The parents split up, but the kids got the house!
Great story kellibelli!
Hmm…think about it. The kids’ parents are homeless now. THAT can’t be good! 
But what is the mothr supposed to do during the week she sin’t there. You don’t get an apartment to live in one week a month. Does she go to a hotel? Pack it in at a hotel. I just don’t think this is viable. This destroys the parents lives, and gives the children an empowerment feeling. It makes me wonder how those kids behave… The kids can’t be getting a good idea of how a relationship and childhood should be with their parents being shifted in and out of the house. Giving the 13 year old the keys to the house. Does anyone else see something wrong with this?
Dont you get it?
And bumping kids back and forth between parents and homes and schools is better?
I assume the dad has an apartment, and the mother stays with parents or friends for a week.
I think it is a brilliant way to restore the sanity and security a child loses when they lose the cohesive parental unit.
I do wonder what arrangements the couple in that story are making; maybe they haven’t worked it out yet. I recall hearing about a couple who did something similar, what they did was rent an apartment, and when one was at the house, the other was at the apartment. This of course demands an amicable relationship–that couple came up with the plan on their own–and a willingness to put the children first.
finally, a logical judge. very, very, rare.
BUt what is this telling the kids. I can only think of two outcomes
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“mom and Dad really love us because they will sacrifice themselves to keep us in hte same home and work around us.”
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“We are in control. The government says that our parents have to rearrange everything parents have to rearrange everything around us. We even have the keys to the house and rooms. Dad says I’m grounded, but I’m just gonna remind him that this is MY house!”
I can understand these kids being catered to because of the security of the single home. But, why couldn’t they visit dad on weekends and have their own bedrooms at each house. They would still have their school friends. And if Dad and Mom stay close to one another. They would have the security that they always had. Only they wouldn’t be playing switcheroo of bedrooms and parents in the house.
just my opinion.
If I’d gotten my parents’ house when they split, we’d all be back together again. They both are now living with other relatives to make ends meet. I’m sure they would jump at the chance to crash with me if I had a house.
A friend of mine did this for a year. She and her husband divorced in their son’s last year of high school. She lived with her parents on her “off” week and her ex-husband got an apartment. Their son got to stay in his home and finish school and then when he graduated and went to college, she bought her husband’s share of the house. They never even really considered making the son shuttle back and forth–they put him first.
are you kidding? sanity and security? my parents divorced in 1990, when i was 10, and continued living in the same house for several years. it was TORTURE. sometimes people need seperation. that’s WHY they got divorced in the first place. forcing them to continue to interact with each other on a consistent basis, to share a house and childrearing duties, seems to me to be patently INsane. these are frequently the most contentious issues in a marriage! imagine being married to someone for a long time, making the mutual decision that it’s best for THE ENTIRE FAMILY to go your seperate ways, and then being forced to continue to share a house with the person that, for whatever reason, you can no longer coexist with? talk about security? the 11 year old son sleeps in his mother’s bed one week a month. now there’s a blueprint for a psychologically healthy kid, no doubt. this is ridiculous. if your goal is to maintain a child’s sanity and security, you should aim towards preserving a “cohesive parental unit,” not towards gimmicks. not to mention what a logistical nightmare this must be. who makes the financial decisions about the house? who decides how to arrange the furniture? why would anyone wish all the difficulties and stresses of married life, without any of its benefits, on a family that clearly needs change? i just don’t get it.
white lightning I respectfully disagree…
What???
The mother isnt IN the bed! How could sleeping in a different bed mess him up? If he went to his fathers on weekends, he would sleep in a strange bed there wouldnt he?
In your references to your own family, I would agree of course that people that cannot be civil to each other, cannot be in each others company at all, would NOT benefit from an arrangement like this.
My parents could not have done it, but I could have, and would have, gladly.
The whole matter hinges on the post-breakup relationship of the parents.
No, you dont get it.
I think you are reading your own situation into the story. The parents are not there at the same time, its nothing like married life - they are only sharing the kids. The mother who has the house 3 weeks out of four would take care of all the normal stuff, and the father just keeps things tidy when he is there.
This isnt a ‘family that clearly needs to change’, you are projecting again. This is two adults that have decided they dont want to be married anymore. Why on earth should the kids pay the price for their decision?
Sadly, this wouldnt have worked for your parents or mine. You have alot of anger in your post, and I hurt for you. My parents split when I was 15, 16 years ago. So, two failed marriages later, I often wonder what my unresolved feelings contributed to my life. I hope you fare better than I have.
ahhh, and tubagirl, with your month long experience of married life, and the benefit of a two parent home, you say:
[quote]
BUt what is this telling the kids. I can only think of two outcomes
-
“mom and Dad really love us because they will sacrifice themselves to keep us in hte same home and work around us.”
-
“We are in control. The government says that our parents have to rearrange everything parents have to rearrange everything around us. We even have the keys to the house and rooms. Dad says I’m grounded, but I’m just gonna remind him that this is MY house!”
