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Toddler Transfer
Easing Visitation for
Children After Divorce By Teri Brown
Putting Children First Easing the transfer trauma for a child starts with easing the tension between the parents.
Children After Divorce
"Parents who work together and approach parenting as a cooperative task raise children[who] are better adjusted and more emotionally healthy," Sember says. "When children know that both their parents love them and are willing to parent together, they feel more secure. Mom and Dad might live in separate houses, but they are still parents together and the children are still encircled within that relationship. You can have a family that does not live in one home and is no longer connected by marriage."
This sort of outlook and cooperation eases the tension between parents and makes transferring your toddler from one household to the other much easier.
Jeffery Leving, president of the Law Offices of Jeffery Leving and a noted father's rights advocate from Chicago, Ill., says putting your child first and cooperationare key not only for your child's emotional happiness, but also in keeping both parents in the picture.
"Uncooperative parenting often leads to father absence due to gender bias in our legal system,"Leving says. "Due to the fact that approximately 24 million children live absent their biological father in America, it is pretty clear there is a lot of uncooperative parenting."
Leving says that though children's specific reactions to divorce vary by age, they all suffer when parents cannot get along. Toddlers often become bewildered and cranky, likely to cling fiercely to any adult family member during divorce, while preschoolers seem to blame themselves for their parents' breakup and suffer a decline in self-image and loss of self-esteem. These problems are difficult enough for children to face without adding parental conflict to the equation.
