Services
Drawing on Robin Sax’s background as both lawyer and therapist, Dear Co-Parent is here to help as your:
Custody Coach
Co-Parent Coach
Parenting Plan Coordinator
Mediator
Legal Ghostwriter
Your custody coach:
Divorce is not just about documents and legalities. Divorce is about real people and real children.
When people divorce or separate, many agreements and decisions need to be made. These can be about time sharing, education, healthcare, religious observances, mental health treatment, and whatever else might come up. Dear Co-Parent helps resolve disputes and disagreements about parenting and custody with a sensitive therapeutic approach combined with the knowledge of the law.
How you and your ex handle divorce and co-parenting will be the single biggest determinant of how your kids will be impacted. Don’t do it alone!
Dear Co-Parent can assist with:
Time share schedules for children
Custody exchange structure
Holiday and vacation time
Methods for co-parent communication and response expectations
Working with unconventional work schedules and places
Creating plans based on children’s age and developmental stage
Role of step-parents and new partners and when to introduce
Your Co-Parent Coach:
Divorce brings about a cycle of emotions. When buttons get pushed, sometimes our worst selves appear and wreak havoc on our kids’ mental health, our relationships, and our own sanity. We act on impulse and assume the worst-case scenario, and have other racing —usually negative —thoughts.
Divorce coaching with Dear Co-parent leans on the skills of emotional regulation to activate your thinking mind.
The coaching involves psychoeducation, developmentally appropriate parenting strategies, collaborating, exploring options, mediating, educating, and receiving ongoing support for your changing family.
Effective coaching sets a foundation for successful transitions, which can lead to healthy and thriving children, teens, and adults alike.
Dear Co-Parent’s coaching can be done with one parent or both parents, stepparents, and new partners.
The Coaching Includes:
Creating a pre-divorce strategy. Who will move where? When do we tell the kids? How do we create a unified message?
Developing a residential schedule and parenting plan and making agreements that can be used in preparation for a legal parenting plan.
Identifying the issues that can be mediated and resolved without court or lawyer intervention.
How to create a two-home family where both home are a safe and secure base.
Developing practices and protocols that work to strengthen co-parenting.
Resolving disputes and building decision-making skills.
Your parenting plan coordinator (PPC):
A PPC can bring order and calm to your life. PPCs work with co-parents as neutral parties to help you make decisions, reduce conflict, and keep the focus on your child’s best interests.
Dear Co-Parent takes a child-focused and developmentally appropriate approach to help separated, divorced, and divorcing parents put the needs of the child first, thus reducing the negative impacts of divorce and custody disputes.
PPCs help settle issues of parenting time/scheduling, temporary changes like vacations and holidays, education, daycare, healthcare management, communication between parents, etc.
The PPC seeks to forge collaborative agreements, but will make decisions when there is an impasse.
Some decisions will be oral if time is of the essence - later to be memorialized in writing - and most decisions will be written. For smaller and/or more urgent issues, the PPC will use phone discussions and email. The PPC typically asks parents to copy the PPC on their written communication so the PPC can track issues efficiently, should the PPC need to become involved or assist in parent communication styles.
As a PPC, Dear Co-Parent supports parents, helps make informed decisions while shielding the child from conflict, improving the co-parent relationship, teaching effective communication skills, and to put the needs of the children first.
The PPC Process:
Parents agree (stipulate) to a PPC or a court orders one.
The parties determine the goals and scope of PPC decisions and what issues to focus on.
PPC will have joint or separate meetings with the parents to understand their positions, thoughts, and beliefs.
PPC will encourage parents to try to work through an issue first.
PPC will explore differences in opinions and get thoughts from each party after they have discussed with the other parent.
PPC may ask for releases to talk to collateral people and experts (i.e. children’s school, doctors, etc.).
PPC will make decisions.
If parties are unhappy with decisions, party can seek judicial (court) intervention.
Your mediator:
Dear Co-Parent provides child custody mediation.
This allows parents to resolve their disagreements or memorialize their agreements absent a parenting plan. This approach allows children’s voices to be heard and taken into account, whereas they may not be heard in court.
Through this voluntary process, Dear Co-Parent can help settle your case without adversarial and expensive litigation and reduces the negative impacts of divorce on children.
Studies show:
When parents participate in mediation, they are likely to reach resolution
Those who mediate report better co-parent communication than those who do not
Mediation is described to be the least intrusive intervention in regard to divorce and custody settlement
Children exposed to high conflict are more likely to be affected negatively in all areas of their life—physically, academically, socially, mentally, emotionally
Your legal ghostwriter:
Are you tired of feeling like a bomb just went off in your inbox every time you see your ex’s name pop up on your phone?
Do you want to avoid throwing those anger grenades back at your ex?
Dear Co-Parent is here to help you craft emails and other forms of communication to your ex or fellow co-parent that can be used in court.
Disengage from the chaos of your ex/co-parent and gain a sense of relief and confidence knowing that Dear Co-Parent will help make for effective communication.
As a ghostwriter, Dear Co-Parent can:
Help you with your legal case.
Anything you say to your ex/co-parent can be used against you in court, so let someone who is well-versed in legal communications evaluate and execute these important exchanges through the lens of how the courts would interpret them.
Help you decrease your own anger and stress.
Knowing that Dear Co-Parent is handling your communication with your ex/co-parent will save you stress, anger, and emotional degradation.
Model appropriate behavior to both you AND your ex/ co-parent.
Dear Co-Parent coaches you through how to deal with an adversarial parent. This will be in the best interest of your child’s development. It will also advance the parenting skills of both you and your co-parent.