I have conducted Social Study investigations on families going through litigation for over 15 years. Early in my career I came to the realization that many of the families I was investigating were good parents who had just lost focus.

If you choose the litigation process, you regress from being mom and dad into petitioner and respondent. Words such as "custody", "possession", and "visitation" become part of the family vocabulary. Warfare breaks out leaving very few neutral family members to focus on your child. Your child's ongoing need for parental support will get lost in the process of battling It will be easy for you to become so entrenched in the adversarial process that you voluntarily give the fate of your child to a group of strangers such as judges, social workers, and psychologists. These strangers will never know your child, never love your child, and never care about your child other than from a professional point of view. These strangers will never be there to tuck your child in to bed at night, change bandages, or cheer your child on at sporting events.

In 1997, in reaction to litigating families, I began providing comprehensive services such as co-parent education classes, mediation, and consultation to assist families in sharing their children between two homes. The goal of these services was to shift parents from the litigation mindset to working together as a family to raise their children. I was so excited when collaborative law came to Texas and I was invited to participate in helping parents craft shared parenting plans. As allied professionals, there are two very separate non-therapeutic hats mental health professional wear in the collaborative process:

1. Your Communication Coach who guides the collaborative sessions and giving each parent tools to communicate through the process to make it more effective.

2. Your Child Specialist/Parenting Facilitator focuses solely on helping you craft a shared parenting plan and incorporating the voices of children in to the plan.

My job is to assist you in crafting a co-parenting plan to share your children between their two homes. As we craft this plan, we will not be discussing custody, possession, or visitation. We will instead talk about how much time your children will spend between homes, ways to create continuity between these homes, and decision making the parents will be involved in. We will also attempt to create a plan to help alleviate the pitfalls that may cause more problems in the future.


For more information, contact: Bradley S. Craig, CFLE (972) 897-0440
www.childreninthemiddle.com