Family issues are particularly amenable to mediation, whether they involve decisions concerning child custody; visitation and support; couples who are separating or divorcing; or families trying to resolve issues related to aging parents or teenagers. With its emphasis on bringing parties together, looking for common ground, and creating mutually agreeable solutions, mediation helps build trust and reduce the potential for future disagreement or misunderstanding.
Child Custody, Visitation and Support. This service is recommended by the courts for every separating couple with children.
Separation and Divorce. This service addresses division of assets and spousal support.
Aging Parents. Elder mediation supports elders and their families and caregivers as they navigate the challenges that arise due to the aging process and caregiver stresses.
Parent-Teen. Our mediators can help parents and teens improve communication and decision making around challenges around school, friends, rules and discipline, privileges and responsibilities, jobs, planning for the future, money, and other issues.
An excerpt from a New York Times op-ed piece (“No Fault Of Their Own by Ruth Bettelheim”) beautifully expresses how mediation can aid families in reducing conflict and stress on children:
“Sustained family conflict can cause children to experience the kinds of problems that are usually attributed to divorce: low self-esteem, depression, high anxiety, difficulty forming relationships, delinquency and withdrawal from the world.
Given that reducing family conflict is good for children, the best way to protect them during divorce would be to minimize the acrimony of the proceedings…[but] issues relating to children in divorce cases are still very often decided by long, heated contests between the parents. Custody disagreements are settled by a judge’s determination of what is in “the best interests of the child.” In practical terms, this means that both parents do their utmost to demonstrate that they are the better parent — and that the other one is worse, unfit or even abusive.
At stake are not only the participants’ self-esteem and their relationships with their children but also their financial security. As child support is often linked to the proportion of time the children spend with each parent, the days and hours of their future lives become tools for one parent to extract payment from the other. This is a recipe for warfare, with the children’s well-being both the disputed turf and the likely casualty.
What children need instead are no-fault custody proceedings — which could be accomplished with two changes to state family law. First, take the money out of the picture by establishing fixed formulas for child support that ensure the children are well taken care of in both homes, regardless of the number of days they spend in each. Second, defuse tension by requiring parents to enter mediation to find a custody solution that best meets the needs of all concerned.”