Coparenting. Sharing the responsibility of care, health, well-being, education, and all the other things that come with parenting a child. Coparenting can be stressful under even the best of circumstances. During the school year, we have the routine of the school year. Even with the band practices, after-school activities, and teacher meetings, we may generally have some consistency with the day-to-day responsibilities of coparenting. Of course, one parent may shoulder most of the responsibilities, or have more flexibility to do so. But, there is likely some expectation of what is happening each week.
Managing Summer Schedules
The summer months turn up the heat on all of this! Even with fairly healthy coparenting partnerships. What does summer co-parenting look like? The kids have completely different schedules, if there’s a schedule at all. In an ideal situation (or even less than ideal), parents can discuss the summer plans for the children and communicate effectively – ahead of time.
As this is our second (and last) marriage, my husband and I are both in coparenting situations. This also means I’m in a coparenting relationship with his ex-wife and he is in a coparenting relationship with my ex-husband. And we all have had different circumstances that affected our abilities to coparent. The best things we did were 1) cooperate 2) be flexible and 3) took nothing personally. The third was absolutely more difficult. (We can discuss what it feels like to be a stepmother another time, though.) But seriously, the majority of the time, even if we complained behind closed doors, there was always an effort to make it work.
3 Tools to Support Your Children
In my experience, cooperation, flexibility and not taking it personally helped all of us involved in co-parenting do just a little bit better. An example starts with my husband and I are not great planners. His ex-wife is. We always knew ahead of time when she and the boys were going on vacation and for how long. And, thankfully, she was always patient with us when we forgot to tell her we were going camping and it would infringe on her time with the kids. Same with holidays. We were flexible with each other and knew that if we were fighting over time with the kids, they would be the ones who suffered.
Over the summer months, my stepson’s mother made most of the decisions and we accommodated their schedules. I coordinated my daughter’s activities and her father accommodated her schedule. My ex and I were fortunate enough to have a lot of support in raising our daughter. Most of the time, it worked out for the children to have more parents to count on to show up at games or pick them up from camp.
I completely understand that not all parents are in a position to use these three tools. But they’re something to try for yourself, regardless of what the other parent is doing.
Concepts to Consider
Things we could have done differently:
- We didn’t plan for emergencies or illnesses (like when the youngest got 2 concussions in one week).
- We didn’t have a shared schedule, and trusted each other to “remember”.
- We didn’t communicate about bedtimes or other expectations for the summer, etc.
Things that helped:
- Engaged support of family and friends
- Tried not to take it personally
- Remembering that it’s not about me
- Reframing it and asking myself “how important is it” when plans changed
- Remembering to check in with the other parent
The goal of coparenting is to create a stable, supportive environment for the child despite changes in family structure. We offer counseling and coaching for adults in coparenting relationships.
If you suspect any abuse of your child, you should contact the appropriate authorities.