How to Have a Healthy Co Parenting Relationship
Co parenting after a divorce has its ups and downs. It’s scary starting over without the life that was once so familiar to you.Yet it is possible to move on as collaborative co parents. Co Parenting requires trust and dedication. Ensure that you maintain a sense of balance and amiability between your former partner with these strategies.
Develop Trust
Co parenting is a commitment you made to your partner and your child. This new sense of family may be foreign, but effective co parenting is possible. The goal of a co parenting relationship is to create a loving, stable environment for your child. In a family, each member deserves respect. Your former partner is still a member of your child’s family. There should always be a sense of respect around the topic of your co parent to enable trust between you. If you want your co parent to support your relationship with your child rather than sabotage it, be proactive. Take the initiative to create an environment where that’s possible for both of you.
Compromise
Some co parents struggle with letting go of the conflict that likely existed at the end of their romantic relationship. Your behavior can help ease the situation. Approach the co parenting relationship with a spirit of compromise. This will help diffuse combative or defensive situations. The goal is to allow your child to enjoy a peaceful and loving relationship with both parents — not to win every argument. In time you may find you have a civilized if not agreeable co parenting relationship that is beneficial to everyone in the family.
Communicate
Maintain expectations, but allow room for mistakes. No one is perfect. Being forgiving can help end conflict. It can also create a closer bond between you and your child. Working together as co parents helps your child feel safe and secure. No child enjoys witnessing or even hearing about conflict between the two parents they love. It’s not healthy or necessary to burden your child with handling communication between co parents. Your children deserve a stable, calm, unobtrusive co parenting relationship.
Understand Your Schedule
One way to reduce conflict and build trust is to understand each others’ rights and obligations. If you’re struggling with moving away from a combative mindset, reframe these rights and obligations as something you are providing for your children. After all, that is the truth. No matter what choices your former partner makes, your children need you to be stable and reliable for them. We’ve all seen the classic movie scene where a parent lets down his or her child by forgetting or otherwise failing to meet a promise.
One of the primary struggles is understanding joint custody. It feels horrible to realize you could have been or were supposed to be with your child, but confusion or miscommunication prevented that. Some co parents cannot seem to agree on their divorced parent calendar or when they’re each entitled to see the children. Others struggle with keeping track of doctor’s appointments, school functions, and other activities. These are opportunities to see and support your children.
Our Days Calendar is here to support you so that you can focus on what matters: spending time with your children. We create your family’s customized, automated custody calendar, modeled upon the joint custody laws of Texas. After you enter information about your divorce decree or possession order and your child’s school holidays, you will have an easy to read, easy to understand child visitation calendar that tracks the Texas Standard Possession Order, including how that order applies to your family. If there is ever any confusion, it’s easy to share your family’s customized child support calendar with your co parent so that you can come to a consensus.
We want you to feel confident that you and your co parent are on the same page. We’ve been in your shoes. Our Days Calendar was founded by a divorced Texas parent and is operated by a team of Texas attorneys and single parents. We developed a divorce schedule after experiencing difficulty, confusion, and disagreements interpreting the joint custody laws of Texas. With input from other co parents, we built our calendar into a full service app that automatically generates a child custody calendar for you.
We know this is difficult. Often, the most contentious issue between co parents is how much time each parent can spend with the children. It is possible to have a peaceful, non-confrontational relationship with your co parent. To do so, you must maintain trust, compromise, communication, and understand your rights and obligations – and download the Our Days Calendar app today on Apple or Google Play.