Books can help children deal with divorce

Think of how stressful a divorce is for an adult; how will we divide our assets/debts, how we will determine custody and parenting time, will we have to move, will the kids change schools, how will we make ends meet, will my spouse remarry, will a new spouse have children, how will the new children fit in with my children?

Imagine all these concerns from the perspective of a child.  It can and is usually overwhelming.  There are many great books on the market that can help your child ease the fears and better understand what a divorce might mean for them. 

Parents often get caught up in what is happening to them, which is overwhelming, and forget that are children have the same concerns.  Many times children don't like to address their concerns with their parents.  These unanswered questions can grow into huge stressors for children.  Books can often be the ice breaker or the catalyst for conversation.  Books can be a great way to start on the path to healing after the break up.

Below is a small list from hundreds of great books.  Spend some time looking for books that will fit the age range of your children and the needs or concerns specific to them.  You will find that the books will help, even the youngest children, to feel more comfortable talking about their concerns. 

It's Not Your Fault, KoKo Bear:  A read together book for parents and young children, by:  Vicki Lansky.

Dinosaurs Divorce, by Laurene Krasny Brown.

I Don's Want to Talk about it, by Jeanie Franz Ransom.

Mama and Daddy Bear's Divorce, by Cornelia Spelman.

Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way, by M. Gary Nueman.

Other titles:  The Divorce Express, How it Feels When Parents Divorce, Talking about divorce and Separation, How to Get it Together When Your Parents are Coming Apart, Divorced but Still My Parents, Dont' Fall Apart on Saturdays, What Children Need to Know When Parents Get Divorced, and My Family is Changing.

Our attorneys recognize the impact of divorce on your children.  They help families navigate their way though this tough time based upon their years of family law experience.

Call Jayne Dykema or Lori Zellers today.

dykemalaw.com  616-363-6611

Divorce and Mediation

Divorce Mediation Myths:

Myth #1: Mediation allows one spouse to dominate another.

Fact: An experienced mediator is always aware of the power balance between the spouses and utilizes many specific techniques to correct any imbalance. If one spouse persists in dominating behavior, the mediator will call a stop to the mediation rather than allowing it to continue. Spouses should let their mediator know if there is an issue with control in the marriage.  This will allow the mediator to watch for any power imbalances and stop them before they detract from the mediation process.

Myth: Mediation is more of a hassle than hiring a lawyer to handle the divorce.

Fact:Mediation can significantly reduce the "hassles" of hiring a lawyer and proceeding to court on a divorce matter.  Mediation can generally be concluded in a few sessions, if not less, whereas a court case can drag on for months and years, thus making it more of a hassle and is significantly more expensive. 

Myth: Mediation makes the divorce take longer.

Fact: In almost all cases, mediation takes less time than litigating a divorce. Even if the parties settle out of court, by the time that happens, mediation would be done and over.  With mediation, there are no court mandated dates, hearings, and investigations. Mediation allows you to settle your case and move on with your life. 

Myth: You don't get to have a lawyer represent you in mediation.

Fact:Mediators welcome parties who have hired attorneys.  Experienced divorce and family law attorneys recognize the benefits and value of mediation as a quicker and more amicable form of resolving martial splits.  Lawyers can play an important roll during mediation.  They assist their clients in the negotiations, they ofter can help design settlement agreements, they advise their clients of their legal rights, and they can prepare the necessary paperwork that is filed with the court.  Generally, when you hire a lawyer to represent you at mediation, the lawyers charge a reasonable hourly rate and there is no need for a large retainer.  The client only pays for the amount of representation that is needed for the arbitration and paperwork.  This eliminates the need for paying a lawyer to go to court, negotiate with the opposing attorney, conduct hearings, come up with proposed settlements for the opposing side to review, argue in court, and the list goes on and on...

Myth: All divorce lawyers understand and support mediation.

Fact:Even though mediation is fast becoming the preferred method of handling divorces, not all attorneys have had experience in this area.  Mediation is a non-adversarial approach to divorce, contrary to divorce litigation for the past hundreds of years.  You will find that some lawyers believe mediation should not be used to obtain a divorce.  These attorneys would argue that spouses should use lawyers and go through the court system.  As divorce lawyers understand mediation and its benefits for their clients, benefits for continuing a positive familial relationship for children, cost effectiveness, and time effectiveness.

Myth: In mediation, the mediator decides what's fair.

