Divorce, the Holidays & the Pandemic: Why Collaborative Divorce Can Be Particularly Helpful
In normal circumstances, separating or divorcing families face new and daunting challenges during the holidays. The pandemic makes these situations even more complicated, but last year taught us a few strategies to make the season a little less difficult for coparenting and to keep things civil under such added stress.
The Collaborative Divorce process inherently includes planning that can help families, children and the parents who may be alone effectively cope with the holiday season. CCDG’s Collaborative Divorce professionals explain some of the benefits.
- CCDG Attorney Allenston M. Sheridan Jr.: Under normal circumstances, parents should have time with their children. This is especially true during the holidays. This time can be difficult for both the parents and the children involved in a divorce, no matter what the circumstances are. The Collaborative Divorce process can help the make co-parenting easier to navigate during the holidays and is known to create creative ways for families to cope, like coming up with new traditions and finding different ways to celebrate this time of the year in healthy and meaningful ways.
- Psychologist Bruce Freedman, Ph.D.: Collaborative Divorce allows a father and mother to sit together and create a customized plan for shared parenting. Planning for holidays and vacations can be carefully tailored to the traditions and preferences of each parent, a process which is cumbersome and difficult in adversarial divorce.
- Attorney Frederick F. Ward II: The Collaborative process allows the parties to formulate their own customized plan for sharing the holiday time with their children in a nonadversarial atmosphere with the assistance of the collaborative team.
- Psychologist Wendy Habelow, Ph.D.: The holiday season is a fun-filled, busy and undoubtedly sometimes-stressful time of year. The COVID pandemic has contributed to the stress, adding unwelcome complications to family plans and further stretching already frayed nerves. Traditional litigated divorce models typically do not provide much flexibility or originality when it comes to helping families celebrate the holidays. In contrast, Collaborative Divorce offers parents the opportunity to work closely with specialized professionals who can help them craft holiday plans that uniquely fit their children and family’ needs. With a behavioral health/family expert as part of the professional team, parents are able to talk through their goals and explore options to meet these goals, as well as learn strategies for helping children through their first holidays as a new kind of family, plan for future holidays, and develop new traditions. The entire Collaborative team of two attorneys, a financial specialist and a behavioral health specialist work together to support families during this emotionally fraught time in their lives so they can move through this transition with less stress and greater likelihood of establishing and maintaining a well-functioning transformed family going forward.
