Real Co-Parents: Diane Schroeder
Diane is a divorced mom who says TalkingParents has minimized conflict with her co-parent and improved her and her son’s lives.
- 2.5 min watch
- real co-parents
Diane Schroeder has one child with her ex-husband. She and her ex separated about nine years ago when their son was two years old.
“My co-parent and I were married for just over three years, and we did not have a very healthy relationship.”
Schroeder says many of the communication challenges she and her co-parent faced after divorce were rooted in emotion, and that was affecting her personally.
“It was not productive. There were a lot of hurt feelings, so we ended up going back and forth a lot with text messages and sometimes through e-mail. So, that’s when we decided we had to come up with something to make it more productive for us and for our son.”
Schroeder says her divorce attorney recommended TalkingParents around the time she and her ex were going through mediation because their communication was so unhealthy.
Instantly, I felt like it helped a lot. I describe TalkingParents like using a communication filter. I knew that if a message was in there, I could decide whether to open it now or later depending on where I was at emotionally.
She says TalkingParents also helped her pause.
“When writing messages, it really helped me respond instead of react. TalkingParents took so much stress and pressure off just by setting that boundary of ‘this is how we’re going to communicate moving forward.’”
The features that have been most helpful for Schroeder are Secure Messaging and Unalterable Records.
“The messaging with timestamps is so beneficial and having the ability to upload our parenting plan right there as well is great. We both did shift work for most of our divorce, so up until very recently, the schedule was always changing. Sending it through messages made it easy to know when it was viewed, when it was downloaded, etcetera. Another feature that I used last time we went back to court was the PDF Records. It was so easy and user friendly to print the PDF Record and have all our communication available in a nice, simple format.”
Schroeder says TalkingParents has helped her co-parenting situation tremendously over the years.
“TalkingParents has improved my life and my child’s life because I’m able to have better communication with his dad. So, it’s less hostile, less anxiety filled, and it’s really smoothed out a lot of the tension and conflict we had before. Now that my son is almost a tween, we’ve created this new normal for us and I’ve found that I’m much happier and calmer, which translates to him being happier and calmer. My co-parent and I even tried to stop using TalkingParents like a year and a half ago, but it didn’t work out. It’s just easy and it keeps us both accountable.”
Schroeder recommends TalkingParents to anyone with kids after divorce or separation.
“I believe in this platform, and I think it’s so helpful when you’re already stressed, and things are already rough. When you’re getting divorced, there are so many emotions attached to each other as parents, so becoming a single parent can be really scary. This tool is so useful and has a little bit of everything you need. Even if you have a civil divorce, TalkingParents just makes life a lot easier.”
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