[quote]
I cant think of a reply to this. It is the most retarded thing I have ever read. Where from this story do you get the idea that the kids are selfish manipulators? And for petes sake!!! they dont have the keys to the house!! they have the keys to the locked rooms!!! Its NOT the kids’ house, it is the parents’house they just dont live there at the same time!
WRONG!!! Being a weekend parent is NOT THE SAME as being a day to day parent. The father will never ever have the relationship on weekends that he will have by helping with their homework, getting them up and off for school in the mornings, making their lunches, cooking dinner every night. Weekend dads rent movies, buy pizza, and forgo the discipline and structure for the fulltime parent. Weekend parents get to be the perpetual good guy, and the kids dont respect them as much.
And think about this: the family has a 3 bedroom home, hardly anything glamourous, I truly doubt they have paid it off in less that 15 years! So this means that they dont have that much money~~~how is dad gonna pay for a 3 bedroom home and pay child support & maybe alimony too? I bet he lives in a tiny apartment or with friends or family.
The LACK of a second 3 bedroom residence is probably how this arangement came up in the first place!
I dont know where you are drawing such venom about the kids from. When I read it, I wasnt jealous! I thought, "now HERE are some kids that are gonna grow up understanding commitment, responsibility and compromise. HERE are kids that might NOT grow up to run out on their own families because its easier than staying. HERE are kids that will have the benefit of TWO full time parents, without the stress of an unhappy home! HERE are kids that wont feel abandoned. They have TWO parents enforcing curfews, tucking them in, meeting their friends, caring for them when they are sick… I think they are the luckiest kids of divorce.
tubagirl, you have truly NO IDEA what is like when one parent bails on the other. The weekend parent gets to be the good guy, and the other parents gets all the bad cop work. When the kids are sick, its always the full time parent that misses work. The weekend parent doesnt take them when they are sick!they need to be home in their bed.
Kids of divorce are set adrift in a sea of the unknown. They are totally at the mercy of the parents whims and moods. “Who is picking me up?” “Where do I live this weekend?” “which parent is coming to my game/recital?”
When you have children, whether by choice, or accident, and you chose to carry the baby, keep and raise it, you owe that child. These kids didnt ask to be born, and they deserve the very best their parents can provide.
If people dont want to be inconvenienced by kids, they shouldnt have any.
The link seems to be broken, so here is the entire story:
I bolded one part for tubagirl.
Children of divorced parents typically shuffle between two households, but a B.C. judge has ruled that a 13-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother can continue to live in their family home in Nanaimo while their parents take turns living with them.
“The children … wish to live in the home to which they are accustomed, and which is very close to their school,” Justice James Taylor of the B.C. Supreme Court said in his August ruling, published in a lawyers’ journal yesterday. “In this time of turmoil, they need at least that stability.”
The judge ordered the mother to live with the children for three weeks a month and the father for one week a month. The two were ordered to keep separate, locked bedrooms in the house. The 13-year-old girl, who holds a babysitting certificate, was to be entrusted with the keys to the rooms, so she could open them in the case of an emergency.
“Each parent will be responsible to leave the residence for the other in a reasonably tidy manner,” Mr. Justice Taylor said.
In practice, because the house has only three bedrooms, the father sleeps in his son’s room during his one-week visit while his son sleeps in his mother’s room for the week, said Mike Warsh, the Nanaimo-based lawyer for Elizabeth Anne Roden, 34, the mother of the two children.
“The sharing of the matrimonial home isn’t going too badly, it’s going relatively well,” Mr. Warsh said. “She doesn’t mind it – it’s okay with her.”
Kristen Rongve, who represents Sean Thomas Roden, 36, the father of the two children, said she has seen this type of order once in the past.
“I think that Mr. Justice Taylor recognized that both parents love the children a great deal and wanted them to continue to enjoy a relatively significant amount of contact with the children,” said Ms. Rongve.
About 15 years ago in Toronto, one particular officer of the court charged with arranging interim custody routinely ordered children to stay in the home while parents shuttled back and forth, said Joel Miller, a family law lawyer. That exceptional circumstance aside, such orders are rare.
While he said the decision shows how creative the court can be in settling family law matters, in practice, it would be difficult for two people who can’t get along to have to continue to share a ketchup bottle and household chores.
“I can see it being a very serious social burden on the respective parents,” he said.
The B.C. decision, he points out, is not binding on other courts. An interim decision, it will be revisited by the court in December.
Mr. and Mrs. Roden separated in June after 14 years of marriage, 11 of them spent in the house now occupied full-time by their children. Mr. Roden is a driver for a courier firm. His wife, who worked as a part-time cleaner while raising the children at home, now works for her sister and brother-in-law doing embroidery work.
“While I am satisfied that these parents cannot cohabit together, I am also of the view that there is no good reason why they cannot share the use of the house in the children’s interest, and so as to permit each to have a degree of involvement in the children’s lives,” said Judge Taylor.
