With many families practicing co-parenting, also known as shared custody, many parents are wondering how they can maintain a family bond when parents live in separate households. Divorced families are plentiful these days. Most children in elementary school are in some sort of shared custody parental situation, while some don’t have two involved parents.
This is just the reality of the world children are living in.
This doesn’t mean an end to family bonding.
There are ways you can work together as divorced parents to maintain a family bond.
We’re going to dig into this topic today with some tips to help you maintain, strengthen, and make family bonding a priority even while you’re divorced.
How Divorced Family Can Maintain Family Bond
Host Weekly Meetings
Make good use of technology with weekly virtual meetings with the co-parent and your children. This will be a time where older kids can communicate about their week’s events, and parents can communicate as they would while living together. This will help a divorced family maintain their family bond in a virtual setting that encourages children to work with both parents during times of happiness, stress, and other situations children deal with during their childhood years.
Blended Family Game Night
This is particularly difficult if co-parents had a negative divorce situation, but some families have worked over the years to get to a point where they can tolerate each other for the children’s sake. If your divorced family is one where you can get along for the sake of the children, then we suggest you try to host a blended family game night. Once per month schedule a time for your co-parent and their significant other, the children, and you with your significant other meet to play games together.
Keep Open Communication
Lastly, it’s important to find creative ways to keep communication open with your co-parent. While you and your ex-spouse may not see eye to eye on everything, you both will need to find a way to remain respectful surrounding decisions and communication about your children. If you can’t speak directly about sensitive or important topics, then consider using email, chat, or voice texts to keep open communication. Always allow time for your co-parent to process before expected an immediate reply.
Create New Traditions
Perhaps the family will not be gathering for holidays as a full family unit, but you can still work to make holidays a time for family bonding after divorce. Find new traditions that will allow both parents a chance to partake in some holiday festivities with the children. Most divorced parents already have a strict schedule created with the court system, but you can work to adjust it to morph into a new holiday experience that gives both parents a chance to create new traditions with the children.
Divorce ends a united family with mom and dad under the same roof with their children. Divorce doesn’t end the parent and child bond or concept of family. Divorced family members must always remember that the children need to come first, even when divorced parents marry again. When you work to maintain a family bond after divorce, you’ll find your children grow up well-rounded, optimistic, and more emotionally intelligent than children who didn’t have this opportunity to maintain a family bond after divorce.