Fact: The mediator is not a judge or an arbitrator. A mediator has no power to make decisions for the divorcing spouses. It is the mediator's job to work with the spouses to help them negotiate an agreement that each of them considers fair enough to accept.

MEDIATION, A BETTER CHOICE, is a service provided by Dykema Law Offices, West Michigan's premier family law firm.  Our family law attorneys have over 20 years in family law experience and are trained and certified family law mediators. 

Contact Jayne Dykema or Lori Zellers today.  jad.dykema@tds.net or ljz.dykema@tds.net

Divorce mediation really works

Divorce Mediation

 

Divorce mediation still feels like a new idea in some parts of the country, but it's increasingly well-known and widely accepted. Mediation means different things to different people. In the form I recommend, you and your spouse would sit down in the same room with each other and with a neutral mediator. With the mediator's help, you would work through all the issues you need to resolve so the two of you can get through your divorce.

 

Although there certainly are several different styles of mediation, there are several things you can depend on no matter what style your mediator uses. Mediation is flexible and confidential. It gives you and your spouse a way to settle the conflict between you, which is natural and inevitable, in a way that helps you to work together as parents after your divorce.

The mediator remains neutral between the husband and the wife. That means the mediator can't give advice to either party, and also can't act as a lawyer for either party.

What the mediator can do, though, is to point out in open session to both spouses things that each of them should be aware of about what they're trying to accomplish. That open and free exchange of information frees up both spouses to negotiate with each other in confidence. Because both spouses are working with the same base of information, it usually takes far less time to negotiate a resolution that makes sense to both spouses. 

You're welcome to bring your lawyer to mediation if you want to, or you can use your lawyer as an advisor between sessions. Don't let your lawyer make you feel that you must pay him or her to be with you during mediation. That's strictly up to you.

Mediation is voluntary. It continues only for so long as all three of you - you, your spouse, and the mediator -- want it to. Your mediator has to have a good reason to withdraw. You or your spouse can withdraw from mediation at any time, for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all.

People often ask, "Does mediation really work?" In a word, yes. We know from years of research that when you compare couples who have mediated their divorce with couples who go through an adversarial divorce, mediating couples are more likely to be satisfied with the process and the results, likely to take less time and spend less money, and are less likely to go back to court later to fight about something.

The main advantage of mediation is that it keeps you and your spouse in control of your own divorce. That can make all the difference in your recovering from your divorce and moving on with your life. Mediation allows the two of you to get through your divorce with less conflict than you would experience in an adversarial divorce. Because mediation is all about working with shared knowledge, mediation also often allows you and your spouse to work together to lower your tax bill . . . and that can often translate to more money for you.

Divorce and the Environment

As if divorce wasn't full of guilt and pain, now you have to worry about....  

A really inconvenient truth: Divorce is not green

Published: Dec. 03, 2007 E-mail Editor ShareThis

EAST LANSING, Mich. - The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment.  

A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. The findings of Jianguo "Jack" Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University are published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.

"Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households," Liu said. "The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere."

Liu and his research assistant Yu started with the obvious - that divorce rates across the globe are on the rise. Housing units, even if they now have few people in them, require resources to construct them and take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. A refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two.

When they calculated the cost in terms of increased utilities and unused housing space per capita, they discovered that divorce tosses out economy of scale. Among the findings:

• In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.
  
• In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.
  
• The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.
  
• The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

To track what happens when divorced people returned to married life, the study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results: The environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households.

Liu, a University Distinguished Professor of fisheries and wildlife and Rachel Carson Chair in Ecological Sustainability at MSU's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, has spent more than two decades integrating ecology with social sciences to understand the complex interrelationships between nature and humans and how those interactions affect the environment and biodiversity. Liu and Yu began to discuss this research project when Yu was a high school student.

This new work also acknowledges that divorce is not the only lifestyle trend changing family living structures - the demise of multigenerational households and people remaining single longer are examples.

"People's first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple," Liu said. "But a lot of things become simple after research is done. Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships. People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered."

The research, Liu said, shows that environmental policy is more complex than one single solution. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy, Liu said.

"Solutions are beyond a single idea," Liu said. "Consider the production of biofuel. Biofuel is made from plants, which also require water and space. We're showing divorce has significant competition for that water and space. On the other hand, more divorce demands more energy. This creates a challenging dilemma and requires more creative solutions."

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.

