Tips for parenting after separation

When my husband and I separated, our son was just three years old. We had joint custody but decided it would be easier for Jonathan to have his main residence at my home and spend one weeknight and every Sunday at his dad's place. (Steve, his father, worked Saturdays, so every other weekend wasn't feasible.) Most of all we wanted to avoid mixed messages and problems such as one home being the "fun house" and the other the eat-your-peas-and-go-to-bed-early place. This was important to me because, above all, I desperately wanted Jonathan's life to be as consistent and stress-free as possible, no matter where he woke up each day.

Setting the ground rules
The key to achieving our goals was to establish one set of rules for both homes. To hammer them out, Steve and I decided to sit down together one night without Jonathan and not get up from the table until we agreed what the most important issues were and how we were going to deal with them. If this sounds easy, it isn't. When a marriage ends, you are often loaded down with all kinds of baggage and things can get very emotional, especially when you are talking about your kids. But we really tried to focus on Jonathan's best interests. When one of us would rant off topic, the other person would get the discussion back on track.

Finding compromises
I can be controlling, so I wanted everything done my way, right down to the brand of cereal that Jonathan was to eat. But we managed to whittle our set of rules down to five things: bedtime, TV, friends, discipline and daily routine. We agreed on a time for bed, the number of hours Jonathan could spend watching TV each day, how often he could visit friends during the week and how we would discipline him (time-outs seemed to work well). We maintained a consistent routine, which meant that if Jonathan had a swimming lesson on a Thursday night, the parent responsible for him that evening would make sure that he got there.