Flexible exes
Let shared custody evolve as kids grow: expert,
For Jessica Terry, who is divorced from the father of her first three children, custody arrangements change as the kids grow up.
“My oldest, who is almost 13, is getting to an age where she doesn’t want to go to her dad’s every weekend because she wants to be with her friends,” the Mississauga mom says. “There’s been a lot of compromising on both sides.”
And that’s exactly the co-operative spirit that Dr. Robert Emery, a psychologist and internationally recognized expert on the subject, wants to see divorced parents bring to raising their kids after a relationship ends.
His newest book, Two Homes, One Childhood: A Parenting Plan to Last a Lifetime, out in August, implores parents to adapt their parenting plans to their kids’ shifting needs.
“Parents who arrive at an agreement in traditional ways — through lawyers, through courts — once you finally get to a schedule, people can just be locked into it because they don’t want to go through it all again,” says Emery, a professor and researcher at the University of Virginia who also does divorce mediation.
But if you arrive at it in a more flexible and fluid way, through mediation or at your kitchen table, you’re more likely to achieve a schedule that will adapt over time, he says.
And that’s important because children have far different needs in infancy than they do in toddlerhood, their early school years and into adolescence.
Two Homes, One Childhood builds upon the ideas in Emery’s first book, The Truth About Children and Divorce, but with more practical details on developing parenting plans and schedules in age-appropriate ways.
It can be particularly challenging to figure out how to parent between two houses when one child is still a baby, for example, especially since a breastfeeding relationship likely tethers the child to one parent.
“But if from the outset you think that your parenting plan is going to grow and change with your 6month-old, that takes a lot of pressure off. You’re not afraid that whatever you negotiate with your 6month-old right now, that’s going to be the same when he’s 3, and when he’s 6 and when he’s 16.”
Instead, a plan could allow for more time when the child is 9 months old, more again when he’s 12 months old, quite a bit more when he’s 18 months old and a whole lot more when he’s 3, Emery said.
While her kids were well past the baby and toddler years at the time she separated from her former husband, Kimberley Healey-Fernandez, a Toronto mom of three, couldn’t stand the idea of being locked into a set schedule.
“In our separation papers, we left the parenting plan fairly vague so we could shift and flow with the needs of the kids. It’s primarily set so neither parent has to be away from the kids for more than three days at a time unless a vacation is scheduled,” says Healy-Fernandez, who stayed in the matrimonial home close to the school. Though their agreement sets out that the kids are with her approximately 60 per cent of the time, she and her ex keep it loose.
“If the kids have events or school work that are super important, they can choose to stay with me. It was important to both of us not to have a strict and rigid arrangement,” she says. “I didn’t want a piece of paper dictating when I could and couldn’t see my children.”
“Parents who arrive at an agreement in traditional ways . . . can just be locked into it because they don’t want to go through it all again.” DR. ROBERT EMERY PSYCHOLOGIST AND AUTHOR