The winter holidays can be full of joy, but its common knowledge that they can also generate a great deal of stress. For those facing divorce, mustering up any holiday spirit at all can be a challenge. You may find yourself surrounded by high expectations at the exact same time that you must confront the end of one of your most important relationships and the prospect of restructuring your entire family. Read more
As the end of the year ushers in another holiday season, many divorcing parents find themselves at odds. Finalizing parenting agreements can be challenging when it includes dividing holiday time. To make matters worse, the 2018 holiday season brings extra pressure for many divorcing couples. Those with alimony provisions need to finalize their divorce agreements by the end of the year to avoid big tax changes.
None of this is easy, but you can at least feel confident that if you and your spouse are negotiating a settlement in mediation, you have a good chance of staying on schedule. Read more
In our last post, we discussed how individual and shared interests often come into conflict in negotiating prenuptial agreements. We saw how an aggressive attorney representing the wealthier of two engaged partners might produce an initial draft prenup with the potential to derail what would otherwise be a happy marriage. In this post we will talk about how the mediation process can provide a better alternative. Read more
Situations where parties have both opposing interests and shared interests are well-suited to mediation. Divorce settlements generally fall into this category. As we will discuss in this post, prenuptial agreements — often called “prenups”— fall into it even more squarely. This makes mediation a potentially useful process for negotiating such agreements. Read more
If you are just reaching a decision about ending your marriage, you may be confused about the best way to go about it.
Perhaps you have friends urging you to hire an aggressive attorney to prevent your soon-to-be-ex from trying to take advantage of you. Or maybe your friends are urging you to steer clear of expensive attorneys and just handle everything yourself. Perhaps you and your spouse are fairly amicable and you are both interested in divorce mediation, but you aren’t sure which issues you actually need a mediator to help you resolve. Is mediation the right answer? Read more
In our last post, we discussed how a couple with three children between 12 and 15 years of age made the decision to pursue child inclusive mediation (CI). Both Jeff, a high school math teacher and basketball coach, and Yvonne, an IT professional, wanted primary residential custody of 15-year-old Kyle and 12-year-old twins, Katie and Kayla. Their mediator, Brian Hill, suggested that they try CI, a process that brings a mutually agreed upon child specialist into the mediation. Yvonne and Jeff agreed that this seemed like a positive way to move forward with a successful parenting plan. They chose Dr. Jasmine Landers as their specialist. Read more
Recently we have been discussing different procedural options for resolving child custody disputes in New Jersey. We followed one family through litigation and another through mediation with a child-focused approach. Today we will look at a third option, child-inclusive mediation. Read more
Last month we discussed the predicament of Alan and Cherie, a couple who took their parenting dispute to court. Each of them hired a separate child custody evaluator, and while neither parent was dissatisfied with the ultimate result, both were highly dissatisfied with the level of conflict involved and with both the complexity and the high cost of the procedures. Today, we will look at another couple with a parenting dispute who have decided to take a different approach. Read more
Today we are going to look more closely at Alan and Cherie, a couple we introduced in our last post.[i] Alan, a 45-year-old executive for a fast food restaurant chain, and Cherie, a 43-year-old small business owner, have decided to end their 15-year-marriage. They separated about 6 months ago when Alan moved out of the family home and into a separate apartment. Alan and Cherie are currently involved in a parenting time dispute regarding 11-year-old Alexis and 9-year-old Mike. Let’s see how mediation can help them. Read more
In our last post, we discussed the documented benefits of child-focused mediation and child-inclusive mediation in divorce. In our next few posts, we will present the stories of three divorcing couples, each of whom decides to approach their parenting disputes in different ways. These families are fictional, but their stories are derived from various real life scenarios. One family will go through a court process, one will go through mediation with a child-focused approach, and the third will go through child-inclusive mediation. Read more
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