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Parenting Mediation

If you have children and separate, your most immediate concern will always be the impact of it all on your kids.

Parenting After Separation—What About the Kids?​​

If you have children and separate, your most immediate concern will always be the impact on your kids.

Most of our clients share a similar goal: “I want to separate and keep my kids’ childhood as stress-free and normal as possible.”

Whether your separation unfolds slowly and deliberately or comes out of nowhere, making arrangements for your children is almost always painful and complicated. Often, one or both of you may have carefully thought-out ideas about how the separation can work best for your children. However, the reality of what seemed acceptable in theory can suddenly feel unbearable in practice.

Moving from a situation where you imagined always being with your children to one where they are unreachable and out of bounds for chunks of time can feel unnatural and terrifying.

Perhaps a partner you once loved has hurt you and now feels like “the enemy.” Allowing your children to spend time with “the enemy” may conflict with your instinct to protect them at all costs.

Even if your break-up is amicable, the noble goal of cooperative shared parenting can be tested by differences in parenting styles, the introduction of new partners, or other unexpected challenges.

Creating a Parenting Plan​​

The best thing you can do for your children is to make an early plan for how you’ll parent as a team after separation. Proactive parenting plans can help prevent problems before they arise.

There are many pro-active discussions that can be had on co-parenting. For example, if you’ve discussed plans for celebrating your child’s birthday well in advance, you’re more likely to avoid arguments about parties, presents, and time spent with your child. This not only protects your child from potential emotional harm but also reduces stress for both parents. You can also proactively address matters like introducing new partners, time with extended family, schooling decisions—essentially, anything that could become a point of contention in the future.

Our mediators can provide neutral, professional guidance to help you both create a parenting plan that may feel unachievable on your own. Call us to learn more about parenting mediation or to book an individual pre-mediation session.

Parenting Plan Resources

Our tip sheet on preparing for Parenting Mediation covers everything you may want to consider when creating a parenting plan. You can find it below.

For a more detailed guide, Relationships Australia provides an excellent parenting plan booklet. This comprehensive resource can help you develop a thoughtful and effective plan:

Relationship Australia: Share the Care—Parenting Plan Booklet

Essential Tips for Preparing for Parenting Mediation

Setting the Stage for Successful Parenting Mediation

When preparing for a parenting mediation, it’s essential you cultivate an attitude that places the best interests of your children first. This may come across as patronising because it would be there would rarely be anyone in mediation who wasn’t there to secure a good outcome and happy future for their children.

Unfortunately in a state of grief and loss, and feeling angry, betrayed and sad, it can be hard to separate out what is best for children and what is just hurt.

The most important thing you can do prior to coming to mediation is to repeat this mantra to yourself: “The most important thing for my children is to keep them away from conflict.” Research has repeatedly shown that keeping your children away from parental conflict, in ANY form, is the best protective factor in ensuring their happiness after separation. This can be so hard to do when you are hurt and angry with your former partner.

Adopting this attitude ahead of mediation will give the process the greatest chance of success.

Have a good idea of what you want to include in your parenting agreement. Our checklist of potential parenting plan inclusions is a succinct list of items you could cover during mediation. Prior to coming you could think about which of them might be necessary to cover.

You’ll need to consider the time a child spends with each parent, how you’ll communicate with each other and the children, the way you’ll make decisions in the children’s best interests, managing the ongoing costs of raising children and how you’ll manage special occasions, holidays and extended family contact.

Click here to download our parenting agreement checklist.

 

Items you might need to refer to during the session include work timetables, calendars or diaries showing work commitments and annual leave, school holiday dates, lists of childcare and school fees, and any other document that may help you to make solid and concrete arrangements for your children.

If you have an existing parenting plan or Parenting Court Orders, bring them along for us to see. If there are any Domestic or Apprehended Violence Orders in place, we will need to see copies.

Parents who get along well together seem to be better off with a flexible arrangement, and flexibility is always better for children. Those experiencing more conflict find more structured and less flexible agreements give them firm guidelines to stick to in order to protect children from harmful conflict.

Often in mediation one party will be keen on a more structured agreement and the other party might prefer a more flexible arrangement. For some people, flexible can feel like “unreliable” and for others, structured can feel like “controlling”. If only parents could see that this is a common perspective difference and is not always unique to their situation.

They don’t care about the kids being disappointed when they’re “unreliable” and “They are trying to control me even though we’re not together anymore” would be two of the most common phrases we’ve heard in mediation. And sadly, they may be based on a mis-perception about the other person’s intentions. These kind of ideas contribute to pervasive conflict.

If these comments sound anything like you—you might find it helpful if you can keep in mind that your ex-partner’s “unreliability” or “control issues” are really not intended to hurt you or the children—they may be well meaning ideas on how a plan feels workable from their unique perspective.

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