Families Change Guide to Separation & Divorce

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Successfully Parenting Apart: A Toolkit (Canadian Bar Association)

This Toolkit organizes and consolidates on-line and print resources offering guidance, information, referrals and resources for resolving parenting challenges post-separation in ways most effective for children. It is primarily intended to increase family lawyers’ awareness of the best available information to better assist parents in transforming their relationship from being a couple to being successful co-parents. As the first point of contact for many separating parents, effective lawyers need to be aware of the best practices and social science on family restructuring, and should be equipped to easily direct parents to quality resources for further guidance and information.

Federal Child Support Guidelines

Children need financial support from their parents – and they have a legal right to it. When parents separate or divorce, they should try to agree on the amount of child support. If they ask a court to decide, the court will use guidelines to determine child support payments. The Federal Child Support Guidelines are a set of rules and tables used to determine child support when parents divorce. They are the law.

Because Life Goes On – Helping Children and Youth Live with Separation and Divorce

“Because Life Goes On... Helping Children and Youth Live with Separation and Divorce” is a Health Canada publication intended to reach out to Canadian families in need of information and resources to help their children to live through the process of separation and divorce. This booklet is also designed to assist professionals in such fields as social services, health, justice and education, in their work with children and their parents.

The Co-Parenting Survival Guide

You may be winning the battle in court, but losing the war at home, saddened at the wounds your children bear as a result of this conflict. But you can learn to build a parenting partnership with your former mate in spite of the history between you. This guide shows you how to avoid the hot spots and the common traps and develop skills to sustain a co-parenting partnership based on love and concern for your children, so they can best benefit from two parents living separately but working together.

Custody, Chaos, Personal Peace

This empowering guide is an inspirational roadmap for the millions of men and women navigating a rocky relationship with a former spouse-while trying to maintain a healthy atmosphere for their child. This is the book for every frustrated parent coming out of a divorce who needs support in setting things right-the healthy, sensible, and sane way.

Does Wednesday Mean Mom’s House or Dad’s?

Thorough in coverage and updated with topics that affect today's families, This book helps you keep your children in the number-one, priority spot before, during, and after your divorce. Nonjudgmental in tone, the new edition will show you how to put your kids' best interests first as you work with your spouse to parent together while living apart.
 

What Happens Next? Information for Kids About Separation and Divorce

So… your parents have decided to split up.  You proably have manu questions, like “What does this mean for me?” and “Do I still have a family?” or “Will I always feel this bad?” or “Will anyone listen to me?” (Department of Justice Canada)

Shared Parenting: Raising Your Child Cooperatively After Separation

This practical book provides straightforward co-parenting advice to parents facing separation or divorce who wish to pursue the shared parenting approach. The authors emphasize the importance of children having significant time with both parents, allowing them to maintain meaningful relationships. By presenting the benefits and challenges, debunking the myths, giving practical tips on communication, and providing concrete tools, this book steers parents past their personal feelings toward a successful resolution in everyone’s best interest.

Parenting Apart

This comprehensive and empowering guide is filled with practical, effective ways to minimize the effects of divorce on children, and offers immediate solutions to the most critical parenting problems divorce brings. In this go-to resource, Christina McGhee addresses the issues of utmost importance to parents. Offering advice on explaining things to every age group-from toddlers to teenagers-in plain, consistent, and age-appropriate terms, Parenting Apart also offers practical suggestions for parents to help them maintain their own sense of stability.

Putting Children First

The breakup of a family can have an enduring impact on children. But parents can positively alter the effects of divorce on their children. The key is proven, emotionally intelligent parenting strategies that promote children's emotional health, resilience, and ability to lead satisfying lives. Filled with the voices and drawings of children and the stories of families, Putting Children First delivers a positive vision for a future of hope and healing.

Family & Divorce Help Guide

It can be difficult to give your kids the stability and support they need when you’re on an emotional rollercoaster of your own, sorting out custody issues, or dealing with an uncooperative ex. But you can successfully navigate this unsettling time—and help your kids emerge from it feeling loved, confident, and strong.

Kids Coping with Divorce

Divorce can be wrenching when kids are involved, but there's a lot you can do to help children cope. If you're a parent dealing with divorce, try to remember that your child needs you now more than ever. Offering reassurance, hope, and a sense of stability can help ease the effects of divorce on children of all ages.

Parenting Plan Worksheet

This parenting plan worksheet can help you and the other parent spell out the details of how you are going to parent. If you and the other parent develop a parenting plan, each of you should keep a copy.

