Florham Park New Jersey Family Law Blog

Divorce for couples who adopted a child together can come with even more concerns and guilt than parents with only biological children face. Unless you adopted your child as an infant, you may be concerned that they've already experienced too much upheaval in their life. You're worried about how this new change to their family structure will impact them.

If your child's biological mother is part of your lives, you may be concerned that you're letting her down. You were likely a happy couple when you adopted your child and presented a promise of stability that she was unable to provide. Now that's changed.

If you and your spouse are going to be splitting custody of your children 50/50 after the divorce, you're probably looking at various schedules that allow you each to have the children an equal amount of time. Alternating weeks is one way to go, and it has its advantages. It cuts down on the number of exchanges you have to make, for example. If you are going to live close to one another and your children's schools, you may be considering it.

However, this type of schedule may not be a good idea if you have young children. Children and even preteens can experience separation anxiety or even develop a more serious anxiety disorder if they're away from one parent for a whole week. Even if you arrange for the parent without custody for the week to have dinner with the kids a couple of times, that may not be enough.

If you and your co-parent are going to be living some distance apart after your divorce, you'll need to include some provisions in your parenting plan regarding the specifics of long-distance co-parenting. Whether your child lives with you most of the time and visits the other parent only during vacations or the two of you are sharing custody, it's essential to include more than your parenting schedule in your plan.

Maybe you and your co-parent will be living a couple of hours away from each other or perhaps you'll be on separate coasts. Either way, having these details in place can make things go more smoothly for everyone and ease the stress on your child:

No one -- particularly couples with kids -- wants a messy, combative divorce, but sometimes it happens. Maybe your soon-to-be-ex isn't handling the break-up well and always seems to be picking fights. Maybe the two of you are nowhere close to agreeing on things like property division, support, child custody and other issues, and that impacts your interactions.

Meanwhile, the two of you have to maintain some contact because you're co-parenting. So how do you keep the tensions between you from impacting your children?