DIVORCE
MEDIATION:
What
is it?
Who
is it for?
How
does it work?
What
are the benefits?
What
are the steps involved?
What
issues are dealt with?
How
long does it take?
But
I've already been to an attorney.
Do
we need an attorney?
Who
are the mediators?
What
does it cost?
Why
choose mediation?
Are
there cases that shouldn't be in mediation?
I'm
very angry now! (We can't even talk to each other!)
How
do I get started?
How
much will child support be?
How
will this affect our children? What can we do to
help them?
What
should we tell our children?
Children's
Bill of Rights |
The
following are some of the results about parenting
and children in divorce from the most comprehensive
study of divorce in America, FOR BETTER OR FOR
WORSE: DIVORCE RECONSIDERED,
by E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2002)
- Children are resilient; two
years after divorce, most boys and girls are
beginning to function reasonably well again.
Happily, the tendency to “self-righting” is
strong in the young.
- Parenting skills decline in the
first year after a divorce but begin to revive
in the second and third years.
- Custodial fathers are
often better at control; custodial mothers are
better at communication and nurturance.
- If parenting is loving, firm,
and consistent, and conflict between divorced
parents is low, children can thrive in a mother,
father, or joint custody situation.
- Divorce does not inevitably
produce permanent scars. Parents can buffer a
child against many of the stresses associated
with both divorce and life in a single-parent
home.
- You don’t have to be a
perfect parent to be a good buffer. Naturally
self-correcting, children can adjust to divorce
with a moderate amount of support.
- Parental love is not enough;
firm but responsive discipline is also important
to a child of divorce. It teaches the child
self-control and how to control his or her
emotions.
- By the time /the children in
our study/ were fifteen, the average distance
fathers lived from their children was four
hundred miles.
- To buffer, the school has to
make a youngster feel cared for, the teachers
have to be open and willing to listen; and the
discipline policy has to be loving but firm.
- Be consistent. It’s hard to
overstate the importance of a predictable
environment after divorce. With so many things
changing in children’s lives, they need to
know there are some things that can be relied
on.
- Remember, your child is a
child. Don’t confide in her or lean on her for
support she is incapable of giving. Solve your
own problems; the child has enough problems of
her own.
- It is difficult for a
non-residential parent to protect a child from
the consequences of a hostile, rejecting, or
neglecting residential parent. Non-residential
parents just aren’t around enough to buffer
the child in the day-to-day hassles of family
living.
- Think about cooperative
co-parenting; it is a major protective factor
for children, and by working together, parents
lighten the burden for each other.
- Although children from divorced
and remarried families are more likely than
those in non-divorced families to have problems,
the vast majority are adjusting reasonably well
six years after divorce.
- Children …need parental
guidance and advice in adolescence, but to be in
a position to provide both, a parent has to be
respected and to have a long history of engaged
parenting. A history of firm discipline, caring,
and nurturing imbues parental “no’s” with
the moral force that even an increasingly
independent-minded, peer-influenced teen will
heed.
- Sensitive, engaged, dependable
parents build up a large emotional bank account
that they can draw on in adolescence, while
parents with a history of disengagement and
undependability usually go into overdraft as
soon as the child becomes a teenager.
- The more marital and divorce
transitions a child experiences, the more
emotionally and psychologically fragile the
child becomes.
- Sexual discretion is advised
for all parents, but particularly for single
mothers. An adult has a perfect right to an
adult sex life, but most parental teaching,
including teaching about sex, is done via role
modeling. An overtly sexual parent predisposes a
child to early sexual initiation. The child
heeds what the parent does, not what she says.
- Adult mentors often play a
valuable role in a child’s life, especially
for children with a difficult home situation.
They can make a child feel worthy and valued,
and can serve as confidents, advisers, role
models, and surrogate parents.
- A structured, supportive,
authoritative school can help to protect against
the adverse effects of non-authoritative parents
often found in divorced and remarried families.
Choose your child’s school with care and stay
involved with teachers and school activities.
- The big headline in my data is
that 80 percent of children from divorced homes
eventually are able to adapt to their new life
and become reasonably well adjusted.
- The roots of marital
instability, what the American psychologist John
Gottman calls marriage’s Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse – hostile criticism, contempt,
denial, and withdrawal – seem to run across
generations and to undermine marriages for young
people from divorced and non-divorced families
alike… For our youths in the 1990, as with
their parents in the 1970s, we found that male
withdrawal and denial, two of Dr. Gottman’s
Horsemen, are particularly likely to drive a
woman out of a marriage; while criticism,
contempt, and reciprocated aggression –
counterattacking when attacked – act like
marital Mace on a man.
- Ultimately, coping with marital
transitions is an active, not a passive process
for adults and children. It is not just the
availability of resources but how people seek
them out and use them and how stresses are dealt
with that determine a win, lose, or draw after
divorce and remarriage.
- Divorce should not be
undertaken lightly; it is a high-risk situation.
Every effort should be made to sustain marriages
with some strengths and satisfactions, or
marriages going through perturbations because of
temporary stresses such as the birth of a
difficult child, a job loss, or a casual affair.
But divorce is a reasonable solution to an
unhappy, acrimonious, destructive marital
relationship. /but/ the current narrow focus in
the media and some of the clinical literature on
the hazards of divorce and remarriage, and
problems in children whose parents have gone
through marital transitions, is a disservice to
the majority of those individuals who, often
with heroic effort, are leading constructive
lives. It isn’t a matter of whether the glass
is half empty or half full. In the long run,
after a divorce, the glass is three-quarters
full of reasonably happy and competent adults
and children, who have been resilient in coping
with the challenges of divorce.
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