Co-Parenting Tips to help you fight less and help your kids feel happier.

3 Co-Parenting Tips for Less Stress and Happier Children

These co-parenting tips will make your life easier. Honest.

Co-parenting often proves a nightmarish, combative process, with your children’s health and well-being as collateral damage.

Resentful and embittered divorced parents share inappropriate information with their children, or just outright lie to them about the other parent. Some do it for revenge. Some do it to maintain control over their children, whom they believe are “theirs” more than the other parent’s, and that the ends justify the means.

The real victims, however, are the children. They get deprived of emotional wellness and a chance for a healthy relationship with both parents. Even if sabotaging the parental relationship is successful, and the relationship between the children and the other parent is severed, the relationship with the alienating parent is far from healthy.

So here’s what to do for your kids.

Fathers in Stepfamilies: 3 Do’s and Don’ts

Remarried fathers often struggle with balancing their relationships with their biological children and those with their step children. Fathers feel guilty for spending more time with their step children than with their biological children due to custody arrangements. Biological children get jealous of their stepsiblings for that very reason. Identifying the guilt and working through it is very helpful for both fathers and children.

Here are some dos and don’ts to help you strengthen your relationship with the children.

Inconsistent Parenting in Remarriage

Many men find themselves spending much more time with their stepchildren than with their biological children, simply because of their custody agreements. Fathers see their biological children’s stay with them as visits, rather than “living with them,” so they treat them like VIP guests and set fewer limits and looser behavioral expectations.

These double standards drive a wedge between the couple, confuse the children, and foster resentment all around. Here’s how to handle them.

Tips for Applying Your New Year’s Resolutions

Another year went by. You may feel the anguish of yet more missed opportunities to last year’s resolutions for a more peaceful and fun stepfamily experience. If you do, you are not alone. Many step-families share your pain. You can make a difference in this coming year. Implement these 6 easy tips and you’ll experience a difference in how you connect with your step-family.

Tips for Successfully Transitioning Into the New School Year

Children of divorced parents who go back and forth between two households experience a sense of loss and anxiety each time they transition between the homes. The biological and stepparents may experience similar feelings. As the summer winds down and you and your family are getting ready for the new school year these feelings may […]

Tips for Meaningful Holidays

The Holidays present an unparalleled opportunity for biological and step families alike to strengthen, deepen, and solidify connections between family members. It is the time of year that you may choose to create the space in which you may have the opportunity to work on mending and improving relationships with different family members. While some […]

Tips For Becoming a Proud Stepfamily

It is rare to be proud of being in a stepfamily. Many stepfamilies struggle with inequality between the adults regarding parental rights and responsibilities, and regarding finances and decision-making. Children are also frustrated by inequality in the discipline and love they receive. “I am so embarrassed that I just don’t seem to be the stepmother […]

Tips for Successfully Transitioning Into the New School Year

Slowly transition from the unstructured recreation of summer back into the disciplined routine that the coming school year will demand of you and your children. Stepfamilies may find this adjustment especially challenging because of differing rules and expectations between the households.

The following tips will help you and your children prepare for the new school year.