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…

• Send your child a back to school care package with cool pencils, folder, notebooks or even back to school clothes.
• Call your child on the morning of his/her first day of school before school to wish them luck and/or after school to check on how their day went.
• Keep a binder, folder or letter tray for your child’s school information, progress reports etc for that year. At the end of the year, close it up, stash it and start a new one.

This is a really touchy situation from the mailbox.

First, I would recommend finding support - either through this site or the other sites out there geared towards long distance parenting. Via these resources, start to put together a realistic idea of what you’re facing before you make your final decision. It’s a hard road to hack and not every parenting relationship is cut out to handle it.

If there is one thing I work with on a regular basis with my life coaching clients who are parents, it is to walk the walk. Kids are smart and they read more between the lines then they actually do the lines themselves.. because let’s face it… they don’t listen to a word we say.

If you’ve decided to move, you HAVE to be able to see it as a positive yourself or you are not going to be able to convince your child to see the positives. If you see it as a horrible thing, your child will pick up on that and see it as a…

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…