my ex does not support my relationship with my teenage daughters

Here is an excerpt from e-mail that I received from my ex-wife. As you can tell by the tone of this message, she is very angry, for some reason. And it is obvious that she has no inclination to help me with my relationship with my children. I appreciate anything you could suggest...

The email in question, which I did not include in order to preserve confidentiality, was about trying to schedule time with his older teenage daughters. His ex is refusing to facilitate this, and his daughters are not responding to the messages or texts he sends directly to their cell phones. Below is my reply:

Ouch! There does indeed seem to be quite a bit of hostility in her communication. How disheartening and discouraging this must be for you.

In situations like this, I think all you can really do is continue to take the high road, even when your ex does not. Especially when she does not.

At some point, (and I believe, the sooner the better), you will want to drop the idea or hope that she will support your relationship with your girls, and stop seeking her assistance in any way.

I know this is a huge thing to let go of, because yes, it is reasonable to hope that your co-parent would be your ally. It's just not likely to happen in this situation, from what I can tell. And almost certainly not likely to happen before your daughters come of age. So I think your communication efforts would be more likely to bear fruit if invested in the girls directly.

I suspect you'll eliminate a huge energy drain if you can adjust your expectations to include your ex's hostility. In other words, stop hoping/expecting that she will be reasonable or nice.

After doing so, you can make appropriate accommodations like contacting the girls directly, and not asking your ex to fill you in, run interference, bring you up to speed, or in any other way facilitate your contact with them.

I suspect it will be a huge relief for you to mentally remove her from that role. Resisting how she is and trying to make her how you wish she would be costs a lot of energy. It's like tilting at windmills. It might be a lot easier to just go around the obstacle she represents rather than knock her down or convince her to join forces with you.

So basically, I'm suggesting you may want to permanently remove your ex from your list of ways to contact the girls/have a relationship with them. Don't ask her for her help again.

Continue meet your financial support obligations, of course. And keep contacting the girls, kindly and gently, with no expectation of reciprocity. Do this to satisfy your own integrity, so that you can know that you have done your part by being available.

The rest, up to and including how often you see them, is not within your control. Please understand that I don't mean to minimize or misrepresent how painful it can be to have something so important to us be out of our hands! But the sooner we can accept the truth about what we can control and what we can't, the sooner we can acknowledge the pain of feeling powerless, and the sooner our grieving and healing process can begin.

When you lift off your hopes and expectations, and have done some grieving work about the losses you have sustained, you may find that your daughters begin to approach you on their own terms -- not because they should, or because you deserve it, even though both of those may be true. Rather because they WANT to have a relationship with you. Your job is to make sure you are the kind of person they would want in their lives. That's all you can really do...

I hope this helps. My sympathies are with you - challenges like this are the hardest thing many of us will face in a lifetime. I hope you have some good friends who are willing to listen while you vent your perfectly normal and natural feelings of sadness and frustration.

For more information about Karen's parenting consultations, click here or visit http://www.karenalonge.com/

my parenting book recommendations

Parents often ask me for book recommendations, and I'm sometimes at a bit of a loss because I rarely come across a book that I can endorse without reservation. (I'm very, very picky!)

So before I suggest a title, I typically issue the disclaimer that I hope parents will see books and other parenting resources not as instruction manuals to be followed rigidly or blindly, but rather as sources of ideas to contemplate, experiment with, and customize.

That said, here are a few resources that have been inspiring and informative for me:

http://www.handinhandparenting.org/ (Which is obviously not a book, but a website with lots of great articles, plus some inexpensive pamphlets that can be ordered.)

Becoming the Parent You Want To Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser

Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles: Winning for a Lifetime by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka

The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children By Ross Greene

Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It by Gabor Mate

Please Stop the Rollercoaster!: How Parents of Teenagers Can Smooth Out the Ride by Sue Blaney

Joint Custody with a Jerk: Raising a Child with an Uncooperative Ex, A Hands on, practical guide to coping with custody issues that arise with an uncooperative ex-spouse by Ross and Corcoran (and I have to go on record as saying I REALLY don't like this title, but the content is excellent. I recommend using a book cover because it pains me to think of a child thinking that one parent considers the other to be a jerk!)

