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Stay Willing to Learn, Grow, and Change Your Perspective Print E-mail


You wont know everything about parenting in the aftermath of a divorce. Years later, you still won't know it all. Despite holding strong opinions and deep personal values, stay open to learning, growing, and changing.

You may discover that, in your early years of co-parenting, you are the parent who is firmer or more structured in the way you raise your children. You may feel like the only parent mature enough to fulfill the necessary role of being the grown-up in the home. You may tire of always being the authority figure, yet you may continue to believe that it's necessary.

If so, be open to discovering the unique gifts and character of each of your children. Some of them will naturally need less structure and less discipline than others. Some of them will require enormous amounts of attention: You'll need to not only set and monitor boundaries, you'll also need to spend all of your time enforcing, enforcing, and enforcing again! As you do so, notice the ways in which each child reacts and responds to discipline and structure differently.

You may be the parent who believes that a looser and freer approach permits the child to grow and develop more naturally. As you mature and age, you may realize that a little structure is good for a childperhaps even necessary. Be willing to adapt your thinking as the laboratory of human experience yields results that you live with every day. Don't be ashamed to changeall of us can learn!

The key factor to keep in mind about learning, changing, and growing is that you can do so at your own pace. You need not cave in to the emotional pressure of your children, your ex-wife, your parents, friends, or anyone else. While many people may have opinions to offer and may follow through by offering their opinions to youyou are not obligated to respond by changing your views to accommodate their ideas, values, or beliefs.

If you are involved in a church, a large extended family, or some other social network, look closely at the families around you. Where do you see children who are well-behaved, well-socialized, and seem to be high achievers? Whose children seem the most confident, the most capable, the most generous?

Learn by observation. Watch how other parents treat their children; be sure you watch what they do, not what they say. Learn from other parents, and especially from single parents and postdivorce blended families, how to lovingly manage the many difficult challenges of co-parenting.

If your children are several years apart, you may discover you are a wiser and better parent by the time the younger ones come of age. By then you will have learned by experience, by trial and error, how to be a more effective father to the unique personalities that occupy your home.

Within a first marriage, the discipline and education of children may be and become one of the "flash points" that causes frequent arguments. You should not expect this to be any different for a divorced couple! Yet it is also true that some divorced couples actually manage the education and training of their children with more grace and aplomb than some married couples.

If you've ever seen a long-term married couple bicker and fight, you may understand this reality. Constantly arguing with and undermining each other, these long-term married partners disagree about everything, often vocally.

Freed of the constant stress of living together, some divorced couples find their way to a cooperative, reasonably unified approach to raising their children. It is not necessary for both persons to agree on everything. It is helpful, however, when both parents find the grace and good nature to be tolerant of each others personal style, values, and ideas.

Co-parenting is a delicate danceyet you can learn the steps and perhaps even manage a graceful turn or two during your time on the ballroom floor.


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