For Professionals

Hands On Training in Skill Based Coparenting

Over the past ten years, California psychologist P. Leslie Herold has developed a highly successful skill-based coparenting program for separated parents. Now he offers intensive one-and-one-half-day training workshops to individuals or agencies interested in setting up coparenting classes in their communities.

Dr. Herold's train-the-trainers program results in an innovative resource for courts, mediators, arbitrators, and parenting coordinators. Once armed with the tools of teaching this class, facilitators can offer parents in conflict an in-depth, ten-hour coparenting class that really makes a difference.

Parents who take the coparenting seminar attend each class together and learn effective skills for working together. They are required to do homework and demonstrate communication skills. Research has shown that divorce education works best when it is skill based rather than purely informational.

Coparenting classes offer professionals a new direction and a refreshing alternative to other stressful work in the field of divorce and child custody. Program leaders in California, Utah and Colorado confirm its positive effects. Parents who complete the program experience major inprovements in their working relationships--and major improvements in the lives of their children.

Contact:

Solutions for Families
P.O. Box 3973
San Bernardino, CA 92413
Phone: 909-885-4545

www.solutions4families.com
email:springboardpubs@comcast.net

Dr. Thomas's 2004 edition is the official textbook of the Solutions For Families Coparenting Program in California and other states.

After Divorce: Cooperative Parenting Speeds Recovery from Grief

A driven father in Connecticut demands that his three-year-old child
make 14 cross-country trips from Arizona to visit him in a year.

A down-trodden mother of four teens in Chicago runs off with her new
boyfriend, stranding her children and leaving her ex-husband to
raise them alone.

An angry fourteen-year-old boy in Oregon assaults his father and is
jailed after his mother in Atlanta rejects him for failing in school.

The common element in these sad family stories is that divorce preceded each of them. Trying to cut their losses and regain control of their lives, separated spouses can behave irrationally and desperately, harming the children they love. Though they are rare, the most tragic examples of divorce-triggered trauma can end in suicide, or even murder.

Less dramatic painful incidents occur daily in millions of families with children, largely because of grief. Moms and dads bicker at exchanges of the children, argue about their kids' activities, and embarrass their sons and daughters by leaving each other hateful messages. While not violent or outright abusive, too many parents unintentionally harm their children while trying to diffuse their own frustrations.

Technically just the end of a marriage, divorce affects nearly half of all American families. But the fact that it is so common does nothing to ease the pain of dismantling an intact home.

Consider the following losses caused by separation:

Loss of a lover and companion

Loss of a parenting partner

Loss of the unified family

Loss of mutual friends

Loss of identity as a spouse

Though some men and women rebound reasonably well to these losses, five to ten percent continue in horrendous high conflict and another twenty percent grieve in other damaging ways. These men and women, now separated "coparents" of their children, act out personally, socially, and legally, often clogging court dockets with litigation, hoping to fend off grief by fighting legal battles.

One powerful antidote to the anguish lies right in front of divorced parents who are able to readjust their thinking. The healing process can start immediately with simple recognition of the importance of transforming bad personal relationships into good parental ones. By letting go of blame and accepting the need to learn to work together without living together, parents can stop the waves of grief, which, unheeded, can clash and swell almost daily, for years.

Parents who cling to anger because of their grief seem to enjoy behaving selfishly while rationalizing obvious moves of self-interest which hurt the children. Neutral outsiders who observe such callous actions are often appalled by the lack of sensitivity parents show for their children's feelings. Claiming there is just "no way" to develop a different parenting style with an ex who they see as the source of the problem, fathers and mothers resistant to recovery think it is right to perpetuate hostility.

The art of successful coparenting, like the art of parenting itself, lies in learning to interact with another person in a special, effective way. This time the relationship is with the child's other parent - and the best analogy is that of a business partner relationship. It can take enormous commitment, but salvaging the parental bond by developing respect and empathy for a former spouse can counteract grief and neutralize the sense of loss.

The three important steps below pave the way for building the business coparenting relationship. Instead of dwelling on your own losses:


1. Admit that the other parent is grieving too, and identify that grief to yourself.
2. Put yourself in your ex-spouse's shoes, and imagine how he or she feels.
3. Learn to communicate rationally with your ex, practicing patience and compassion as you relate.

Coparenting education is a very new field, emerging as a cultural response to the disastrous divorce epidemic of the past forty years. Most states now require parents to attend basic classes to learn that grief is a natural response to divorce, but many distraught parents are too emotional to understand or accept mourning as the real culprit. Thus, they continue to compete or battle each other in anger, and children in one out of five divorced families suffer from poor coparenting. One answer is more divorce education for these mothers and fathers, and more promotion of harmony in parental interaction.

The bottom line is that parents and children can be happy again after recovery from grief caused by divorce. When active mourning has been put behind, and when the adults have found balance in how they relate, waves of rage and sadness may still ebb and flow, but the destructive acting out will be over. No longer letting the tow of grief pull them under, healed moms and dads learn to trust each other again, and even celebrate the new coparental relationship. Most importantly, they can relax in their roles as parents, knowing they have given back to their boys and girls the peaceful childhood they deserve.