Posts filed under ‘Children’s best interest’
How to Be Smart About Mediation
Understanding what mediation is as a process, and finding the right mediator, are critical elements to developing smart and long lasting parenting and financial agreements that are predicated on informed, thoughtful decision making. A good mediator will discuss what your goals are for the process, what is important to each of you and will help you to craft a plan that addresses those goals and intentions. This is important to understand, as all mediators are not created equal!
Our guest, Cara Raich, (http://www.srmediators.com/mediators/cara-raich-esq/) (http://mediatetrix.wordpress.com/) explores the specifics of mediation in this episode of The Smart Divorce, with Deborah Moskovitch and Steve Peck. Cara is a mediator and attorney who specializes in helping people find non-adversarial resolutions to conflict. She mediates a wide range of cases including divorce, family conflicts, and organizational and civil disputes.
Cara is dedicated to helping her clients avoid the challenges and acrimony that frequently accompany adversarial proceedings. She does this by enabling her clients to come to realistic and informed agreements that work for them and their families. Cara believes that separation and divorce are family matters with a legal element, not a lawsuit that happens to be about a family.
To understand how these goals are accomplished in a fair and reasonable manner – and gain perspectives on alternative ways to view mediation and settlement we discuss:
- What does neutrality really mean?
- What are the process choices that people have when contemplating divorce?
- How do we as a society view divorce?
- What is a successful divorce?
- What is the role the law will play in your divorce? Is the law relevant, determinative or something in between?
This interview will surely help you understand the many aspects of mediation.
To listen, click on the link http://www.divorcesourceradio.com/be-smart-about-mediation/
It’s All About The Kids, “Stupid” – Parenting During Divorce
One of the most important concerns parents have post divorce is how their time is to be shared between their children. Is there such a thing about the right parenting plan or how parenting time is shared? In this episode of The Smart Divorce with Deborah Moskovitch, our guest Dr. Phil Stahl has some very insightful answers and thoughts on parenting during divorce.
Dr. Stahl is one of the North America’s foremost parenting experts; a practitioner, author, and teacher, specializing in high conflict families of divorce. He has served on numerous committees and task forces designed to improve the quality of work in his field. He teaches judges, attorneys, psychologists and other mental health professionals about issues affecting families and children. His expertise is accepted in courts across the country.
If you are a parent going through a divorce, you will want to learn more about custody evaluations and some of the issues affecting families and children. This show is insightful for grandparents and step-parents…..or anyone who wants a better understanding of the parenting plan and putting the children’s best interests first.
Topics include:
- Communication blunders, and apologizing to our children for our mistakes
- Wise advice from Dr. Stahl’s book – Parenting After Divorce
- What makes a good parenting plan
- Parenting plan ideas
- Parenting through conflict
- How to share your child – your child is not a percentage
For more on Dr. Stahl, visit: http://www.parentingafterdivorce.com/index.html
To hear this insightful interview chock full of great advice tune in at http://www.divorcesourceradio.com/its-all-about-the-kids-stupid-parenting-during-divorce/
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Fathers are Important Too
Kids Need Their Fathers, During and After Divorce
One of the sad realities of divorce and the outcome is fatherlessness. In this episode of The Smart Divorce with Deborah Moskovitch, we discuss the need for fathers to stay involved in their kids lives, especially during and after divorce.
Deborah Moskovitch
It is more common for father’s relationships to be thinned out more than mothers. While a lot of attention and research has focused on single-parent families where the parent is the mother, limited attention has focused on single-parent families where the father is the parent. Single-father families are a small, but growing segment of our society. But what happens when dads aren’t involved?
Deborah Moskovitch and Steve Peck explore this issue, and help provide an understanding of fatherlessness, while providing ideas for staying connected.
Did you know:
- Up to 25% of children do not see their father by 2-3 years after divorce
- Daughters that do not have a relationship with their father are more likely to have long term emotional issues – are more promiscuous and less likely to graduate from high school and college; while sons are more likely to exhibit delinquent behavior
- 80% of the daughters and sons in the U.S. only live with their fathers for a maximum of 10 to 15 percent of the time after their parents divorce
Tune in to discover what can be done and how you can overcome these obstacles. There’s been research that shows when fathers are more involved in their kids’ lives — they are less likely to divorce themselves.
Also, Like us on our Facebook pages, The Smart Divorce and Divorce Source Radio. Join the community!
To hear this interview, click on the link
http://www.divorcesourceradio.com/kids-need-their-fathers-during-and-after-divorce/
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How to Tell Your Kids Your Getting Divorced
Published in The Huffington Post
By Deborah Moskovitch
Research indicates that too few parents sit down and explain to their children that their marriage is ending. They also don’t encourage their children to ask questions. Parents often say nothing, leaving their children confused. When parents do not explain what’s happening, the children feel anxious, upset and lonely and find it much harder to cope. Children don’t need to know the reasons behind the divorce, but what you can tell them is what it means to them and their lives.
Providing age-appropriate information will help your children and adolescents cope with the many changes in their lives initiated by the separation and divorce. It will make them feel less anxious. And it establishes a healthy pattern of communication with your children.
Preparing for conversation: Children and adolescents are much smarter then we often give them credit for. There is information they will want to know and appropriate to share, such as:
- The parenting plan. If you can, try to work out an interim agreement about what your living arrangements will be before you talk with your children. Although this plan might change later, your children will feel more confident if they know you’ve put some thought into the separation and how it might impact them.
