Help Your Clients to Co-Parent Better
As an attorney who deals with divorce and/or family law, you have an extremely difficult job. Beyond the practice of law, you have to deal with two people who are often at war with one another. Getting them to communicate is often nearly impossible and emotions almost always run extremely hot no matter how benign the topic at hand might seem to be.
Co-Parent Hub can be a huge help in these situations. When your client and his/her soon-to-be ex simply cannot communicate, the kids suffer, as do all the businesses and organizations that surround all these parties. Co-Parent Hub can help people in dysfunctional co-parenting relationships to avoid much of the need to communicate with each other.
How Does It Work?
Co-Parent Hub is very simple. We assign a phone number (Co-Phone) and email address (Co-Email) to the co-parents. All calls, SMS messages, and emails are then routed to BOTH parents, at the same time. This way, one parent cannot keep the other in the dark, nor is one parent saddled with the responsibility of constantly having to inform the other of what’s going on. In many cases, this completely avoids the sources of conflict and improves the ability of the two people to co-parent.
But Wait, There’s More!
As you know so well, along with communication, money and custody are the other legs of this conflict trifecta. That’s why we have tools to deal with these hot-button issues also. Each Co-Parent Hub user gets access to Co-Swap and Co-Expense.
Co-Swap
Co-Swap solves several headaches. First, even for co-parents who get along reasonably well, planning out custody swaps can be a nightmare. Having to figure out which days, nights, or hours are going to be swapped for the time requested can be an arduous process. We realized that if the two halves of this process were broken apart, the whole thing becomes easier. What most don’t realize is that the reason for all the 1-for-1 swapping is because neither parent wants to be cheated out of custodial time. Well that can be most-easily achieved by simply keeping score. We allow the co-parents to requests swaps, and when approved by the other parent, the swapped time goes into the losing-parent’s Swap Bank, much like an IOU system. In the future, when the formerly losing-parent needs to swap the other direction, any matching time will be canceled out and the score updated. This way both co-parents can monitor how far out of balance the custody time has gotten and then adjust accordingly.
A key benefit of this approach is that it helps to avoid negotiations and helps keep the parents from acting out of fear because they know that the time will be properly recorded and an historical record will always be able to be referenced.
Co-Expense
Co-Expense works in a similar manner to Co-Swap. The co-parents can submit expenses for items that are supposed to be a shared financial burden. They can be split 50/50 or in whatever proportions the co-parents wish. Receipts can be uploaded for proof, and the expenses will stack up in a tidy list. The co-parents can see how far out of balance the share of expenses has gotten and choose to “settle up” the balance whenever they wish. There’s no need to go line by line to settle each expense. That approach would create countless payments back and forth and is a true nightmare to keep track of. Co-Parent Hub enables a single payment to settle all outstanding debts.
As you can see, Co-Parent Hub is an ideal tool for helping your clients to avoid conflict and in turn, be better co-parents.
Does It Really Work?
Yes! Co-Parent Hub was created by Alex Pelli, a single dad of two wonderful girls. After his divorce, he cobbled together a combination of other services to create a prototype of the Co-Parent Hub app we know and love today.
Alex and his ex have been successful co-parents since the girls were just 3 years old, largely thanks to the Co-Parent Hub prototype he created. Now Co-Parent Hub is available to everyone and it’s Alex’s hope that many other co-parents can benefit from the tools that served him well for over a decade. 