This week's episode is with Christina McGhee, a Divorce coach and parenting educator, speaker, coach and author. You may know about her through the Channel 4 series How to divorce without screwing up your children.

She also contributed to the documentary SPLIT, a film offering an unfiltered look at how kids really feel about divorce.

Christina helped UK-based family law organisation, Resolution, create the first version of the Parenting After Parting course which The Parent Practice have just revised and presented in London with Family Lawyers in Partnership.

Christina is the author of Parenting Apart: How Separated and Divorced Parents Can Raise Happy and Secure Kids

Most recently Christina released Coparenting With Purpose an online course for separating and divorced parents that offers practical solutions and strategies to help parents manage their most critical co-parenting challenges.

She is a mum of four and bonus mum as well and says she is doing on the job training as a chauffeur, negotiator, short order cook and scheduler extraordinaire! She is the child of divorced parents herself. She speaks about her own experience of divorce at 14 years old and remembers clearly the impact of her parents' way of handling it, which was to not talk about it. Read more about how Christina's own experience of divorce affected her here.

Listen to this episode with Christina McGhee if you want to learn:

• Some practical ways to navigate a positive course through separation and divorce
• About the impact of the stress of divorce on the brain's functioning and how to alleviate this
• How to avoid some of the common mistakes parents make after the breakdown of their relationship
• How to put children in front of mind throughout the uncoupling process
• How to behave in ways that your children will look back on with pride
• How to establish a two home concept; a warm, loving and connected relationship with both parents
• How to be a business partner with your ex, even though the marriage relationship has gone
• Why it is that the child's self-esteem is damaged every time they hear one parent denigrate the other
• What parental alienation syndrome really means and how to distinguish that from the child's own choice to distance themselves from a parent because of the parent's actions. Christina is clear that PAS needs professional support
• Why a parent shouldn't distance themselves from the children in the belief that they're being respectful of the child's wishes
• When and how to tell the kids that mum and dad have decided they should no longer be together
• How to deal with practical things like family holidays and handovers, schedules and communicating, including use of co-parenting apps such as Familywizard
• That while you may not have the ability to make things better you always have the ability to make things worse… so don't!

In our celebration of vulnerability and perfect imperfection Christina shares with us a Low Parenting Moment of her own which prompted she and her husband to join a parenting group which she describes as a gamechanger.

And Christina also shares her top tip for raising children to be confident, happy and successful even if their parents' relationship ends

Links

To get in touch with Christina:

Website: www.divorceandchildren.com

twitter: @christinamcghee

facebook: @divorceandchildren

linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinamcghee/?locale=en_US

Co-parenting with purpose course: https://www.flourishtogether.com/catalog/coparentingwithpurpose.html?s=10816