Are Co-Parenting Apps Just a Gimmick?
Text messaging apps such as What’s App are hardly a conduit of family harmony. Even in the case of parents with intact marriages, no one is happier when your daughter texts your family group a piece of vegan propaganda, and your son responds by texting the family group a piece of anti-vegan propaganda. You knew you were headed for divorce when your spouse kept texting a coworker while insisting that their relationship was platonic. Now that you are divorced, your kids spend all of your parenting time ignoring you while they text your friends, and somehow it bothers you now even more than it did while you were married. You would rightly be incredulous if the judge ordered you to download yet another app and use it to text your spouse, which is something you have already been doing, and all that it has gotten you is a legal dispute where a judge has to tell you how to communicate with your ex. A co-parenting app may be able to help you resolve some of your conflicts with your ex-spouse, but for others you need a Mississauga child custody lawyer.
Co-Parenting Apps Can Help You Keep the Peace in a High Conflict Divorce
Most people will tell you that the key to a successful co-parenting relationship is communication, but those people have never had to deal with your ex-spouse. Your ex calls you in a rage when your children show up at her house with an odd number of socks or when your kid makes a PG-13 rated joke that you are sure he learned at school but your ex is convinced came from a movie that your kid watched at your house when you were not supervising his screen time closely enough. Your ex changes her plans constantly, especially where your children are involved, and expects you to read her mind.
It’s no wonder that you and your ex cannot talk to each other in person on the phone without a fight, and you can tell that it bothers your children. Therefore, judges sometimes order divorced parents who can’t get along to communicate through co-parenting apps such as Talking Parents or Our Family Wizard. These apps have shared calendars where you can both see the children’s schedule and keep up easily with each other’s changes of plans. Their main purpose, though, is to enable the parents to text each other so they don’t have to fight. Some even employ polite chatbots to draft messages for you, so that your anger doesn’t come out when you text your spouse to say that you are on your way to pick up the children. Best of all, co-parenting apps archive all the messages. This way, you can easily show the judge that you have followed the parenting plan, kept your promises, and made every effort to de-escalate conflicts.
Contact Zagazeta Garcia LLP About Difficult Co-Parenting Relationships
A family lawyer can help you draft and follow a parenting plan when you and your ex-spouse can’t get along. Contact Zagazeta Garcia LLP in Mississauga, Ontario to discuss your case.
