During a highly contested divorce or custody battle, the last person you may want to talk to is the other parent. However, when there is an extensive visitation schedule involved, it is necessary for parents to continue communicating in a respectful manner. Luckily, there are online and mobile programs that exist to help parents reduce friction during high-conflict times. These applications are so useful that family courts often order parents to utilize them, with the goal that users will parent with less conflict.
Our Family Wizard is a helpful tool that allows parents to easily coordinate parenting schedules and even keeps track of actual visitation that took place. This helps to avoid any confusion as to who spent what amount of time with the children, for the purpose of retroactively calculating child support amounts. Parents can also easily request a trade in visitation through the calendar function of the application. There is even a way parents can keep track of expenses for visitations and share their child’s health records, immunization histories, school information, and more in the information bank.
Talking Parents is another useful website. It focuses more on another important feature – storing secure, reliable and accurate records of parental communications. Both applications keep track of exact messages sent by each parent. The parents don’t have to worry about if an email was deleted or tampered with. The added benefit of this feature is that parents are usually more likely to not be mean, rude, threatening or withholding on these apps when they know that it is being tracked by a third party, and can easily be downloaded and presented to a court. It also encourages settlement outside of court when each parent can quickly log into the application and access a record of whatever issues may be in dispute. That way they don’t waste valuable time and money in court with a “he said/she said” debate.
Although TalkingParents.com has fewer features, it is possible to create a free account, whereas Our Family Wizard costs $99 for a full year subscription.
The purpose for using these online tools is to help bring about a working relationship within the family. Even when parents get along well enough to discuss matters on their own, it is still a good idea for them to keep a permanent log of all important decisions and disputes regarding their children.