Documenting Divorce Communications

Documenting Divorce CommunicationsMany partners divorce over an ongoing failure to communicate with each other during their marriage. Counseling and other marriage tools strive to increase communication between you and your partner but they do not always succeed. You may think that the final resort to escape this problem is divorce, but in fact, the need for strong communication continues during and after your divorce as well. The difference between the two is an added step, documentation. Documenting divorce communications can help you to reduce conflict and the chance of going back to court in the future because of unresolved issues.

 

Documenting divorce communications will help you to steer clear of future obstacles

Depending on your personal situation, you may not have the best feelings toward your ex, making any communication between the two of you much harder. In high conflict situations it wouldn’t be ideal to communicate in person or on the phone. One simple tool that many co-parents have used in the past for documenting divorce communications is a simple notebook. This notebook can help to relay important information or just simple notes between co-parents; you can be as in-depth as you’d like. Remember to keep the subject matter strictly about the children in order to reduce any unneeded conflict. The notebook can be exchanged between co-parents at the same time as the children.

 

Email has also been used as a tool for documenting divorce communications as well as eliminating meeting with your ex in person or on the phone. Email is helpful because it is fast and easy to organize. In most email accounts documenting divorce communications is simple since all messages, sent and received, are saved for you unless otherwise specified. Because email is much quicker it is easier to get caught up in arguments with your ex by just emailing each other many messages back and forth in a short amount of time. It is important to remember to read over your emails before sending them. Watch for words or phrases that your ex may take the wrong way and change them. It is easy to misinterpret things through email, which can only create more conflict.  Additionally, most emails will not be allowable as admissible evidence because they are so easy to falsify.

 

Documenting divorce communications is not always a simple task. The forms of communication listed above cannot always provide 100% accurate and truthful documentation. Notebooks can be tampered with by erasing entries, ripping out pages, or adding false entries. Emails can be tampered with by changing the content and/or timestamp in the reply email chain. The Our Family Wizard website® has effective tools for documenting divorce communications which eliminate these uncertainties. The Our Family Wizard website® message board acts just like email, but with a twist. The timestamps and reply chains of all emails are not editable; they cannot be tampered with. Another effective communication tool they provide for documenting divorce communications is the shared parenting calendar. This calendar allows co-parents to easily manage their shared parenting plans, along with create events for the children, request trades between co-parents, and more. Documenting divorce communications with this feature is easy and effective because users are not allowed to create false events in the past and each event that is created is stamped with the name of the user who created it.

 

Keep your children out of the middle by documenting divorce communications

Try one of the above solutions to help reduce conflict between you and your co-parent. Whatever strategy you and your co-parent use for documenting divorce communications, it is important to remember to not use your children as messengers between the two of you. Using your children as messengers will expose them to any argument or fight that you might have with your ex. Relying on the children to relay information also leaves room for misinterpretation. Documenting divorce communications helps co-parents to stay conflict free for the most important goal, the health and wellbeing of your children.