Divorce

Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way

Kids tend to blame themselves when parents divorce. The Sandcastles workshop--now mandatory in over a dozen counties throughout the United States--is a half-day group session for children of divorce between the ages of 6 and 17. This intensive workshop helps kids open up and deal with their feelings through drawings, games, poetry, role playing, and other activities. Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce details many of the workshop exercises, all designed to increase communication, understanding, and togetherness between parents and kids. The book is also packed full of suggestions on everything from the best way to break the divorce news to a child (it differs according to age group) to facing the holidays, visitation, custody arrangements, anger, discipline, co-parenting, single parenting, overcompensation, sorrow, custody fights, and much more.

Author Gary Neuman never patronizes or preaches, and although he is technically a child advocate, he proves himself to be an advocate of every member of the divorcing family. Neuman takes a hands-on approach and believes that children need not be permanently scarred by divorce--that with work and time, divorce can actually become a positive force for change. A powerful tool for protecting children caught amid parental struggles, Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce should be required reading in all divorcing families. --Ericka Lutz

Divorce is painful and confusing. Perhaps now more than ever, you want to give your child all the love, support, and guidance he or she needs, but everything seems harder and more complicated. Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way can help. Based on Gary Neuman's phenomenally successful Sandcastles program, which has helped more than fifty thousand children cope with divorce, this warm, empathetic guide shows you:


  How to build a co-parenting relationship--even when you think you can't

  When you or your child should see a therapist

   Age-appropriate scripts for addressing sensitive issues

  What to do when a parent moves away

  How to stop fighting with your ex-spouse

  How to navigate the emotional turmoil of custody and visitation

  How to help your child deal with change

  How to cope with kids' common fears about separation

  How to introduce significant others into the family and help your child cope with a new stepfamily

More than a hundred pieces of artwork from children of divorce will help you appreciate how kids perceive the experience. Dozens of special activities and fun exercises will help you communicate and get closer to your child. This guide shows you that divorce need not be an inevitable blot on children's lives, but an opportunity for them to grow and strengthen the bonds with their parents.

Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends, 3rd Edition (Rebuilding Books; For Divorce and Beyond)

Internationally renowned divorce therapist Bruce Fisher and his 700,000-copy bestselling guide, Rebuilding: When Your Relationship Ends, have made the long and difficult process of divorce recovery a lot easier. FisherÆs divorce process rebuilding blocks offer a proven, supportive nineteen-step process for putting oneÆs life back together after divorce. Built on more than two decades of research and practice, Rebuilding reflects feedback from, and the experiences of hundreds of thousands of divorced men and women who have read and used Rebuilding. Clearly the most widely used approach to divorce recovery, FisherÆs rebuilding model has made the divorce process less traumatic, even healthier, for his readers. The third edition, revised and updated with the assistance of psychologist and marriage and family therapist Dr. Robert Alberti, continues BruceÆs tradition of straight-to-the-heart response to the needs of those who are divorcing or divorced.

The Grief Recovery Handbook : The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death Divorce, and Other Losses

Incomplete recovery from grief can have a lifelong negative effect on your capacity for happiness. Drawing from their own histories, as well as from others, the authors illustrate what grief is and how it is possible to recover and regain energy and spontaneity. Based on a proven program, now extensively revised, The Grief Recovery Handbook offers grievers the specific actions needed to complete the grieving process and accept loss. For those ready to regain a sense of aliveness, the principles outlined here make this a life-changing handbook.

Divorce Poison: Protecting the Parent-Child Bond from a Vindictive Ex

Your ex-spouse is bad-mouthing you to your children, perhaps even trying to turn them against you. If you handle the situation ineffectively, you could lose your children's respect, their affection -- even, in extreme cases, contact with them.

Backed by twenty-five years of experience in helping families, Dr. Richard Warshak presents powerful strategies for dealing with everything from tainted parent-child relationships in which children are disrespectful or reluctant to show their affection to disturbances in which children virtually disown an entire side of the family.

Divorce Poison offers advice on how to:

• Recognize early warning signs of trouble
• React if your children refuse to see you
• Respond to rude and hateful behavior
• Avoid the seven most common errors made by rejected parents

This groundbreaking work gives parents powerful strategies to preserve and rebuild loving relationships with their children and provides legal and mental-health professionals with practical advice to help their clients and ensure the welfare of children.