I remember hearing about a plans for an apartment building, I believe in Stockholm (Sweden), for families that wanted to do something similar. Each apartment was really a pair of apartments. There were bedrooms and a sitting room for the kids in the middle. On either side was a small self-contained apartment for one parent, with a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room with a sleeping loft. The doors between the kids’ section and the two parents’ sections could be locked in various ways, so that for instance the week that Dad had custody the doors to Mom’s apartment could be locked. It was even set up so that the parents entered the building through separate doors and climbed separate stairways. Don’t know if it ever got built, but it seems to me to be a very interesting solution for divorced couples who can still stand the sight of each other.
stunned
Thats brilliant! Those europeans are always so enlightened.
kellibelli
i’m sure you’re right that i projected my own situation into the story. to some extent. but i still don’t think it would work. although you’re also of course right that it depends on what the post-divorce relationship of the parents is like.
i know the kid isn’t sleeping WITH his mother, just in the bed. but it’s still creepy! i wouldn’t want to sleep in my mom’s bed one week per month. that’s just weird. maybe that’s a personal thing. last week i told my housemates i had never hooked up on my parents’/mother’s bed and that i regarded that as taboo, and many of them seemed to disagree with me. maybe it’s a similar principle. but i still think it’s creepy.
here’s my point about how this situation preserves ‘the difficulties and stresses of married life.’ with the ‘weekend parent’ situation you describe, it’s not at all close to perfect, but there is a cohesive parental unit – whichever parent the kid lives with. consistency is key. with this timeshare arrangement, the parents must continue to make childrearing and household decisions TOGETHER. sorry, i don’t think “The mother who has the house 3 weeks out of four would take care of all the normal stuff, and the father just keeps things tidy when he is there” would work at ALL, because this absolves the dad of any responsibility, and also marginalizes him as a parent and householder.
[btw sorry for the crudity of the quotes, i don’t know how to quote more than one post, and i’m still too newbie to
know how to use the vb code right, so i just do it the old-fashioned way. hope no one minds.]
as far as “This isnt a ‘family that clearly needs to change’, you are projecting again. This is two adults that have decided they dont want to be married anymore,” that’s just my point. if two people that at some point thought they loved each other enough to want to spend their lives together, people that felt they provided a stable and secure enough home to have children together, decide that they don’t want to be married anymore, why, something is obviously wrong. and a change needs to occur. that’s WHY they’re getting divorced. right?
on a parting note, you are of course right again when you ask “Why on earth should the kids pay the price for their decision?” and the kids paying the least for this tragedy is also my goal. i just disagree (respectfully 
) about what is the best way to accomplish that goal.
the swedish solution is fantastic. that would solve most of the problems i can think of, besides of course the emotional trauma caused by the divorce itself. but you do what you can.
White Lightning said: “…sometimes people need seperation. that’s WHY they got divorced in the first place. forcing them to continue to interact with each other on a consistent basis, to share a house and childrearing duties, seems to me to be patently INsane.”
Yeah. Better to throw away what’s broken in this disposable society. People don’t care enough to put in the effort to fix things anymore.
Don’t get me started. A lot of people get married before they even talk about things like how they will discipline their (future) children, or how they want to save for a retirement. Add children to that, and you wonder why so many “adult” couples give up and throw their marriage away.
To be honest, I don’t give a flying f*ck how married couples deal with each other. I figure it’s two consenting adults. What gets me pissed off more than anything, is couples who are so selfish and self-centered that they bring a child into this world without making child-rearing their top priority. And that means keeping stability in the home, and keeping mom and dad home, together, working hard at being together every single damn day that the child lives at home.
flodnak – the duplex solution sounds interesting, although for many divorcing couples I suspect the priority to stay in each other’s proximity is not very high. Many divorcing folks find jobs elsewhere. And what if one of them wanted to get married to someone else – and that new person didn’t want to live next door to the ex?
For some reason I was under the impression that the opinions expressed in this forum are supposed to be taken open-mindedly. I have absolutly no idea why my marraige and parent’s relationship do not entitle me to an opinion.
I just think that this isn’t going to create well adjusted kids.
BTW, the dad is still going to be a part time parents since he is only going to be there one week a month, right? I think you have let your hostilities oput on the wrong person kellibelli, I was just stating an opinion that I had formed with “all of my worldly experience”, as little as that may be
I’m sorry if I somehow insulted you and your thread by responding how I perceived the situation.
Oh get off the cross. We need the wood.
:rolleyes:
Baglady, you’re right. divorce sucks. it sucks that there are people in this world that don’t realize that a child is their most important responsibility. it sucks that there are selfish and immature people out there who have kids without thinking about it. but that’s not what we are talking about. if it were up to me, no one would ever GET divorced, because no one would ever need to. and the only people that would ever have kids would be sane, well-adjusted, intelligent, responsible people. unfortunately, it’s not up to me, and there are people out there that have kids and then get divorced, and sometimes that really IS the best thing for the members of those families. and since those things do happen, all i’m saying is that we need to think about what’s best for the innocent victims in the situation, the kids. seems reasonable to me.