My son is young and I have been out of his life probably for as long as he can remember. I would like to start contact again but I don’t even know where to start. Any tips on how to start or what to do?

I would recommend talking to a child psychologist to get some good insight. They be able to give you good pointers and reliable advice based upon your specific situation and your specific child - and should you ever need to go to court, that is a mature, responsible approach that will be on your side.

Past that, slow and easy. Write letters or cards, even if you live in the same city. Do supervised visitation for a while to make sure he feels completely comfortable with you before you ask for unsupervised time. Don’t expect miracles and try to remain humble and hopeful even if you have a tough day. Get onto a schedule that he can depend upon. Be reliable. Don’t make promises you won’t keep and keep all of the…

So you’re in one place, your child is in another and they are getting ready to go back to school. As a long distance parent, if you want to keep up with your child, how they are doing and what they are doing, school is a big part of that. Your child spends a good portion of their life in school so the school has a lot of information about how your child is doing. The school is also obligated by law to cooperate with you.

Here are the first steps to getting involved in your child’s schooling.

Here is a letter to send to the school to remind them of your rights as a parent. You should send this each year, just to be safe.

Once you’ve got all of that under your belt, they key is to be persistent. It never fails that the school will ‘forget’ to keep you in the loop and the other parent will think it is unnecessary. It is necessary and you have to be your own advocate. Insist… politely, perhaps, but insist…

When someone tells me they are getting a divorce and the other parent will be getting physical custody of the child(ren), there is one piece of advice I always give them. It is : Make your parenting plan EXACTLY what you want no matter how wonderful your relationship with the other parent is right now, no matter how idealistic your views of co-parenting may be… plan for the worst.

My ex and I split quite peacefully. There was some pain and hurt - but we were friends. We wanted our son to always have both parents. We wanted to cooperate and co-parent even though we were separated. We had a verbal agreement and even went so far as to take it to an attorney to make it official (we thought “WOW… that’s a stretch… make it legal?! We don’t need to do all that, do we?”).

Then his mother and then, girlfriend got involved. Oddly, the attorney disappeared along with the written agreement. Suddenly, he simply was not going to give me my son, as we…

Along my journey gathering community around long distance parenting, I’ve read and seen a lot of things regarding divorce, child custody, non-custodial parents, deadbeat parents and parental alienation syndrome. One thing that sticks out to me is how gender biased the stories typically are.

Rather than being centered around parents in general, it’s about fathers or mothers or men or women. Take for example this post by Richard Gardener. He all but blames the advent of parental alienation syndrome upon mothers even going so far as to say :

We see here how those who deny the existence of PAS are adding formidably to the grief of women. Women’s past denial and discrediting of PAS has now come back to haunt them. Women are now being injured by their own weapons, or, as the old saying goes, they are being “hoist by their own pitards.”

That is one of the most ridiculous, one sided, prejudiced things I’ve ever read. Granted, mothers were often awarded physical custody based primarily upon the fact that they were women not…