents did. Help her understand that that will never happen.

Advice for Bio Moms

The best thing you can do for your child is to work together cooperatively as parenting partners. It does not matter if you are the bio mom and your spouse adopted her – in your child’s eyes you are both her parents and she needs you both. It can be hard as the bio mom to make room in your child’s life after divorce for a man whom you see as having hurt you. You might think you and your child are just better off without him. However, when you agreed to the adoption, you made him your child’s parent forever. Divorce does not change that. You asked your child to accept him as a parent. To try to change that for your child now would be very confusing and unfair.

You have to put aside your personal feelings for the other parent and find a way to work together so that your child can have two parents who are active, cooperative, and relatively pleasant to each other when it counts.

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Co-Parenting Basics

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photo credit: Africa

Dave and Karen have just gotten divorced. Their divorce wasn’t pleasant but it was reasonable, especially when it came to custody. The kids live with Karen, and Dave sees them every other weekend and one night per week. Their divorce decree refers to their “co-parenting” plan and talks about joint legal custody with Karen having residential custody. Neither one of them is quite sure what all of these words mean or how they are supposed to co-parent when what they want more than anything is to start their own separate lives.

“Co-parenting” is a big buzz word when it comes to divorce. You’ve probably heard about the importance of co-parenting, but understanding what co-parenting really is and how to make it work requires delving beneath the hot word of the day.

Types of Custody Arrangements

Before you can even begin to try to co-parent together or understand what co-parenting is, it is important to understand what the custody options are when your marriage or relationship ends. There a variety of arrangements possible.  The biggest distinction is between legal custody and physical custody.

Legal Custody

Legal custody refers to parental authority and decision making power. Parents can have joint or sole legal custody. Parents who share joint legal custody are supposed to make important decisions about the child together (and is truly at the root of co-parenting). These include education, health, religion, and other major decisions. In theory, joint legal custody requires the parents to truly cooperate. In reality, often parents are given joint legal custody simply because it is a way of making the parent who does not have primary physical custody feel better about the situation. I’ve worked with several families where a schedule was easy to create, but the father would not agree to it because he did not technically have joint custody. Changing that wording made the agreement more palatable – parents like to be able to say, “I have joint custody of my children.”  Often this designation is in words only – parents who couldn’t work together before are not magically transformed into cooperative parents by a court decree.  Often the residential parent ends up being the one who makes many decisions about the child without the other’s input.

On the other hand, just because one parent is given sole legal custody does not mean that the other parent is completely shut out of participating in decisions about the child’s life. Your custody arrangement is what you make of it.

Physical Custody

Physical custody has to do with how the child’s time is shared by the parents. There are an infinite number of ways time can be shared – any possible schedule permutation can you think of. However, there are a few ways these arrangements can be characterized. First, let’s consider the child’s primary residence. In most custody arrangements, the child has one home base – the parent’s home at which he or she spends the most time. This parent is sometimes referred to as the residential or primary parent.

If one parent is given sole physical custody, it means that the child spends all of his or her time with that parent and does not see the other parent, This is rare, except in cases of abuse or neglect. Parents can also have joint or shared physical custody, which means they share the child’s time in a relatively equal way, such as alternating weeks or months, or splitting the weeks in half. As great as this sounds, it doesn’t work for many families. Most commonly one parent is given primary custody or residential custody and the other is given visitation.

What is Co-Parenting?

Generally speaking, co-parenting refers to two parents continuing to function as a parental unit after a divorce. Instead of going their separate ways and never speaking or cooperating, co-parents continue to see themselves as a parenting team who must work together and rely on each other to raise their children together. Joining together in this way is the best thing possible for the child, who needs to know he still has two parents who care enough about him to work together. Co-parenting is possible in most cases, except when there is domestic violence or control issues.

No matter what kind of custody and visitation schedule is in place, almost anyone can be co-parents. Co-parenting is not about equally sharing time or even making big decisions together; it is instead a state of mind. Your divorce has not ended your parenting relationship. In fact, you will be parents together for the rest of your lives, even after your children are adults. Co-parenting is a cooperative approach to the years ahead of you and a way of including both parents in the child’s life.

Co-parenting does not mean second guessing each other or having no individual freedom. Since you are each essentially parenting alone, you have to have the ability to make decisions on your own. What it does mean is trying to face the big picture of parenting together – working together to solve problems in your child’s life, presenting a united front on things such as curfews and household rules, and sometimes joining together in a happy way to celebrate your child’s accomplishments or milestones. Viewing each other as partners in your child’s life is at the root of co-parenting.

Co-Parenting Agreements

Co-parenting agreements are sometimes included as part of your divorce decree or family court order. Sometimes, though, co-parenting agreements are negotiated and created with the help of a therapist. Co-parenting agreements can be very short and simply list the schedule you will follow. They can also be quite long and incorporate other details about how you will parent together, make decisions together, and face problems as parents.

How to Co-Parent Successfully

The first step in co-parenting successfully is to talk to your children about the divorce together. The news that you are separating or divorcing needs to be shared by both parents together. Talking to your kids about why you are breaking up (only general reasons should be discussed, such “mom and dad are fighting a lot and need a break” or “we have decided we don’t want to be married anymore” and it must be emphasized that none of it is the child’s fault) sets the tone for your entire co-parenting relationship. It lets your kids know that you are still parents together and will continue to work as a unit.  If you aren’t comfortable talking to your kids together, then you need to seek help from a therapist who can assist you with this.

The key to making a co-parenting arrangement successful is respect. You must respect the other parent. You likely have a lot of bad feelings towards the other parent, but you need to find a way to separate your parenting from those feelings. Your goal is to create a good life for your child and you can do that by parenting together in a respectful and cooperative manner.

Flexibility is the other key to success. You have a schedule, but you need to be flexible with each other. Today the other parent may ask for a change, but tomorrow it will likely be you who is running late, suddenly has a business trip scheduled for your weekend, or wants to take your child to a special event on a day you aren’t scheduled for. Cut each other some slack. Also, try to approach your time sharing on a monthly basis. Don’t be uptight if you have three hours less with your daughter this week than you are supposed to. Things tend to even out over the course of a month, so try to look at the schedule in a long term way rather than an in a to the minute manner.

Evolution of Co-Parenting Agreements

One of the biggest changes in co-parenting agreements in recent years is the wording. Custody and visitation were words that were always used to explain how parents shared their time with their children, but more and more people are realizing that there are better words. Parenting experts today prefer to talk in terms of parenting time, parenting schedules, parenting plans or just simply agreements. These words are much more family-friendly and do not degrade the parent who has the least amount of time. There is also more recognition of the fact that the time really belongs to the child and not to the parents, so parents are learning not to refer to “my time” and “my days”.

Co-parenting agreements have become more and more specific over the years. For some families, they are pages and pages long. One family I worked with created a long document that specified each parent’s responsibilities to the finest details. This included bedtimes, types of meals appropriate for the child, and even details about who was responsible for what portion of the child’s laundry. The problem with very detailed co-parenting agreements is that they don’t give a lot of room for flexibility and have to be re-drafted as your child ages and has different needs.

Co-parenting is the best way to help your child through the divorce and the years afterward. Working together as parents after a divorce is not always easy, but it always offers big benefits.

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