When you finally get divorced from a person, you cannot stand anymore, because of a strong feeling of offence, anger, disappointment and many more, you are free to start over a new life and leave online divorce forms far behind. But what if you have mutual children, who you love so much, but even thought of co-parenting brings you pain. There is a perfect way out for you – parallel co-parenting.
Parallel co-parenting is a type of co-parenting, in which each parent is able to perform parental duties at their best, but interparental communication or interaction is minimized and usually not needed at least a real-life one. This is the best way out for couples going through high conflict divorces so that they can switch off their arguments and focus on upbringing children. More to this, children are no longer dragged into parents’ conflicts and feel cared about and loved. And this should be your primary aim.
Organized Co-Parenting without Live Contact
Previously researchers stated out that seeing their parents filing for divorce made children suffer a lot. And the only key to a child’s happiness was to pretend that everything is good and relationships between parents are amicable no matter what.
The latest research and many divorce websites prove that it doesn’t really matter if the parents get along or not until kids don’t witness it. What is significant to them is enough qualitative attention and interaction with both parents.
So, parallel co-parenting offers multiple tools to minimize communication between partners and maximize concentration on parental duties. This can be performed through parental applications, such as OurFamilyWizard, Cozi, Coparently, which allows you to organize co-parenting together, avoiding live communication. Commonly the applications are based on a shared calendar, which can be edited by both parents, it may include tasks, schedules, events, visitation hours and so on. You are also able to add vital information about your kids, communicate in the secured messenger, track shared expenses and many other tools, depending on the application, to help you organize co-parenting as perfect as possible
Unpersonalized Communication
The main principle of parallel co-parenting is to decrease communication and live interaction between conflicting partners. You may use co-parental applications since they offer secure messaging with tone meter, which doesn’t allow you to use offensive language or an over-emotional tone. You can also use e-mail to communicate not more than once a month to state out the most important things. If you have any information to update sooner you may still use the application and upload it there. Keep your communication business-like, just predetermined for information exchange but not commenting on parental skills of each other definitely. Mind, that in case of emergency, you should forget about principles and reach your partner as soon as possible, if needed. The kids should be your primary concern.
Cooperation with Specialists
Good specialists are needed not only for filling out divorce forms and proceeding through the case but to cope with co-parental challenges as well. Avoiding each other you still may have issues to discuss in the flesh, especially concerning your kids and co-parental procedure in general. So, visiting a mediator or specialist once a month is also a nice idea to share your opinion and comments and feel relieved for a month ahead.
Many couples also cooperate with specialists to help them organize and plan parallel co-parenting and check up their progress for the first time.
Don’t be ashamed or too self-confident, get the necessary help to succeed. Since the happiness of your children depends on your success.
Independent Households
It is also vital to have completely separate households, manage only yours and not interfere with your partner’s one. You set rules in your house and make children obey them to improve their maintenance. You should never comment on your partner’s parenting style or share disapproval with your kids or any other people until your children are safe. Also, don’t let your children compare houses, share their feedback about parenting styles and try to transfer rules from one house to another. There should be Mom’s and Dad’s house with separate rules, styles and parents. Until you follow the programmes and do your best for qualitative parenting.
Shared Duties and Events
When it comes to live presence of the parent such as attending dentist or school events, you should organize it that way so you don’t have to meet your ex. You have your shared calendar where you can take turns attending important events and take part in kid’s life equally. More to this, you’d better clarify the situation to the doctors and teachers, so that each parent will receive the same amount of information about their kids and develop separate relationships with the specialist. As to school, sports events, and other things, going separately but to the same event may confuse your children, but taking turns in attending will show children that both parents care and love them equally. That is what you should aim for.
Focused Parenting
Parallel co-parenting is organized in the way so that you can focus on performing your parental duties at your best. This way you can concentrate your enthusiasm and efforts on children but not waste your energy on fights and arguments with your ex.
As time passes and mediator helps you, you can gradually switch to simple co-parenting, if you can get along with your ex-spouse and things will go even better.
Yet, there are cases when parents are performing parallel co-parenting for many years and feel comfortable about it. Still, the main aim is not the relationships between ex-partners but the ability and desire to provide kids with love and care from both sides equally.
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