TedX: Impact of Divorce on Children

Tamara Afifi is a Professor in the Department of Communication at UCSB. Most of her research focuses on how family members cope communicatively with various challenges they face. Including communication processes related to uncertainty, loss, stress and coping in families, with particular emphasis on post-divorce families.

Helping your Child Through a Divorce

Thousands of kids experience the stress of divorce each year. How they'll react depends on their age, personality, and the circumstances of the separation and divorce process. Every divorce will have an effect on the kids involved – and many times the reaction is shock, sadness, frustration, anger or worry. But kids can also come out of it better able to cope with stress and become flexible, tolerant young adults.

Talking to Children About Divorce: A Parent's Guide to Healthy Communication at Each Stage of Divorce

In Talking to Children About Divorce, Jean McBride provides you with the tools and encouragement to effectively communicate with your child about divorce. McBride brings her more than twenty-five years of specializing in divorce to guide you through crucial but difficult conversations and cultivate an environment of love and support throughout the divorce process. You’ll learn how to have honest conversations about different situations and emotions that may arise during divorce―from breaking the news to understanding resistance.

Surviving Your Divorce: A Guide to Canadian Family Law

Divorce doesn't have to be messy and bitter to be difficult. Even the most amicable break-ups are tough for everyone concerned. It's hard to understand and deal with the legal and financial consequences of a marriage breakdown during such an emotionally charged time. For more than a decade, Surviving Your Divorce has guided thousands of readers past the legal jargon of divorce to offer clear and candid guidance on how to survive a divorce or separation legally, financially, and emotionally.

Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing

Your ex-spouse is bad mouthing you to your children, constantly portraying you in a negative light, perhaps even trying to turn them against you. If you handle the situation ineffectively, your relationship with your children could suffer. You could lose their respect, lose their affections-even, in extreme cases, lose all contact with them. The conventional advice is to do nothing, that fighting fire with fire will only result in greater injury to the children. But after years of consulting parents who heeded such advice with no success, Dr. Richard Warshak is convinced that this approach is wrong. It doesn't work, and parents are left feeling helpless and hopeless. Divorce Poison instead offers a blueprint for effective response.

The Co-Parenting Handbook

The Co-Parenting Handbook helps parents confidently take on the challenges of guiding children through divorce or separation and raising them skillfully in two homes.

Don't Alienate the Kids!: Raising Resilient Children While Avoiding High-Conflict Divorce

We all know breakups can get ugly. But sometimes they can get downright vicious, with badmouthing, brainwashing, and allegations of alienation, child abuse and domestic violence, all leading to nasty custody battles. And when they do, it's the children who suffer most. During a high-conflict divorce or separation, kids can develop lifelong habits of all-or-nothing thinking, unregulated emotions, and extreme behaviors. Professionals who want to help may unintentionally make things worse, believing everything a parent says or taking sides.

Co-Parenting from the Inside Out: Voices of Moms and Dads

Effective co-parenting, or sharing significant parenting time with an ex-spouse, is one of the best gifts separated parents can give to their children. The interviews in Co-Parenting from the Inside Out are with real moms and dads in diverse circumstances, showing them making choices, sometimes struggling, and often growing. Their stories offer insights into wise decision-making, as well as practical strategies that strengthen families. Parents can see that they are not alone as they navigate their feelings and build a future. While pain exists in most stories, there is also hope.

Making plans: A guide to parenting arrangements after separation or divorce

You can use this guide if you're making parenting arrangements under the Divorce Act. "Parenting arrangements" are the arrangements parents make for the care of their children after a separation or divorce. This includes arrangements about where the children will live, where they will go to school, their religious education, their medical care, their after school activities and so on. This guide may still be useful to you even if the Divorce Act does not apply to your situation. The basic decisions that you have to make about parenting arrangements are similar whether you're separating or divorcing.

Help Your Teen Survive Your Divorce: 7 Ways To Guide Young Minds Through A Familial Breakup

No matter how you slice it, divorce has a huge impact on your teen son or daughter – but there are ways the negative effects can be mitigated. The steps you take and the behavior you and your spouse adopt can definitely help your adolescent adapt to this changed life successfully without long-term ill effects.
 

Crisis Planning and Counseling for Parents with Shared Custody

Information and guidance for parents going through separation during the COVID-19 crisis from a counsellor's perspective (note: American resource).