Co-Parent Fear?

I recently received an email from a bio mom from Houston, Texas who was interested in my mediating a problem she was having with coparenting with her ex-husband.

"Well, I thought I was doing it right," she wrote. "I didn't think my children could see how disgusted I was with their father. His parenting skills suck. I always have to take up the slack."

Intermixed among other emails was one from a father, Mike, who complained that his ex-wife was always trying to control how he dealt with the kids. He felt his privacy was invaded and he wanted to be left alone when his kids were with him. He was writing to ask how to get through to his ex-wife and let her know that he was fully capable of taking care of his own children. “The kids are clean,” he wrote. “They have a bed time. What's the problem?"

Before I go on, I must explain that I often have the opportunity to talk with both parties, even though we do not meet face-to-face. If those who need mediation do not live within driving distance, I mediate using Yahoo Messenger and we converse over the internet in real time. Both Mike* and Brenda* had stumbled on to the Bonus Families web site and had no idea the other was writing. I suggested online mediation--and for them it worked.

"Have you asked her what the problem is?" I asked Mike.

"Sure," he wrote back. "She never gives me a straight answer. I think it's just me."

"Have you told him specifically what you don't like about his parenting skills?" I asked Brenda.

"It's everything!" she wrote back. "He doesn't do anything right!"

It appeared that Mike was right. Brenda’s responses suggested that she did disapprove of just about everything he did.

"Do the kids complain when they are with Mike?" I asked Brenda.


If you ever had an insecure bone in your body, divorce will find it and shake it until it really hurts. "Are you kidding?" she wrote back. "They can't wait to get to their dad's house. No one bugs them to clean up their room. They have pizza for dinner every night. It's a party over there! I'm the one who always has to be the disciplinarian. The kids probably hate me."

I continued to ask Brenda questions and because we were meeting in real time Mike could instantly read her responses. “Because Mike is a little more lax in the discipline department, does not cook on a regular basis, and is not the fastidious house cleaner that you are, do you feel as if you have to compensate by staying the responsible one?”

“Oh my Gosh! she wrote. Yes! What a relief! You get it!”

Mike then wrote, “It’s just not my style,”Brenda. And, continued by saying that being “‘Suzy Homemaker’ was not required for their children to be healthy or safe.”

As much as she hated to admit it, Brenda agreed that Mike was right. “He’s right,” she wrote. “He just makes me so mad!”

I then pushed a little further. “Are you perhaps afraid that Mike is "the fun one" and therefore the kids prefer to be with their dad?” Her response was simply, :-(. It was obvious I had reached the heart of her insecurity. She went on to explain that because of the divorce she could no longer influence Mike’s parenting decisions and her frustration was making her into someone she did not want to be--bitchy, condescending, and never satisfied.

Mike then confided that the kids felt Brenda’s frustration, too, and he worried that they could never satisfy their mother.

In turn, Brenda admitted that exactly what she feared so much was happening--the kids preferred to be at Mike's. She was deeply hurt, however, it was obvious that her family perceived her hurt as anger and the children were rebelling.

"Brenda," I wrote. "Are the kids in danger when they are with Mike?"

"No," she replied. "He's always been very careful with the kids."

Found at BonusFamilies.com

iPod + Teenager = ?

What Do You Get...... when you cross a teenager and an iPod Touch (with enabled wifi)?

The start of a horror story you hear about on Dateline or Maury Povich complete with private chats of an inappropriate nature with strangers of questionable age (and even gender).

I've been asked not to tweet or post about this because the Internet doesn't need to know about His daughter but I'm doing it anyway because ... well, it's *my* blog.
But, that's not the real reason. I do so not to embarrass Cinderella, or to spite anyone. I post this now because it's important to remind ALL parents (steps AND bio) of the importance of monitoring your children's internet usage. No matter how insignificant you might think it is, it can be a recipe for disaster.
Even the best parent needs a reminder every now and then.

If you are not familiar with an iPod Touch and all of it's capabilities, it's basically a mini-computer. So when your otherwise good kid is locking him/herself in their room "playing games" on their "iPod" you need to know that they may be ON TEH INTERNETZ and that means people of ALL KINDS are also playing these games and therefore have access to your good kid. AND!!! that said games also have private chat capabilities (remember the early days of a/s/l checks? Umm...YEAH! 'nuff said.).

BUT, if you are lucky (and YES there is also an upside to this otherwise craptastic and stomach turning experience) you might also get validation that you are doing a good job when, as you scour though the chat and email history, you happen across a statement made by your kid such as: "I'll [send it] tomorrow because my Dad is home then and he doesn't watch me."

You bet your ASS I'm going to be watching you.

Found at TheWickedStepMom

The Co-Parenting Issue

Co-Parenting: Nationwide Effort Would Force Parents to Share Responsibility


By VICTOR GRETO


When Doug Richardson remarried, he waited nearly a decade before having a child. "We got married under the agreement we'd have no kids," says Richardson, 42, of Essexville, Mich. "But my wife is 10 years younger than myself. I didn't want to shortchange her because of my own experience."

That experience, which began when he was 19 and married his pregnant girlfriend, got even worse in 1991 when Richardson divorced her, and took a nightmarish journey through the court system. He ended up paying tens of thousands of dollars in child support and health insurance, and then never seeing his two children. "For the first 16 years I buried it so deep, along the lines of a rape victim," Richardson said. "It hit me when my child was born (to his second wife), about what was really taken from me."


Angry and bewildered fathers who want more rights after they divorce – to either right the wrongs of paternity fraud, or to be awarded equal or shared parenting with their children – have been fighting back through high-profile court cases, founding shared parenting organizations and lobbying extensively for new laws.




Shared parenting assumes that both parents will be awarded joint custody, unless other factors (proven abuse or domestic violence) weigh against it. "It is the case that there's a growing awareness of the injustices in the system," says Ronald K. Henry, co-founder of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research, and who has argued and written papers for decades arguing for shared parenting rights.


Keep reading here at d360