After a divorce or separation, understanding how to make it as easy as possible on the kids should be your main goal. You want them to feel stability, security and a close relationship with both parents. Unless the relationship or marriage had substance abuse or domestic violence problems, you want to have both parents in the child’s life for their mental and emotional well-being.
Set Aside the Anger and Hurt
You must look past the negatives between yourself and your ex to do what’s best for your kids. Setting aside strong feelings can be difficult, but you want to work cooperatively so that the kids won’t suffer. You may need to learn what works and what doesn’t. Co-parenting has nothing to do with your feelings or what your ex feels. Think about your child’s happiness. Divorce can cost a fortune, and even with disputes settled out of court, you could still pay thousands of dollars.
To offset the cost, if you had a life insurance policy for the other spouse, you may want to consider selling it. This can help you to recover some of the costs. At a younger age, you may not get as much for it, but you can still see if you can sell to anyone for something to relieve yourself of the monthly payments. You can review an online guide that will explain how you can sell your life insurance policy for cash in further detail so you can be fully informed of the process.
Improve Communication
As much as possible, you want to act peaceful, consistent, and purposeful with your co-parent. It starts with a positive mindset determined to take positive actions. You want to touch base on your child’s wellbeing and focus on doing things that will have that impact. With every conversation that you have with your co-parent, make the child the focal point. This strategy can also help build resilient kids as they witness your ability to communicate in a healthy manner with each other in spite of your breakup.
You don’t always need to meet them in person. In many cases, you can speak over the phone or exchange texts or emails for most of the conversations. No matter how you communicate, set a goal to keep the conversation as conflict-free as possible. Even in the conversations that the child doesn’t hear, you want to keep it cordial. This ensures that the emotions don’t spill over later in front of the child. Experiment to see what method of communication works the best for you.
Wait 24 Hours
When you experience a problem with your co-parent’s method of parenting, wait 24 hours before bringing up the subject. This keeps the conversation from getting heated. Many times, you can control your emotions better if you wait a little while before you attempt to speak about it. Remember, you want to always keep your child’s wellbeing as the top priority.
When it comes to parenting, it is normal to feel stressed and overwhelmed. You just need to always keep your child’s well-being as the top priority. Children from divorce can have a higher risk of risky behavior, poverty and educational failure. For that reason, you want to take active measures to make it as easy as possible on them. Many of the things that may feel like a big deal at first won’t seem like a huge problem after 24 hours. You need to decide if the issue is something that you genuinely care about. Pick your battles wisely and do your best to bring up the conversation in a kind light.