Married to Me: How Committing to Myself Led to Triumph After Divorce

Former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres shares her secrets for a happy, fulfilling life after divorce.

After her divorce from music superstar Marc Anthony, Dayanara Torres had to learn firsthand how to handle the challenges of starting over and creating the healthiest environment possible for her two sons and herself. The most important lesson she learned is that the commitment a woman makes to herself is just as important as the commitment she made to her spouse on their wedding day. Dayanara resiliently vowed to honor and respect herself, and in Married to Me she helps other women do the same.

As a single mom, Dayanara could not find a handbook that said: “This happened to me. Now, let’s move forward.” So, in Married to Me, she walks women through the critical stages of redefining their life after a divorce: accepting and preparing, rebuilding, and rediscovering happiness and self. Dayanara offers honest advice, personal mantras, and effective tips on family, lifestyle, beauty, and health, so that women can learn to move beyond the pain and tears, establish a new family dynamic, discover new passions, and build new relationships. Like Dayanara, readers will discover a life within themselves that is beyond their wildest dreams.

Split: A Memoir of Divorce

Bestselling and award-winning author Suzanne Finnamore writes a story of divorce that is “brilliant” (Augusten Burroughs) and sure to become a classic.

There are certain books that come to epitomize their painful subject matter, offering solace to those who share the same fate and pleasure to those who merely appreciate fine writing. What The Year of Magical Thinking did for grief, what Drinking: A Love Story did for alcoholism, now Split does for divorce. Prescriptive yet full of pragmatic advice, insight and black humor, Split is a finely wrought tourniquet for a broken union and its attendant trauma.

Suzanne Finnamore, author of the novel Otherwise Engaged, didn’t see it coming. Well, perhaps she saw something—for example, a cocktail napkin on which her husband, N, had scribbled a Cole Porter love song and someone else’s name—but she refused to acknowledge it. She was busy tending to their one-year-old son, then applying makeup, donning high heels, and mixing a martini to greet N with when he arrived home at night. Until the night N came home, told her she looked beautiful, changed his clothes, and announced that he was leaving.

In crystalline, riveting prose, Finnamore tells the story of her divorce, and her marriage, and how it all imploded and came back together, changed. At once quite funny, achingly sad, and unflinchingly fierce, Split will resonate with anyone whoÂ’s endured the end of a relationship.

Getting Past the Affair: A Program to Help You Cope, Heal, and Move On -- Together or Apart

It's Not Your Fault, Koko Bear: A Read-Together Book for Parents and Young Children During Divorce (Lansky, Vicki)

How do you talk to your children about your divorce? How can you best handle their responses? Here's a children's book and parenting tool rolled into one. It's Not Your Fault, Koko Bear is a picture book designed to be read by parents to their children. Koko Bear's parents are getting a divorce, and Koko, a preschool-aged unisex bear, isn't happy about it. "I don't like this divorce. I don't want two homes," Koko says. Koko Bear's story doesn't minimize kids' pain, but it doesn't wallow in it either. The message is positive: children are reassured that their feelings are natural, that their parents still love and will care for them, and that the divorce is not their fault. At the bottom of each page, there are bullet points for parents that give information and advice about what the kids are going through, and the best way to handle each issue as it arises. (Ages 3 to 7 and parents)

The Divorce Organizer & Planner

This one-of-a-kind workbook streamlines the divorce process

This completely unique guide helps anyone —even someone enduring a not-so-easy split—create a complete, accessible record of absolutely everything needed to confidently tackle, organize, and prepare for the legal, emotional, and financial aspects of divorce. Family attorney Brette McWhorter Sember’s The Divorce Planner & Organizer includes:

• Suggestions for selecting an attorney and getting the most legal help for the dollar
• Tips on how to gather and organize information for easy access during legal proceedings
• Advice on required documentation for homes, cars, investments, bank accounts, debts, insurance, and household expenses
• A tracker to record alimony, child support payments, and children’s medical, educational, and athletic expenses
• A personal property inventory and wish list, a budget form, and fill-in contact information lists

The Co-Parenting Survival Guide: Letting Go of Conflict after a Difficult Divorce

This book helps parents in the aftermath of divorce learn to sustain a healthy co-parenting relationship. “Conflict and Parenting” explores parental conflict and its effects on children, conflict resolution, and the importance of forging a co-parenting relationship. “Co-Parenting Guidelines” offers specifics for solving day-to-day problems, disciplining, and handling conflict during transitional times and special events.