One of the challenges for parents during and after a divorce is figuring out how to co-parent in a way that meets the children’s best interest. Parenting decisions can become especially difficult when resentments have been building up for some time. Now that you’ve made the decision to divorce, often these previously unstated resentments are exposed, causing more tension when trying to discuss challenging issues, such as how to co-parent your children. Here are three ways that mediation may help you to create your parenting plan.
1. Mediation will help you and your co-parent begin to work together on challenging issues for your children.
Whatever your parenting plan looks like, it must be in the best interests of your children. Part of that best interest is determining how to cooperate as you co-parent. Mediation is a facilitated conversation between you and your co-parent about essential things in your lives – your children. Engaging in mediation in good faith shows that you and your co-parent may disagree but may do so in a way that allows you both to work through challenging issues. The mediator will consistently ask questions about the decisions and disagreements, help you navigate difficulties, and let you find a resolution that works for the parents and is in the children’s best interests. Through the mediation process, you have the opportunity to create a model for addressing future parenting disagreements.
2. Mediation allows you to identify the many issues that need to be decided for your parenting plan.
When divorcing, parents have a lot of decisions to make together about how to parent their children. Parents need to determine when the children will be with each parent. Other choices include when the children may transition from home-to-home, or whether the parents will transition from home to home (this second option is called “nesting” and occurs when the children stay in one home and the parents move into and out of that home according to who is the on-duty parent). Other decisions include considerations such as where the children will go to school. What after-school activities will the children participate in? Where will the children spend the holidays? What time will the off-duty parent pick the children up? This is by no means the full list. It can be a challenging process and requires a lot of communication and decisions.
The mediator will work with you and your co-parent to identify the many issues and explore whether each is important to you and how you can together make agreements that are in the best interests of your children.
3. Mediation allows Parents to Explore New Roles and Create Boundaries
Co-parenting often requires each parent to take on new roles that may have never been needed. For example, one parent may have made dinner while the other worked with the children on schoolwork. Or, one parent may have been the one to transport the children to their various activities. Now, both parents must figure out how to juggle these new roles. Mediation can help the parents work through complex challenges associated with these roles. For example, it is entirely appropriate that a parent may not know the children’s routines. The mediator can help the parents share this information in mediation in a manner that allows each other to provide information within the confines of a safe space. The mediator, especially a child-centered mediator, will help the family transition from their previous positions to new ones.
After a divorce, the children will continue to have both parents, who will likely remain a significant part of their children’s lives. The law favors ongoing and frequent contact with parents who act in the children’s best interests. It encourages parents to share the rights and responsibilities of raising their children. ORS 107.101(1)-(2). Parents should use mediation to encourage ongoing communication to create a safe, respectful, and emotionally healthy co-parenting relationship with the other parent.