Thank you for joining me. My name is LaSheena Williams, and I am a Maryland family law attorney. My firm helps our clients take control of out-of-control domestic situations. Today we will be discussing peaceful parenting time transition tips.
Open Communication and Flexibility
It’s important to know that when managing parenting time transitions that you and your co-parent have open communication and that you’re both flexible when it comes to things that may be rare but last-minute changes to the schedule. You want to make sure that you and your co-parent get communicate enough and that the dialogue is open enough that you can let them know that, “oh I have this late thing for work” or “they changed my schedule and now I can’t get there until 6:30” or “I hit the beltway and there was an accident and I might be an hour and a half late picking our child up.” It’s important that you are able and comfortable with your co-parent to discuss these things so that you can both work together and make these changes.
Transition Locations: Share the Responsibility
When picking a transition location, it’s very important that you share the responsibility for the transitions. What does that mean? That means if you and your co-parent, if you live in Prince George’s County and your co-parent lives in DC it may make more sense for you to pick a middle ground location that’s based on average traffic time or travel time instead of distance or it may make more sense if the person picking up the child goes to the co-parents house to get the child and the co-parent comes and picks the child up from the other parent’s home that way both parents aren’t always in traffic both parents aren’t always kind of on the Move in sharing the burden of travel time and gas expense.
Don’t Pass Information Between Children
To ensure that your parenting time transitions are smooth, it’s better that you don’t pass information between your children. If there’s any information that needs to be transferred between the parents, it needs to be discussed through the parents and even if it’s a “oh there’s a parent-teacher conference” or “why didn’t you pack Susie’s lunch,” it’s very important that you not talk through your children at all. You need to be able to talk to each other to avoid your children essentially being in the middle. It makes sure that the information isn’t altered or changed, it makes sure that everybody knows what’s going on and that your child can remain a child instead of having any say or knowledge about what the parents are making decisions about.
Don’t Talk Negatively About Your Co-parent Around and to Your Children
To make sure that your transition times continue or are going smoothly you must not talk negatively about your co-parent around or to your children. It will undoubtedly get back to your co-parent and that will cause problems, and that will cause a breakdown in communication, and it will make the transitions go less smoothly because you may decide that you don’t want to be as flexible since they’ve said these terrible things. So, don’t talk negatively about your co-parents around your children.
If you have any questions to assist in parenting time transitions or other issues related to your custody matter, contact the Law Office of LaSheena M. Williams at (301) 778 – 9950 or leave an online request for a consultation.
