Child-centered agreements, Part 1

Some believe that living in a child-centered marriage requires you to have a comfortable lifestyle so that money is not a concern. Again, that’s a myth. Whether you endure extreme poverty or enjoy fabulous wealth, you can be child-centered parents or adult-centered parents. Both kids are evenly distributed along the income continuum. Certainly, lacking money contributes to stress and tension in a household, but swimming in cash also can distance people from their true priorities, so it’s not as easy as looking at your tax returns to decide whether you can or will be a child-centered parent. Everyone can, and everyone should.

I have chosen family mediation as my life’s work because I am a child of divorce, and I am living proof that you will not always skid into the ditch just because your parents split up. In spite of the fact that my parents separated while I was still a toddler, separated again when I was nine, and finally divorced when I was 11, that rockiness never stopped me or my sister from living the lives we were meant to live. We both learned to read around age three, we did very well in school, and now we have three university degrees between us. Divorce was not a death sentence.

Being in a child-centered marriage involves planning before you even have children, so you’re ready for that lifelong and often challenging commitment. When I was born in 1979, ten weeks premature, my mother was barely 23. At the age that I was when I graduated from college, my mom had to get a crash course in the care of a baby with hydrocephalus. Thank goodness, my mom was ready for that challenge, but I don’t think she’d thought about it beforehand. Who would have predicted that her first child would be as sick as I was from the moment I was born? Even if you don’t choose that life, it might choose you, and you have no real option but to step up.

One of the most rock-solid benefits of a child-centered pre-nup is that it provides consistency for your children. Children want to know what to expect from their parents, whether we’re talking about the food in the fridge, getting help with homework, or the consequences for bad behavior. Many children and teenagers are deeply troubled after a divorce, but it’s not because their parents moved to separate houses. Do you really think it would help to stay in the same home if two people who hated each others guts and disagreed on most everything? Of course not. The issue is that the parents are not on the same page on important issues, which then cause conflict. That problem is largely foreseeable and avoidable, and it can’t be boiled down to whether they share a house or not. When children, teens, and adult children of divorce have trouble in life that is supposedly tied to the divorce, it is not the physical distance that is at issue. The harm is really a result of the war zone the parents have created by never agreeing on important issues and waiting for them escalate to an unsolvable crisis.