I have posted a rather extensive list of recommended resources on many topics, including parenting, on my other website: http://www.karenalonge.com/resource.htm. I haven't updated it to include my up-to-the-minute favorites, but there's enough there to keep you busy for quite a while.

I'd love to hear your recommendations, so please let me know about your favorites by posting a comment, so others can enjoy them as well!

For more information about Karen's parenting consultations, click here or visit http://www.karenalonge.com/

a little parental silliness can save the day

Learned something interesting from a client today. When her kids are frowning, she tells them that's great, because she's making frown soup and she could use another frown to throw in the pot.

Then she chases them around and tries to grab the frown off their face, and of course they end up laughing and smiling, and then she acts all bummed that she can't have the frown for her soup, and they gloat with glee.

When they whine, she says Oh, good, I could use some whine in my frown soup because it makes it nice and spicy. And then she chases them around trying to catch the whine, and they all end up giggling.

Frowning happens to be their family issue, but I bet this could be adapted for other issues, too. There are very few issues that can't be resolved with the silly treatment.

Doesn't have to be soup, necessarily. When my kids were little, they absolutely loved when their dad would wrap them up in blankets and roll them around like he was making them into burritos. Periodically he would say Oops, I forgot to add the beans (or cheese, or good manners, or sharing hands, or whatever the desired behavior was), then unwrap the blankets, tickle them a little, wrap them up and roll them around again.

My client reported that she's really been working on not getting caught up in her kids moods/issues and not taking them so seriously. She's been singing goofy songs and making up games as much as possible, and her days are now much less stressful than when she thought she had to stop and get serious and address every infraction every time.

So there's a few ideas to fuel your creative parenting engine. I'd love to hear what other kind of silly games you play with your kids to lighten things up at your house!

For more information about Karen's parenting consultations, click here or visit www.karenalonge.com

what to do when your child whines, "It's not fair!"

My kids whine that it's not fair when one of them gets something the others don't, like a goody bag at a birthday party. What do I say to them when they tell me that I should buy them a treat, too, to make it fair?

Ah, yes. This one is a classic! Although we parents know that life isn't always fair, a whining child is not exactly receptive to that lesson in that moment.

So first, give empathy -- perhaps by saying, "You really wish you could have a goody bag, too."

That may be enough. They may simply work through their disappointment by crying a bit, then let it go.

Or not. If they continue to beg you to buy them a treat too so they can feel better, then neutrally refuse to make things "fair", perhaps by saying simply, "No honey, I'm not going to do that."

That will probably bring tears to the surface. Stay present and listen compassionately while they release their upset feelings about it, with no attempt to convince them to feel differently.

Realize that their feelings are probably not just about this incident, so the outburst may seem to be blown out of proportion. What they are actually doing is adjusting themselves to the reality that life is NOT fair, and that can take some time and effort to accomplish.

In a way, the child is grieving the death of the dream that they will always have everything they want the moment they want it. That's a big one. Let them have their process while you stay nearby. Feel free to physically hold or comfort them if they want you to and you can stay calm. Stay engaged, loving them, and trusting that when they release those feelings, they will feel much better inside.

When the feeling storm passes, and it will, your child will be much more accepting and affectionate again. It's okay for a child to cry in the loving presence of a warm and caring adult. Tears can wash the heart and mind clean of painful expectations and disappointments, and bring us back to the present moment.

You might even say to your children, "I'll keep you company while you cry, honey." That teaches them not to be afraid of expressing their emotions so they don't keep them bottled up inside. They will also learn from experience that no emotion lasts forever, and develop trust that a feeling that is expressed will run its course and they will feel better with it out of their system.

So don't rush too fast to fix everything for your child so they don't feel pain. Crying can serve a healthy purpose when it happens in the loving presence of a caring adult.

If you resonate with this approach, you might also enjoy the articles at http://www.handinhandparenting.com/.

For more information about Karen's parenting consultations, click here or visit http://www.karenalonge.com/