New Year, New Chapter: Essential Tips for Navigating Divorce and Custody in 2025
As we move into 2025, many focus on resolutions, fresh starts, and personal growth. For some, this includes working to create a healthy relationship for their family, even when the parents are divorced. Here's some help to jump into this new year with strategies that work for parents and children. Examine your current parenting plan to ensure it meets your family’s needs. If you don't have a plan, work with a professional with child custody experience to develop one tailored to your family’s needs. (Cookie-cutter plans often create more problems than they solve!) If you already have a parenting plan, evaluate whether it still works.
Are you following the parenting plan?
Does the plan set reasonable and reliable expectations?
If your family has outgrown the plan, it can often be modified through mediation to provide a critical roadmap for parents to navigate responsibilities and expectations. This helps to prevent conflict and promote healthier relationships within the family.
New Year’s Resolutions for Co-Parents
Here are a few areas parents may want to consider as we enter the new year:
1. Improve Communication with the Other Parent
If you rely primarily on text messages or brief emails to communicate—Pause.
Consider convening an in-person meeting with the other parent without the children present. Evaluate how your current communication style benefits or harms your relationship and promote healthy relationships between both parents and children. Work together to create a strategy for better communication moving forward. We often include monthly or quarterly in-person meetings between parents to check how things are going when they are working to ensure their children thrive in the co-parenting relationships.
2. Review your Budgets and Finances
It’s a great idea to review both family budgets annually and examine precisely how the children’s financial needs are being met. This might include addressing the following questions.
Meeting with the other parent to discuss potential needs of the children and parents can improve the experience of co-parenting.
What financial goals are you setting for your children and family?
Do you have a fair system for dividing costs for extracurricular activities?
Does your parenting plan effectively address managing uncovered medical expenses, such as dental, optical, or co-pays?
Ensure child support calculations are up-to-date and consistent with state guidelines and court orders. Many of these provisions can be modified in mediation and adopted by the court as formal resolutions.
3. Develop a Plan to Resolve Inevitable Conflicts
Review your parenting plan to ensure it includes mediation as a conflict resolution method. If it does not, consider adding it. Mediation often provides faster, more sustainable, and less expensive solutions. Don’t hesitate to go to mediation early in a dispute—waiting too long can worsen matters. A stitch in time saves nine! Other conflict resolution methods, such as appointing a child specialist to help resolve conflicts, can help avoid protracted court disputes.
4. Ensure Stability and Emotional Security for Your Children
When children live between two households, differences in household rules and routines can cause stress. Work on being as consistent as possible with your parenting approaches.
Include house rules in your parenting plan and strive for consistency.
Discuss safety measures such as the use of alcohol and the storage of firearms to ensure children feel secure in both homes.
Review these provisions monthly or quarterly to ensure your parenting approaches are as consistent as you want for them to be.
If these provisions are not in a current parenting plan, consider adding them. Facilitating these conversations with a neutral professional often leads to more productive and detailed agreements tailored to your family’s needs.
The new year is a good time to review how expenses are shared and to consider modification of the parenting plan.
5. Take Care of Yourself
Parents often get so involved in meeting their children’s needs that they neglect their own. This can ultimately impact the children. Consider finding ways to improve your well-being through therapy, journaling, exercise, or another self-care routine. It may feel impossible to prioritize yourself, but if close friends, family members, or employers can help lighten your load, let them!
Taking the Next Step!
What steps are you taking this year to make co-parenting or navigating divorce easier? How can we help? We offer free consultations, so if any of these ideas resonate with you, schedule a meeting with us to discuss how to improve your co-parenting in 2025. Schedule a free meeting online now!