- Reassurance. Let your children know that they are equally important to both of you, and you both want to be with them. Assure your children that the divorce is between mom and dad, and not your children — you will always be their parents.
- Answers to their questions: Try to think of the questions that your children might ask and be ready with answers. For example, they will want to know if they will be able to attend the same school or see their friends and extended family and where each of you will be living.
Talk about it together: It is helpful for both parents to talk with the children together. This gives them a consistent message and shows them that you both love them and that you can and will work together and parent cooperatively, even though you are divorcing. When it is not possible to talk to children together, do the best that you can to coordinate what you are saying to them and be sure not to put down your co-parent or be negative about them.
Provide the right message: When parents talk to their children about the separation or divorce, they are some very important things that you most likely will want your children to hear:
- That it was a mutual decision to separate; avoid laying blame on one parent.
- You, their parents, love them very much and that the divorce is not their fault
- Tell them what their lives will look like in concrete terms. For example: what will stay the same and what may change. Try to provide your children with security and routine.
Allow for grieving: Don’t rush your children; allow them time to react. Children need their space to grieve and adjust to this new reality too. Allow your children to express any and all feelings; let them know that is OK to do so. Also, help your children articulate different feelings and let them know that they can ask you anything.
Help your child understand the new reality: What will your children’s new reality look like? Hang a family calendar in a prominent place or in your children’s rooms. Show your children that you care; help them keep track of when they will be in each home. Since they will be adjusting to life in two separate homes, you want them to feel comfortable in this new routine.
And lastly, don’t be afraid to tell your children that you, the parents, may not have all the answers, but you are working toward goals together.
I also discuss this topic with Marilyn Denis on The Marilyn Denis show. To watch the interview click on the link
http://m.marilyn.ca/mobile/segment.aspx?segid=17929
For more tips and strategies about the conversation with your children, I interviewed Joan Kelly, an internationally recognized psychologist whose work focuses on the impact of divorce on children, on The Smart Divorce on Divorce Source Radio
http://www.divorcesourceradio.com/what-should-we-tell-the-children-about-our-separation-or-divorce/
More helpful tips may be found in The Smart Divorce: Proven Strategies and Valuable Advice from 100 Top Divorce Lawyers, Financial Advisers, Counselors, and Other Experts (Chicago Review Press, 2007). Or through The Smart Divorce Resource ToolKit.
To place an order or for more information, email info@thesmartdivorce.com
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Parent Alienation 911
Judge Michele Lowrance and I Jill Egizi have written a Parental Alienation Workbook entitled Parental Alienation 911.
This Family Day, Don’t Play Games with Your Children
As published in The Huffington Post
Living in the province of Ontario, I am fortunate to have the day off on February 20 because of the statutory holiday “Family Day”. This holiday was created because the provincial government felt that “there is nothing more valuable to families than time together. And yet it seems tougher than ever to find, with so many of us living such busy lives.”
Single parent households, blended families, same-sex families, cohabiting families. There so many more configurations that I haven’t even mentioned. But when you’re divorced and single, the expression “family day” suddenly takes on a very new meaning.
What if you’re divorced with no children, and have no extended family? Does that mean you can’t celebrate Family Day? No. I suggest that you reach out to your friends who have become your extended family. Let them know how special they are to you. Start building important bonds and relationships that you hope can be long lasting.
If you have become estranged or alienated from your family and children, use this time to reflect and try to understand what went wrong. Perhaps this can be the day when you start mending those broken bonds. The ending of a relationship between a parent and a child is probably one of the most painful experiences that can happen.
To be estranged is a breakdown of the bond between a parent and the child; a distance between the two is created. For whatever reason, there was something that caused the loving relationship to turn into one of apathy or hostility. If you ask me, parent alienation is a form of mental abuse.
I’m in my book, The Smart Divorce: Proven Strategies and Valuable Advice from 100 Top Divorce Lawyers, Financial Advisers, Counselors and Other Experts, I argue that:
“The most heinous situation in child custody disputes is called pathological alienation or parent alienation syndrome (PAS). In this scenario, one parent becomes obsessed with destroying a child’s relationship with the other parent when there is no good reason to do so. Alienation can be mild, moderate, or severe… The children’s will and choice are removed from them through a form of brainwashing. This is a serious form of child abuse, because if it isn’t stopped, the children are headed for psychiatric disturbances, failed relationships, and dysfunctional lives in which they will pass this behavior on to their own children.”
So what can you do to overcome these devastating scenarios?
In an interview I conducted with Dr. Robert A. Simon, a clinical and forensic psychologist in California, the doctor offers a slightly different perspective on the issue:
“I have concerns about the use of the term ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ because I think this oversimplifies the phenomenon and searches for its cause within an individual. In reality, there is a lack of quality, objective and empirical research to validate the notion that there is an identifiable syndrome that corresponds to the problem. Instead, this is a multi-faceted problem. The issue of children becoming alienated or estranged from a parent is a very real phenomenon and a huge problem.However, I am concerned that raising this issue during the course of child custody litigation has become rather “trendy” these days. And when children resist contact with a parent, this is rarely the result of a malevolent parent setting out to destroy the child’s relationship with the other parent. It is far more complex.
To see the full article in The Huffington Post, click on the link
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/deborah-moskovitch/the-meaning-of-family_b_1277833.html
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