Be a Great Divorced Dad

By Kenneth N. Condrell and Linda L. Small

Your marriage may have ended, but your fatherhood has not. How can you stay an involved, caring dad in the aftermath of divorce when all kinds of obstacles appear, making you insecure and uncertain of your parenting skills? With advice and insight from psychologist and family therapist Kenneth N. Condrell, and from some of the ever-growing number of other divorced dads, this practical, insightful handbook will help you:

-avoid the ten most common divorced dad pitfalls
-adjust to family life after the custody agreement
-handle school, homework, and extracurricular activities
-strategize celebrations and holidays
-deal with a child who rejects you
-move on to dating and other relationships

Let divorce be an opportunity for tremendous growth-and great parenting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781250088628

Kenneth N. Condrell

Kenneth N. Condrell, Ph.D., is a child psychologist and family counselor who has been counseling children and families for thirty years. He is the director of the Condrell Center for Change and has served as a consultant to Children's Hospital of Buffalo, New York, and Fisher-Price Toys. He lives in New York State.

Book preview

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

introduction

chapter 1: Understanding Your Feelings After Separation and Divorce

chapter 2: Understanding Your Children’s Mother and Her Feelings After Divorce

chapter 3: Children of Divorce Talk About Their Feelings

chapter 4: Avoiding the Ten Most Common Divorced-Dad Pitfalls

chapter 5: Adjusting to Family Life After the Custody Agreement

chapter 6: Making the Most of Your Time Together

chapter 7: Dealing with School, Homework, and Extracurricular Activities

chapter 8: Fathers and Daughters

chapter 9: How Divorced Dads Can Stay in Charge

chapter 10: The Divorced Dad’s Job Description

chapter 11: How to Deal with Celebrations and Holidays

chapter 12: Dealing with a Child Who Rejects You

chapter 13: Moving On: The Challenge of Dating and Other Relationships

epilogue: Be the Best Part-time Dad You Can Be

Copyright

Children who are compassionate and understanding are the best medicine for a father going through a divorce. This book is dedicated to my adult children, Connie, Kristine, and Nick, who remained loving and balanced while Dad went through the biggest crisis of his life. And this book is dedicated to little Madison Mary, who introduced me to the wonders of being a grandfather.

I also want to dedicate this book to all divorced fathers and wish them the best as they strive to be the best of dads.

Acknowledgments

While I was in the middle of my divorce, Lynn Sonberg and Meg Schneider from Skylight Press called me out of the blue with the idea of writing a guide for divorced fathers. Emotionally there wasn’t a better time for me to write this book, and I’m grateful they found me. I’m also indebted to them for introducing me to Linda Small. Linda is a professional writer who has been an absolute pleasure to work with. I marvel at her talent for working with words, organizing chapters, and staying focused on the primary mission of this book. She also didn’t hesitate in her kind way to remind me of our schedule. We have since become friends. Through Linda Small, I met Agnes Birnbaum of Bleecker Street Associates. I owe Agnes a special thanks for all the helpful things she did as an agent to make this book a reality.

I want to thank Jennifer Weis and Madeleine Findley of St. Martin’s Press for all their thoughtful efforts to bring Be a Great Divorced Dad to a successful completion.

There were times I needed the opinions of other professionals. A very special thanks to Josselyn Sanborn, school counselor; Paul Pearson, attorney; the psychologists Dr. Connie Condrell, Dr. Kathy Calabrese, Dr. Anthony Bongiovani, Dr. Jim Butters, Dr. Nancy Karp, Dr. Lorraine Engl, and Dr. Tedd Habberfield for their insights, suggestions, and advice and for sharing their experiences with divorced parents.

Without Kay Campagna’s expert management of the Condrell Center, I would not have had the time to write this book. I am very appreciative of everything Kay did to make things work at the office.

I also want to thank Barbara Peca for her encouragement during moments of discouragement.

And finally I want to express my sincere gratitude to my friends, Hank Steiger, John Connelly, John Fera, Paul Pearson, and Herb Siegel, who were there for me in so many ways during my divorce.

introduction

I’m a child psychologist and family therapist who has worked with thousands of divorced parents over the past thirty years. I am also the father of three adult children, and like many American fathers I have seen my own marriage end in divorce, in my case after thirty-two years. It is this combined personal and professional experience that has inspired and guided me in writing this book.

There has to be a better way. This has been a recurring thought for me in counseling divorcing parents and living through my own divorce. There has to be a better way to legally end the partnership of marriage, and there must be a better way for parents to go on parenting after a divorce.

The legal process for divorce in this country is not designed to be helpful to families. Many matrimonial attorneys see the goal as winning out over the opposing attorney: Winning means getting all the money one can, often while beating up on the character of the other parent; and most important, winning means one parent loses the children. Fortunately, in the nineties we are beginning to see some enlightenment at the end of this dark legal tunnel. Our court system is now moving away from this adversarial process and toward a saner method of mediation for divorcing parents.

The Case for Joint Custody

When couples divorce, they must divide everything they have had together—including the children. This division of whatever was ours into yours and mine often becomes ugly, petty, and complex. The division of children brings about the most grief. We find ourselves using such terms as sole custody, joint custody, custodial parent, shared custody, physical custody, and visitation rights. All this formal language only adds to the confusion.

One day Jack, a construction worker, stood in my office, wet concrete dripping from his boots onto my carpet. Recently separated from his wife, Annie, Jack was going through the proverbial messy divorce. He was already turning over a big chunk of his weekly salary to Annie, but still he said, I don’t care what it costs. I just want more time with my girls. He added plaintively, My children are my whole life. He confessed to me that he missed reading Goodnight Moon to his three-year-old so much that he sometimes read it by himself. All Jack wanted that day was to be assured that he would once again play a meaningful role in his children’s lives, although he didn’t have a clue how to guarantee that would happen.

