Page 8: Because life goes on … helping children and youth live with separation and divorce

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Section 6 - Moving Forward: From a Couple to Co-Parents

When you and your ex-partner were a couple, your interactions as a couple and as parents were bound together. After the separation, you move away from the couple relationship toward forming a new relationship as co-parents. A co-parenting relationship refers to a relationship between parents who are separated or divorced, where the focus of the relationship is on what’s best for the children. While not all co-parenting relationships are the same – they may differ in terms of the parenting schedule or how decisions about the children are made – the key aspect is that both parents are focusing on the child’s interests.

Why co-parenting? Decades of research on the effects of separation on children converge around a consistent finding that the vast majority of children do better when they have a meaningful relationship with both parents.

• In general, children do best when their parents are actively involved in their lives. This is true for all families, separated or not.
•  When parents are more involved with their children, children are less likely to have conduct and emotional problems, or problems with school achievement.
• When asked, the majority of children want contact with both parents on a regular basis.

Children Want and Need Both Parents in Their Lives

Parenting with an ex-partner can be exhausting and infuriating, especially after a painful split. It can be extremely difficult to get past the difficult history you may have had with your ex-partner and overcome any built-up resentment. Making shared decisions, interacting with each other at drop-offs, and just speaking to the person you would rather forget all about might seem like impossible tasks.

But while it is true that co-parenting isn’t an easy solution, children benefit when parents work together to focus on their needs. (See box What Is Family Mediation? Whether children have a father and a mother, or two mothers or two fathers, their need for the loving involvement of each parent is the same. Both parents are important to children for emotional support, protection, guidance, sense of identity and their basic trust and confidence in themselves and in the world.

Fathers also Play an Important Role

The critical role played by mothers in children’s development is widely acknowledged. In families headed by a mother and a father, research is now highlighting the importance of fathers in children’s development. Studies show that children do better when their fathers are regularly involved in their care and form close bonds with them. The same is true after their parents’ separation. Both boys and girls benefit from the involvement of fathers who consistently provide emotional support, praise accomplishments, discipline misbehaviour, and support their schoolwork and activities. In fact, studies show that fathers can greatly contribute to children’s learning and ability to get along with others when they are consistently affectionate, supportive and involved.

As they grow older, children of involved fathers tend to have better social connections with their peers, do better in school and have fewer behaviour problems.

Another important way fathers can positively influence their children is indirect – by the way in which they interact with the mother. In other words, the quality of the parenting relationship between the mother and father has been shown to significantly strengthen both parents’ ability to foster their children’s well-being.

“Getting to Yes” for the Children

Without a doubt, putting aside relationship issues to co-parent your children may be one of the most difficult and stressful tasks you take on. (See box “I Do” Agree to Co-Parent”.) But keep in mind that when parents reduce conflict and put their efforts into providing the best parenting possible in their own homes, a major positive change can occur in their children’s lives. Why? Through co-parenting, your children should recognize that they are more important than the conflict that ended the relationship – and understand that your love for them will prevail despite changing circumstances. In addition, children are more likely to:

• Feel secure. When confident of the love of both parents, children adjust better to the separation and have better self-esteem.
• Benefit from consistency. Co-parenting fosters similar rules, discipline and rewards between households, so children know what to expect, and what’s expected of them.
• Better understand problem-solving. Children who see their parents continuing to work together are more likely to learn how to effectively and peacefully solve problems themselves.
• Have a healthy example to follow. By cooperating with the other parent, you are establishing a life pattern your children can carry into the future.

Without a formalized custom, there are, thankfully, a variety of services and resources designed to help keep both parents involved and minimize parental conflict – no matter how painful the split.

Choosing the Best Option for Reaching Agreements

When you’re deciding together which parenting arrangement is best for your children and other issues like child support, there are many ways to come to a decision.

You can reach an agreement with the other parent through negotiation (with or without a lawyer), through mediation, or through collaborative law. Or, you can have someone else decide the issue through arbitration (available in some provinces) or by going to court. These are all different types of “dispute resolution.”

When relationships end, most parents can agree on how they will parent their children without going to court. Court is costly, time-consuming and stressful. Going to court generally increases the animosity between parents and reduces the chances of them ever working together to raise their children.

A Parenting Plan: The Co-Parenting Management Tool

A parenting plan is a written document that outlines how parents will raise their children after separation or divorce. A parenting plan, developed with the best interests of the children in mind, lays out how your children will spend time with each parent; how you will make decisions about your children; how you will exchange information and communicate about your children; how you will handle appointments and extracurricular arrangements for your children; and how you will resolve disputes.

As you review this section, it’s a good idea to read the guides on the subject produced by your province or territory and by Justice Canada. The following documents are available on the Justice Canada website:

• Making Plans: A Guide to Parenting Arrangements After Separation or Divorce provides helpful information about parenting after separation and divorce and how to decide on the best parenting arrangements for your children. It also includes a helpful glossary of legal terms related to parental separation and divorce.
• The Parenting Plan Checklist provides a list of issues for parents to consider when developing a parenting plan.
• Parenting Plan Tool provides examples of clauses for parents to use in developing a parenting plan.
• Federal Child Support Guidelines: Step-by-Step provides information on options for reaching agreements about child support issues.

(See Section 11 – Resources for more information on these guides.)

Setting aside hurt and anger. The key to co-parenting is to focus on your children – and your children only. Co-parenting is not about the past, or who did what to whom but about the children’s stability and well-being. In the process of co-parenting, your own emotions – any anger, resentment or hurt – you need to take a back seat. This is not to say that your feelings aren’t justified or that you don’t deserve to have your needs met. On the contrary, there is a time and a place for you to focus on your needs. (See Section 2 – Taking Care of Yourself: Inside and Out for information and tools designed to help you feel better and get your own needs met.)

It all begins with your mindset. Think about communication with your ex-partner as having the highest purpose – the well-being of your children.

When Cooperative Co-Parenting Seems Impossible: Parallel Parenting

For parents who feel overwhelmed by their own feelings of anger, grief and loss, sitting down with a former partner on a regular basis to engage in a civil discussion about raising the children may seem out of the question. If it seems impossible for one or both of you to communicate without fighting or name-calling, but you are both involved parents, there is a way to co-parent with minimal contact with your ex-partner.

This approach is called “parallel parenting.”

Parallel parenting is actually a term adapted from child development theory. Very young children, under age 3, can learn to play next to one another – in a room, playground or sandbox – before they learn to play cooperatively and share their toys. This works as long as they leave each other alone and don’t try to take each other’s toys, throw sand or interrupt the play in some other way.

With parallel parenting, parental responsibilities are divided and each partner parents fairly independent of the other. Parents communicate with each other only when necessary, in a business-like fashion and only about issues directly related to the children.

In some cases, as strong feelings subside with time, parents are able to shift to a more cooperative form of parenting. In other cases, parents may continue to parent in “parallel” with one another for quite some time. Remember – no matter what form of co-parenting you are doing – it is important to focus on what’s best for your children and to shield them from parental conflict. (See box Cooperative Parenting vs. Parallel Parenting.)

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