3. Observing their Child Safety Zone
Observe the Child Safety Zone by keeping all parent conflict away from your children.
You can use these links to print out a copy of the Child Safety Zone:
- For parents with more than one child together
- For parents with a son together
- For parents with a daughter together
Preserve these times as ones devoted just to child needs. Save difficult issues for the many times each week when your children aren’t around. Disengage from any conflict your co-parent brings. These very brief drop-offs and pick-ups will say a lot about whether your children are happy or devastated—for days, weeks, or years afterward.
Give yourself up to 10 points on your Score Sheet for the extent you can say, “I have a copy of the Child Safety Zone, and I use it to remind me that all times our children see us together or hear us speaking belong to them. Our children never see or hear conflict between their parents.”
“Children inevitably suffer the most in a divorce. I know, because as the divorce court judge for many years in San Francisco, California, I often witnessed the pain and heartache firsthand.”
Comments of Judge Ina Gyemant, Good Parenting Through Your Divorce.
—Mary Ellen Hannibal