My experience with Child Inclusive Practice (CIP)
The best interests of the children are always a priority in family law mediations. Sometimes it can be difficult to gauge exactly what children, when their parents are separating, need or want as it is common to hear two opposing views from the parents. Perhaps also it is the child telling the parents two different things to please them both.
Where exactly does the truth lie, which parent actually knows what their child needs most, or sometimes the question to ask is which of these parents can put their child’s needs ahead of their own needs or indeed put aside their animosity for their former spouse to focus on the child.
I have been involved in two recent cases where the parents had completely different views on what their children were needing.
One of the cases involved a mother asserting that the two children had expressed a desire to live mainly with her and only see their dad on weekends. The other involved a teenager wanting to go from living almost 50/50 with both parents to wanting to live predominantly with her father.
While the specific circumstances of each case of course differed, the question in both cases would be essentially what was going on for the children – what was the motivation for the teenager wanting to live solely with her father? And what was going on for the two children apparently wanting to live mainly with the mother?
Was the father of the two children accurate in saying that the mother was trying to manipulate the children? Was the mother being genuine in saying that she was being guided by the children?
With the teenager, both parents expressed a desire to gain insight into her wanting to change living arrangements. Could it simply be a case of teenage hormones or perhaps there was less discipline and more freedom in the father’s home which would obviously appeal to the child. There was no way for us to establish the legitimacy of either perspective without hearing from the child/ren themselves.
Both these cases I felt called for Child Inclusive Practice (CIP) which means bringing the voice of the child/ren to the mediation table by an outside third party, an experienced child consultant.
We often recommend it in cases where it is unclear exactly what the children need or want from their parents. Hearing two opposing perspectives from the parents can be due to several factors, perhaps the most common being one of conflicting loyalty the child feels for both parents. Children generally do not want to hurt either parent by sharing how they really feel. The introduction of a child consultant provides the opportunity for them to speak openly.
In both these cases, the parents agreed to the CIP process. The parents need to be supportive and in fact brave enough to give their child the opportunity to speak and to be heard in a formal process.
The interview with the child includes their feelings about the current living arrangements and their hopes for the future, without placing them in a position of having to say or decide what they want. It is a highly skilled interview which will account for each age and situation. Care is taken not to promise any particular outcome to the child, but rather to assure them that everything possible will be done to help their parents better understand their children’s experiences and what they are needing from their parents.
To get back to the two recent cases I was involved with, the children met with our child consultant and she later provided feedback to the parents within the mediation setting. In the first case, the child consultant had the difficult task of telling the mother that the two children did not in fact want to live with her the majority of the time but were content with the current arrangement of 50/50.
One of the main things to come out was that both children told the child consultant that they would like their mother to give them more independence and that they wanted her to stop questioning their time with their dad as they felt guilty every time they saw him.
With the second case, the teenager said that she was very angry at her mother as she felt the mother was the major cause of the breakdown of the marriage and she felt she no longer trusted or respected her. In this case, it was a question of re-establishing the parent-child relationship, and the child consultant recommended family therapy for the child and parents.
In both cases, it was difficult for the parents to hear the voices of their children. Without a `doubt, it is a very confronting and emotional process. But what we, as mediators most commonly see is that the parents stop being so positional and can move into a place of understanding and some acceptance of the situation.
I have found CIP to be a powerful intervention which supports both the child’s need to be heard and understood as well as a powerful tool to help re-establish the co-parenting relationship.
While parents are sometimes hesitant to expose their children to yet another element which may add to their confusion in the separation/divorce of their parents, almost all of the CIP mediations that I have been involved with have been extremely valuable to both the parents and the children. I will therefore always, when appropriate and when it appears to be in the best interests of the children and families that we work with, recommend CIP as a powerful way of helping families move out of the cycle of conflict and towards a more unified unit.