Five simple mindfulness practices that you can employ today to shift from high-conflict to Enlightened CoParenting:

1. Remain attuned to subtle changes in your children’s behavior.

Responding to a highly emotional child with patience is much easier to do when a child is not completely overwhelmed by what is bothering them.

By noticing subtle changes in your child’s behavior you gain the opportunity to address the challenges your child is experiencing before those challenges become overwhelming to them. 

When problems feel approachable to children and approachable to us we are better situated to solve them with less anxiety along the way.

2.Take the time and make space for learning how your child is perceiving the many changes that separation and divorce brings. 

Doing so builds our empathy muscle.

Even if you are facing the lengthy to-do list your lawyer gave you, trying to translate  financial information, or engaging confronting other legal...

As a parent who is thinking about divorce, going through divorce, or divorced, you have more than likely experienced concern, fear, and anxiety about how your children will be impacted by divorce. 

You want to continue providing your children with a healthy and happy childhood and to give them the tools to build resilience. But how, amidst the lifequake that is divorce?

Enlightened Coparenting is a coparenting journey to improve your coparenting relationship, deepen your relationship with your children, and to reconnect with your self and engage in self care. 

All 3 relationships, coparent to coparent, parent to child, and parent to self, are important in Enlightened CoParenting, as all 3 are essential to healthy coparenting.

Enlightened CoParenting fits perfectly into every different type of family. For all families, divorce has simultaneous effects on every area of family members' lives. This is the source for the intense stress, uncertainty, anger,...

One circumstance that entrenches co-parents in high-conflict is when a parent has acute anxiety over the safety of their children while they are at the other coparent’s home. Many of the things I suggest relate to helping  coparents minimize uncertainty and worry.

I encourage coparents to specifically agree in writing on safety measures inside each of their homes. I do so not just to maximize the children’s safety but also to minimize conflict between parents. Safety measures should include protections to both the child’s physical and emotional health.

An example from my client Marlene. 

Marlene didn’t sleep at night when her kids stayed at their other parent’s house.  Her eight year old had mentioned that the smoke detector was beeping and that her dad took it down and threw it away. 

 Two things. Marlene was so immediately enraged and frightened that she did not stop to think about whether her child may have misunderstood...

I have been a divorce coach and family psychologist for over a decade.  Before that, I was a divorce lawyer. I have also gone through divorce myself.  As such, I have had a rather intimate view of what divorce entails. 

While I knew many of the effects and challenges of divorce and single parenting before I divorced, being divorced made these experiences real in a way that changed what they meant for me and brought to life many aspects that I could not have known as a divorce lawyer.

The divorce terrain is tumultuous. Knowledge of the divorce process is not enough to guide a client through divorce.  To guide someone through divorce, one must have empathy and creativity as well as being non-judgemental.  I prepare my clients both for what typically occurs and for some heart-pounding surprises. I also prepare them for the task of solving problems in new ways, leaving them with a valuable skill that they will utilize in many different contexts over their...

“We aren’t married anymore, why are we having the same arguments we had when we were married?”

One of the hardest tasks for separated parents is to redefine their relationship and to create new, more positive, communication patterns. Enlightened coparenting makes, what seems impossible, intuitive.

         Katherine and Niko have 2 young children, are recently divorced, trying to coparent, and need to learn how to stop fighting about parenting.  Their arguments had escalated when they came to see me for coparenting coaching. Over the course of 3 sessions we worked together through the 3 steps to communicate better as coparents.

The Story of Katherine and Niko

         Katherine and Niko had been together for 15 years and married for the last 12 years.  They have a 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter. The previous year, Katherine decided that she no longer wanted to be...

Enlightened Coparenting is a child centered, family centered, developmentally optimal coparenting approach. The model aims to improve the relationship between coparents, to deepen the relationship between parents and children, and to help parents begin the process of healing and improving their relationships with them selves. Adopting the enlightened coparenting method is meant to take place, when possible, before, during, and after divorce in order to increase the quality of life for your children and for you.

The Enlightened CoParenting Model is a model that takes into account that parents went into their marriage believing it would last forever.  They had children and made a commitment to offering them a healthy family in which to grow and flourish. The model is a non-judgmental effort to enable families to emerge from divorce happy and whole. Life and relationships are challenging.  Many unforeseen circumstances may arise to erode the couple relationship.  When...