Conflict with a co-parent can overshadow your child’s best interests. Finding solutions to challenges in a co-parenting relationship requires new approaches to prevent old wounds from halting progress. While divorce in Southern California can be complex, reducing its impact on co-parenting and your child is often possible. We offer the following suggestions if you struggle with post-divorce co-parenting challenges.
Emphasize Your Parenting Goals
Most co-parents want what is best for their child. Losing focus on your goals may occur when communication becomes about your feelings instead of your child’s best interests. Meet challenges with sound information that supports your decisions and your child. A child learns positive and negative aspects of conflict resolution in how parents work together to accomplish parenting goals.
Seek Professional Help
An emotionally uninvested counselor can offer impactful suggestions specific to your co-parenting challenges. While friends and family provide daily support, they often offer a more biased opinion because of your emotional ties. Talking through post-divorce co-parenting challenges with a counselor can help identify ways you can change unhealthy approaches you may not be aware of, as well as find new ways to relate to a challenging ex-spouse.
Remain Flexible
Many challenges with a co-parent will arise out of unforeseen circumstances. A co-parent that benefits from your flexibility may be more likely to extend the same accommodations to you when the unexpected occurs. The challenges of accommodating multiple family schedules will require give and take. These challenges likely arise from daily schedule shifts and unplanned events and are less likely targeted acts to make life more complex for the other co-parent.
Refuse to be Reactionary
Even your best efforts to deal with co-parenting challenges can be thwarted by an ex-spouse who still seeks to hurt you. Your reaction to a co-parents words, decisions, and parenting styles often feeds a co-parent’s desire to be hurtful. When a child is safe, but the challenges with a co-parent seem to focus on creating frustration for you, refusing to react is a powerful tool that removes their power over you.
The only individual in a relationship you can truly control is yourself. However, addressing some challenges with a co-parent immediately when a child’s safety or your relationship with a child is in jeopardy may be necessary.
Craft and Follow an Effective Parenting Plan
A well-executed parenting plan in California can address many co-parenting challenges before they arise. A parenting plan establishes the groundwork for structure in decision-making. It may also offer structure for a child and provide a sense of security and predictability after divorce.
Keep Detailed Documentation
When co-parenting challenges have the potential to harm your child, documentation is vital for legal intervention. Proving that a parent is not acting in a child’s best interest is necessary, particularly when custody modifications to protect your child may be necessary. Discussing potential custody modifications in California with a child custody attorney in Sherman Oaks can clarify the necessity of documenting co-parenting challenges and when the court’s intervention may be required.
Spouses who divorce but share a child will remain connected for years and possibly a lifetime. Effectively addressing co-parenting challenges supports stability in a child’s life. Working together as co-parents can also remove the emotional stress many children experience in parental conflict. Reach out to discuss co-parenting challenges that impact your child’s best interests.