A copy of the paper can be downloaded from http://www.pnas.org/  or www.csis.msu.edu/research.htm#publications.

Related Links

• PNAS Study

• PNAS Study

Divorce Mediation: Lose the custody mentality

 Mediation:  A Better Choice

A recent article in the Michigan Family Law Journal(Vol. 40 No. $ April 2010) by Carole Chiamp discusses the benefits of divorce mediation as it relates to the issues of custody and parenting time.  Her article relies on the wisdom found in a book titled, Divorce and Family Mediation,by Folberg, Milne & Salem. 

The article points out that custody disputes have a contest mentality.  There is a relentless need to evaluate who is the "better parent".  We question; who should be in charge?  We evaluate each parent's past behavior in light of a set of standards call the "best interest of the child test".  The court then applies the test to the past behavior of the parents. 

The above fails for three reasons, according to the article.  First, it assumes that people cannot and will not change.  Second, it assumes that circumstances are static and will never change.  Third, it ignores the high cost of "the contest".  The cost of evaluating past conduct and placing a score on that conduct is always exponentially more expensive than building a parenting plan in a mediation setting.

Most importantly, is the plain and simple fact that the children always get caught up in the contest.  The children are always the losers in the contest.  They lose a united front of two parents working together for them.  They lose the example of showing respect by both their parents.  They lose from the loss of financial resources spent on the contest (litigation, arbitration, motions, evaluations......).  They lose a feeling of security.  Often they lose as they are placed in the middle of the game.

 What to do?  First, we need to change the mindset of custody and parenting time determination.  The article suggests we need to "change the game".  Parents need to come to the table with the mindset that no one is trying to steal the child from them.  No one is trying to be "in charge" of the other or be the "owner".  Both parents need to work together to put a plan in place for the best interest of the child.

Let's stop talking custody and start talking parenting.  When we talk parenting, we have made the first step towards working together.

Dykema Law and Mediation: A better choice

Your first step towards parenting.  Take this step for the sake of your child.  Contact us today.

Divorce and Child Custody: How do Courts Decide?

 

 When a couple files for divorce, how does the court decide who will have custody of the minor children? 

When evaluating child custody, Michigan courts are required to evaluate the "best interest" factors, a series of considerations which are meant to help the court determine the most appropriate custodial environment for a child. Those factors include:

(a) The love, affection, and other emotional ties existing between the parties involved and the child.

(b) The capacity and disposition of the parties involved to give the child love, affection, and guidance and to continue the education and raising of the child in his or her religion or creed, if any.

(c) The capacity and disposition of the parties involved to provide the child with food, clothing, medical care or other remedial care recognized and permitted under the laws of this state in place of medical care, and other material needs.

(d) The length of time the child has lived in a stable, satisfactory environment, and the desirability of maintaining continuity.

(e) The permanence, as a family unit, of the existing or proposed custodial home or homes.

(f) The moral fitness of the parties involved.

(g) The mental and physical health of the parties involved.

(h) The home, school, and community record of the child.

(i) The reasonable preference of the child, if the court considers the child to be of sufficient age to express preference.

(j) The willingness and ability of each of the parties to facilitate and encourage a close and continuing parent-child relationship between the child and the other parent or the child and the parents.

(k) Domestic violence, regardless of whether the violence was directed against or witnessed by the child.

(l) Any other factor considered by the court to be relevant to a particular child custody dispute.

Please note that, while a court will make specific findings under each "best interest" factor when rendering a custody decision, the court's findings are not tallied up like a baseball score. It may be that one party "wins" under most of the factors, but that custody is awarded to the other party on the basis of a factor the trial court considers to be more important under the circumstances. For example, a judge may be sufficiently concerned about a parent who appears to wish to alienate the child from the other parent, that custody will be awarded to the other parent under a strong "factor j" finding, despite the many good qualities of the first parent. Similarly, "factor b" and "factor c" findings may be given considerable weight by a court, if a parent appears unwilling or unable to provide appropriate guidance or support.

The issue of "morality" relates to the effect of the parent's moral choices on the children. It is not intended to include an evaluation of a parent's character outside of the context of the best interests of the children, and the ability of the parent to provide appropriate moral guidance to the children. A parent's involvement in a new romantic relationship following divorce or separation is not the type of "moral conduct" which would ordinarily concern a court.

Contact West Michigan's experienced divorce and custody attorneys at Dykema Law Offices, P.C.

616 363 6611

dykemalaw@aol.com