Is negotiating separation/divorce agreements with your partner becoming difficult because of:

• Relationship conflicts between the two of you?

• The feelings that are getting stirred up?

I can be of help by teaming up with your mediator to address these issues.  Providing guidance on how to have more constructive interactions and how to manage the emotional reactions that get triggered will help unblock the mediation process and allow it to move forward.

Child Inclusive Mediation allows your child’s concerns, interests and developmental needs to be heard during or following a divorce mediation. This can be particularly helpful when the parents’ perspectives regarding the needs of their children are so divergent as to make coming to agreement on how to approach them difficult.

Child Inclusive Mediation can help you to:

• Bring your child’s voice into the mediation process when decisions regarding parenting are being made

• Move the mediation process forward by maintaining a focus on your child’s needs

• Understand what impact the conflict between you and your child’s other parent is having on your child

• Formulate parenting plans that take your child’s particular needs into account

• Participate in a process that supports your child by reducing parental acrimony and increasing parental cooperation

In this process I would meet with your child to assess how the conflict between you and your child’s other parent might be affecting your child’s development and would then feed this information back into the mediation process. This then allows the mediation to move forward by staying focused on your child’s needs and to develop parenting plans that take them into account.

Because divorce is extremely stressful and usually very painful, it can generate intense feelings that—if not adequately managed—can frequently fuel conflict and derail any attempts at constructive problem solving. As your divorce coach, I would be helping you manage intense emotions so that they don’t interfere with your ability to clearly communicate and negotiate long-term solutions with your partner and with your being able to help preserve or develop a mutually respectful co-parenting relationship between the two of you.

Divorce Coaching can help you to:

• Work effectively and efficiently with your attorney

• Develop communication and conflict-resolution skills

• Negotiate effectively

• Explore parenting concerns and help you talk to your children about divorce

• Review how well the parenting plan is working and whether it requires any improvements or adjustments in post-divorce follow-up meetings

Divorce coaching can provide support, guidance, and tools to help you with any or all of the above whether you and your partner are engaging in the following divorce processes: do-it-yourself, attorney-negotiated, collaborative divorce, or mediation.

Parenting Coordination offers parents who are repeatedly at odds over parenting issues a means of resolving disputes that avoids litigation, is non-adversarial, and is based on what is in the best interests of their child(ren). By helping parents communicate in ways that are respectful, businesslike, and child focused, ensuring parents’ compliance with communication guidelines and the parenting plan, providing parents with tools to resolve conflict constructively, and managing the level of engagement between them, it aims to reduce the amount of damaging conflict to which their children are exposed.

Parenting Coordination can help you and your child(ren)’s other parent be less at odds with one another by:

• Having what is in the best interest of your child(ren) be the basis for resolving disputes

• Providing a timely resolution of impasses through the Parenting Coordinator’s role as an arbitrator—someone who is entrusted to make a recommendation when the two of you are not able come to agreement about a particular issue

• Putting procedures in place for how to address similar types of issues when they arise, thus helping the two of you avoid conflicts each time they occur