When children are involved, it can be tough to know how to navigate your separation – especially when there’s ongoing conflict with your ex-partner.

Many parents worry about how the separation or divorce will impact their children.

Here, we have put together a list of five parenting courses aimed at assisting parents to navigate their separation, with their children’s needs in mind.

1. Parenting After Separation – Relationship Matters

The Parenting After Separation program provides parents with key information and strategies to assist you and your children to successfully adjust to separation and/or associated conflict.

The course is delivered online and offers the convenience of learning from home with a trained facilitator within a small online group. Relationship Matters delivers the program via Zoom over 2 weekly sessions (3 hours per session). Learning combines group work, film clips, discussion and reading to support your learning.

Link: Parenting After Separation (Online) – Relationship Matters

Cost: $150

2. New Families – Uniting

New Families is a six-session program aimed specifically at assisting parents understand the impact of separation on their children. It is individually tailored to help parents gain the knowledge and skills needed to support and enhance their children’s adjustment following separation.

New Families will help you:

• Recognise your child’s emotional and behavioural responses to the separation and ways you can support them in these responses.
• Understand the emotional and psychological processes of separation.
• Learn how your parenting might change post separation and how to utilise more effective parenting strategies to deal with these changes
• Utilise more effective parenting skills across households.
• Learn how to assist your child in their changing developmental needs over time.
• Explore how your reactions as a parent may affect your child’s adjustment to the separation and how to manage these reactions.
• Explore ways you can reduce and manage conflict.

Link: New Families (uniting.org)

3. Building Stronger Families – Interrelate

The Building Stronger Families program supports parents and carers to examine their relationship with the other parent. It provides them with fresh ways of managing conflict and creates a new parenting arrangement that supports improved outcomes for their children.

Parents and other carers of children in separated families attend Building Stronger Families when they:

• Know that the conflict between them is affecting their child and don’t know what to do about it.
• Have been ordered or encouraged by a court to attend a post-separation parenting program.
• Have been referred by their solicitor.

One parent can attend on their own, or both can attend but at different times so they don’t have to meet.

Building Stronger Families aims to:

• Create a strong bond in separated families so children are not disadvantaged.
• Focus on the needs of the children and teach ways to co-parent successfully.
• Set specific goals for the benefit of everyone involved.

Link: Parenting and family support after separation – Interrelate

4. Parenting After Separation – Relationships Australia

This online course is for parents looking for ways to best support themselves and their children through the process of family separation. Group facilitators help you learn to reduce conflict with your former partner, while managing your role as a supportive co-parent.

Groups of 8-12 participants meet weekly over six weeks to discuss common parenting and separation challenges. Experienced facilitators encourage a supportive environment in which you can share concerns, learn from others and take away practical tools for communicating with your ex-partner and children.

During this group program, you will learn how to:

• Recognise triggers for possible conflicts with your ex-partner.
• Better understand how to manage conflict.
• Move away from hate and blame.
• Constructively and safely express your emotions with your former partner and children.
• Meet the needs of your children during this transition.
• Use reflection and goal setting to plan for a positive future.

Link: Parenting After Separation | Focus On Kids (relationshipsnsw.org.au)

Cost: Sliding scale based on income

5. Parenting Not Partners – Interrelate

Parents Not Partners is designed to improve emotional and developmental outcomes for children in separated families by:

• Raising parents’ awareness of the impact of the ongoing conflict on their children.

• Providing parents with knowledge, tips and strategies to be able to focus on their children rather than on their issues or conflicts with other parent.

On completion of Parents Not Partners, parents will:

• Have learnt ways to better regulate their emotions and to self care.

• Have learnt ways to help their children manage their emotions.

• Recognise the effects of ongoing, mismanaged conflict on children.

• Have learnt skills to better manage conflict with the other parent.

• Be able to reorient interactions with their child’s other parent to be respectful and cooperative.

• Be able to recognise and differentiate between their own and their children’s individual needs.

• Have learnt skills to communicate effectively with the other parent.

• Have increased their ability to reflect on their behaviour and make changes where needed.

Cost: $25 per group session

Link: Support for parents after separation – Interrelate

To speak to one of our Family Law Solicitors to find out if Mediation or Collaborative Practice is right for you and your situation, contact the team here.