3 ways technology makes co-parenting easier

When you have children and divorce, one of the toughest transitions is when your kids start splitting custody time between you and your ex. Not only do they need to adjust to a mom and dad who no longer live together, but parents need to keep their co-parenting relationship civil if they want the best for their children. That’s not always easy after divorce. However, technology can help.

Here are three ways technology can make co-parenting easier:

1. You can keep all communication with you ex via email or text to reduce conflict. If you have a hard time avoiding conflict by communicating through phone calls, communicating through email, co-parenting apps or text can help. Just try to keep your tone more neutral and professional to make these forms of communication work best for both of you.
2. You can easily map out your child’s schedule. Through a co-parenting app (such as Our Family Wizard or Talking Parents), Google calendar or another software-based calendar, you and your ex can stay on the same page about your child’s schedule. You can note when any doctor’s appointments for your child are, what their extracurricular schedule is, when they have days off school and when they will be with you versus with their other parent.
3. You can track expenses related to your child. As part of your divorce, you and your ex came to some agreement for child support and how you pay other expenses related to your child. Through a co-parenting app or even a shared spreadsheet, you can track those expenses easily to show who paid for what and if one of you needs reimbursement.

You can easily review several features of co-parenting apps to see what might work best for you. If you want to maintain daily contact with your kids, you can use a variety of video phone call software programs through a tablet to do that or even by texting them if they are old enough for their own cellphone. More than likely, as they grow older, they may become part of your custody scheduling process and these communications as they have more school, friend and other commitments they want to be a part of.