Pros and Cons of Parenting Apps
Are you constantly texting your soon-to-be-ex about the children in all caps and adding things that don’t need to be there, like, how you’ve always hated his mother? And how you just can’t stand his personality?
Let’s talk about why you should be using a parenting app and why you should stop texting your-soon-to-be-ex. Co-parenting after a divorce or during a divorce can be contentious and complicated. And, what adds fuel to the fire a lot of the time, at least from what our family law attorneys have seen here in Golden and the surrounding Denver area, is parties texting each other and ranting in the texts. Almost no good can come of that. What we found is that parents tend to behave with one another if they are talking about the children through an app that they know can be used in court. The first app that we generally recommend the parties agree to, and there are a number of apps out there, of course, is Talking Parents.
What to look for in a co-parenting app:
Talking Parents
Talking Parents is an app that costs $10 a month and it can help parents coordinate schedules. The messages back and forth cannot be deleted. They can’t be edited. This is a good thing because it tends to keep people behaving badly with one another.
This helps to keep the focus on the children. Our firm always encourages people to do just that. Sometimes when people don’t have an app, the texting just spins out of control and it doesn’t have anything to do with the children and it’s not helpful.
Our Family Wizard
Another app that we recommend that’s great for co-parenting, and that’s during or after a divorce, is Our Family Wizard. Now Our Family Wizard is $99 a year. It can be used on an Android or an iPhone. And one of the things I really like about it is that you do a shared calendar on it. You can also figure out expenses. This is great because it can help track where the money goes. Imagine you have a kid in club soccer for $30,000 a year plus travel expenses. How nice would it be to track exactly what gets spent and what doesn’t? This isn’t about proving one parent wrong and shaming them for going over or under budget. It’s about having recorded evidence so that it doesn’t turn into a ‘he-said, she-said.’ That’s ultimately what parenting apps can help in accomplish: reduced conflict.
WeParent
A third app that’s I think pretty good is called WeParent, it has a lot of features that you might like. For example, shared contacts and shared schedules and to do lists. So, a couple of features that maybe some of the others don’t include. We believe that this really takes a lot of stress out of co-parenting as many of these apps do. In this day and age where we can have an app for almost anything on our phones, consider having an app that’s going to make co-parenting less stressful.
We always recommend that for our clients. And if you have any questions at all, about co-parenting and lessening the conflict, give us a call here at The Drake Law Firm. We’re standing by and we’re happy to help.