In my thirty years of practice as a psychologist and on my weekly call-in radio show Kid Talk, I often act as a sounding board for other divorced fathers. They talk to me and share their frustration and pain. Over the years, I’ve also been asked by judges to prepare the family study evaluations they use in determining custody. Many men just like Jack have come into my office desperate to prove to me not only that they are good fathers, but also good enough to be deserving of custody.

My own impression is that 99 percent of these men dearly love their children, which is why I generally recommend joint custody.

Joint custody simply means that both parents retain their legal rights as parents and each enjoys significant amounts of time with the children. The legal agreement is often very specific about how they share parental rights: For example, one parent cannot arrange for a child to have her tonsils removed unless the other parent agrees.

Some parents and experts argue that joint custody isn’t fair to the children. Certainly it can be rough as kids get used to going back and forth between two homes. When lawyers argue for sole custody, they often address the court and say, Your Honor, we don’t want these children living out of a suitcase, forced to bounce between parents like a Ping-Pong ball. Unfortunately, the usual alternative to joint custody is to award sole or physical custody to the mother and reduce the father to a part-time visitor.

It’s been my experience that many judges have a strong bias against joint custody because they believe that the parents must be friendly and able to communicate in order for it to work. Judges will often conclude that the two parents who stand before the court hate each other, so joint custody could not be in the best interests of the children.

But research clearly shows that children do best when they have two active and involved parents. Almost all children, when asked, prefer to have equal time with each parent. Experts who favor joint custody have gone so far as to advocate that courts should automatically mandate this parenting arrangement.

Whenever possible, I feel it is in the best interest of children to be legally and emotionally raised by two parents. Joint custody is at the top of my list of priorities when I try to help divorcing parents work out their future as parents. I do recognize that there are exceptional cases. Sometimes one parent is neglectful or abusive or just doesn’t want to be involved as a parent.

One question I often answer is: What if the parents hate and argue with each other? I still favor joint custody. Hostile parents may go on hating each other for a lifetime, but many warring parents manage to declare a truce once the attorneys have disappeared if they have a clearly written plan for sharing the children. As long as Mom and Dad make loving and actively parenting their children a priority over settling scores with each other, joint custody will be better for the kids. What kids really need is to be guided by two parents who love them.

The Importance of Fathers

If you are like most men, you have grown up in this society feeling uncertain about how important you really are to the development and growth of your children. From my years as a psychologist who specializes in dealing with children, I can tell you: You are very important to your children. We now know that men can nurture and parent as well as women. When children raised solely by men are compared to children who have been raised by women, there are no significant differences in how the children turn out.

As a wise twelve-year-old once told me, Kids belong to fathers as well as mothers. It’s not a case of either/or. Mom can clearly be central to a child’s life, but that is not enough. It’s never enough, because if Dad is not integral in his child’s life, it’s as if one of the child’s limbs is missing and he is not whole.

More than fifty years of research bears out the importance of fathers. Children with involved fathers grow up doing just about everything better than children with absent or remote fathers. As just one example, Dr. Richard Warshak, a psychologist, points out in his book, The Custody Revolution, that boys with involved fathers are better at making friends and achieving in school than boys who grow up without their fathers. Warshak notes that the leading cause of emotional problems in children is diminished contact with fathers. He even says that fathers are the forgotten contributors to child development.

Yet our culture has consistently devalued the father’s contribution to his children’s psychological development. The popular image is that Mom really knows best and that Dad is little more than Mom’s assistant. Most men were not raised as boys with the message that a big part of their life would be to grow up to be a father.

The truth is that by and large our culture has always cast Mom as the psychological parent—the one who worries about the child’s day-to-day welfare. Furthermore, mothers are usually very protective of their role and do not willingly loosen the close bonds that attach them to their children.

Many of the fathers I have counseled have found it tough going as single parents. Only casually involved with their children while they were married, they typically need to make a tremendous shift in their parenting. Having relied on their wives for all the day-to-day details of caregiving—shopping for clothes, making the pediatrician appointments, planning birthday parties—fathers often do not know what sizes their children wear, or even the names of their children’s best friends. After divorce, many fathers need to get acquainted with their children, to discover, for example, what color clothes the children prefer and who likes Apple Jacks and who likes Cheerios in the morning.

Why Do Fathers Need This Book?

Divorce has reached epidemic proportions; over half of all couples who say I do eventually wind up saying I don’t. Every year another 500,000 men join the growing number of divorced fathers.

Be a Great Divorced Dad is written expressly and directly for dads to show them how to make a successful transition from husband/father to single dad. It directly answers the question: How can I be an effective parent when I typically see my children only every other weekend?

The time after divorce is not only one of personal emotional turmoil, but it’s also a time when it will be necessary for fathers to focus on playing catch-up as a parent. It isn’t that fathers are less capable than mothers; it’s that in many cases they don’t automatically know exactly how to care for children. Neither did Mom; she’s just had a head start in practicing the parenting game. A divorced father coming out of a traditional marriage may at first be at a disadvantage with his parenting skills. But most men can easily learn how to shop, cook, feed, give baths, and help with homework within six to twelve months.

Many men feel overwhelmed after a marital breakup—adrift in a sea of legal, economic, and emotional entanglements. This book can serve as an anchor; it supports fathers by offering advice on how to share the responsibility of raising children with the least amount of conflict. This book provides all the information needed so they can play on a level field as parents, and win as fathers.

Be a Great Divorced Dad has been written for men by a man. It presents the best approaches I