This is a collaborative post: Deciding to coparent your children when your relationship fails can be a difficult decision but one that is often best for the sake of your children. However, you do need to make sure that you go about this task in the right way. A failure to coparent can mean that you just end up fighting more with relationships turning sour. Your children deserve to have both their parents, but you need to be the adults and work to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Here are some of the important things to agree on when coparenting.
Communication
When you are coparenting with a former partner, everything can fall apart if you are not willing to communicate with each other. You need to make sure that you are open and honest with each other about many different things. Trying to one-up each other in a battle for your children’s affections is never going to end well.
This coparenting resource can offer some tips to help you communicate and cooperate more effectively. Remember that this will be for the benefit of your children, so you need to make sure that you are both prepared to work towards bringing up your children together.
Living Situation
Where are your children going to live? This is going to be one of the most important things that you need to consider, so you have to make sure that you get it established as soon as possible. There are several different situations and scenarios that you might want to consider. For example, many people like to go weekend about. Their children are with one parent one weekend, and the other for the next. This might seem disruptive, but it can work well if handled correctly.
Another option is for the children to permanently live with one parent but have regular contact with the other. They might go over to stay with their other parent regularly, but they live with just one for the majority of the time.
Holidays
Christmas is a time for family, so you might understandably want your children with you. However, you need to consider that your partner might want your children with them as well. The best way to handle Christmas can be to do it turn about. Your children will spend one Christmas Day with you but will go to their other parents’ next year. On the years that you don’t have them, you can still celebrate a mini-Christmas together but it won’t be on the 25th of December.
Likewise, you need to consider summer holidays. You might both want to take your children away on holiday so you need to plan well to avoid the holidays overlapping. Will going away on holiday also affect the amount of time that your children get to spend with their other parent? If so, you need to make sure that you have a plan in place to address this unbalance.
Money
No one particularly enjoys discussing finances, but it is important that you do so when your children are involved. If you equally split time between you and your partner when it comes to where your children stay, you might pay roughly equal amounts in terms of food and other basic expenses that can occur when raising a child.
However, there are lots of extras that you have to consider. Things like school uniforms, extracurricular activities and hobbies that your child has will all have their own costs. You need to decide how you and your child’s parent will split these costs whenever they arise.
Birthdays
Finally, you need to discuss how you are going to approach your children’s birthdays. Some coparents prefer to do things how they do Christmas, essentially giving their children two birthdays to celebrate.
If you have a good relationship with your partner, you might decide to host the birthday party together. When your child wants a big party with all of their friends, agreeing to host it together and split costs can be the best way to handle it. Birthdays should be a special time in your children’s lives, so focus on them. Your first goal should be to make a memorable day for them to enjoy, and successful coparents will be able to do this.
If you want to successfully coparent with a former partner, it is going to take work. You need to make sure that you are willing to work together for the benefit of your child. If you are able to get communication going properly, you should still be able to bring your child up well. Even if there is no longer a romantic connection between the two of you, there is no reason why you cannot form a good bond that will help you both be better parents to your children.