Mediation 'from go to woe'

By Michael Knight

Friday 12 November 2010

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When you are feeling complete, together as a family unit and thinking how blissful life is — to be sharing healthy and loving relationships with your partner and those wondrous gifts you have been blessed with called children — it must surely be agreed that mediating is part of the glue that keeps your whole family ticking — healthy, functional, advancing, in love and together.

As parents living together and raising children you are constantly making decisions about issues that face your family on a daily basis, as well as long term plans. In effect what you are both doing as parents is collaborative mediation with each other, not that most parents think of it in these terms.

In fact, one of the main reasons you can maintain a family relationship is through your ability to effectively mediate and negotiate with each other, allowing both of you to keep your desires, values and interests largely in alignment, intertwined with love and care of course fostering a healthy environment for the benefit of all family members.

So if mediation is such an important part of the mix to keep relationships workable and amicable in an intact family, especially in the case of raising healthy children, why would it not follow that mediation should still continue between two parents after a Separation, whether children are under one roof or two?

The simple answer is it should as parenting in all its many forms is a long term gig until the day you die. There is ample proof that when both parents have a civil relationship with each other post Separation despite the hurt from past events, and be given every opportunity to contribute positively what they can and when they can to benefit their children, everyone will adapt to the new change of circumstances quicker and easier. Mediation nullifies conflict and promotes peace ensuring greater opportunity for healthy growth.

If you as Separated parents adopt the approach of mediation and negotiation as in the marriage on the issues surrounding the welfare of children, the chances of your children growing into well adjusted adults, making good decisions, with aspirations of having children and a positive family life one day making a valuable contribution to the community, are on the whole extremely high.

With love, kindness and peace
Michael