FamilyConnex®

Are you a single parent who cares deeply for the well being of your children? Do you face a growing number of activities, responsibilities, and demands on your time?  Are you are a busy mom or dad hoping to craft a parenting agreement that focuses on what’s best for your children? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Family Connex program was designed for you!

Going to court is expensive. Going to court to have judges who don’t know your children make decisions about them is even more expensive – financially and emotionally.  Family Connex recognizes that you — not the judges — are the expert on your child. It gives you the tools to apply what you know about your child’s needs and each parent’s strengths to a customized plan that works for your family.

Through Family Connex you will work at a pace that is comfortable for you while developing an approach to co-parenting that serves your needs and the needs of your children.  Despite the many challenges of being a single parent, the time you spend with your children offers a unique opportunity to help them grow into healthy, productive human beings. You have the power to create and enhance loving connections between you and your children and to develop civil, constructive relationships with your child’s other parent. Family Connex will teach you to forge a child-focused, parent-initiated Parent Plan that works for you and for your child.

Children grow and thrive, not only when their parents love them but when they know them and treat each child as a unique entity with different needs from their siblings based on their personality and age appropriate developmental needs.

The tools which are available at www.familyconnex.org help parents address the psychological, intellectual, interpersonal and safety and security needs of each of their children.

Family Connex is an online program that helps parents create a parenting plan based on the needs of their children. The program contains three parts:

Needs Assessment- It helps you to focus on the important areas of your child’s development, unique challenges, personality and also helps you to look at your parenting strengths and weaknesses. One of the outcomes of doing this is that you realize that each of your children has enough needs for both parents to remain actively involved. Once you have the needs identified, you can then discuss with each other, or with a third party, how to put together a parent agreement that is based on the work you have completed with the Needs Assessment. You will probably see that you have more areas of agreement than disagreement. You can use the Needs Assessment to guide you to develop your parent plan.

The Parent Plan - The parent plan is a product- it is the culmination of your work completing the needs assessment and then coming together to work on the final product – the parent plan. The parenting plan that you and your child’s other parent agree to is an extremely important document because it defines each child’s personality and needs and how each parent will meet those needs, now and in the future. Coming together to work on a plan is not an easy task. You may still be angry, hurt, sad or worried about the end of your relationship with your child’s other parent. Please use the Parent Plan Manual and the reading and resource list if you need help.

No matter how difficult, this plan is worth the effort. You are teaching your children that their needs come first and that the people who they love most in this world can treat each other with dignity and respect.

The Parent Manual, a downloadable document available on www.familyconnex.org is written to address special challenges, conflict between parents and other issues. The manual can and should be used as an ongoing reference. It helps you to keep the child focused mind set and see that there are ways to resolve complex situations.

The Parent Manual can be used as a tool, particularly in helping parents manage co parent conflict and learning challenges, mental illness, substance abuse. There is no “perfect” family and every family has little and big difficulties. This program offers a way to address these challenges without blame and without loss of one’s role as parent. The manual can help keep you in “shape” as parents and co parents.

Professionals using www.familyconnex.org have a structure to assist them in mediating, counseling and reviewing parent plans; thus this program is appropriate for lawyers, judges, mediators, collaborative law professionals and mental health professionals. Mediators use this program with parents when they are focusing on parent agreements regarding their clients’ children. Lawyers and judges can use the Needs Assessments as guides to obtaining needed information that will help them in their decision making, advice to parents and resources that parents need.