Positive Shared Parenting

Positive shared parenting is working together with your partner parent in order to create a loving and supportive environment for your children even though you live in separate households. Regardless of the issues between yourself and your child’s mother or father, you want to do what’s best for your kids. This can often be very difficult when your child is split between two homes that can have different rules and beliefs, which contradict each other. The process of creating an environment that’s healthy for your children starts with you and the other parent sitting down and agreeing on what will work best.

There are many guidelines to help you get started in this process. First you need to sit and discuss with the other parent what each other’s ideal parenting situation is. This will greatly depend on the age and needs of your child. This will give you a general outline on what each of you is looking for. This is a good point to start finding points of disagreement that can be settled ahead of time rather than later on when things become problems. This is also a good place to outline rules that will exist in each household. These should be consistent so your child doesn’t have any sense of unfairness from household to household. If there are small disagreements, especially on the stringency of a rule, this may be workable.

After this discuss how best to implement these parenting ideas. This will greatly depend upon the level of involvement in terms of time spent each parent will have. Many times, a child will live exclusively with one of their parents and only visit the other. This is common in order to simplify school schedules and other elements of your child’s life especially for those doing online jobs work from home. Even if this is the case, a child should still treat each household as if it was their home. So rules should still be in place as well as responsibilities expected from the child.

Regularly discuss your child’s development with your partner. This is important to keep an eye on their health and ensure that they have a supportive experience in both homes. With these basics in place, you can then start to get a sense of how best to enable your children and support their development. As they grow older, their interests should be encouraged and their freedom expanded, this too should be a shared discussion for both parents involved.