Favoring one parent in a co-parenting situation

Allan Yellin, PhD Psychologist & Family and Marriage Therapist, shares advice for divorced parents on how to best handle a situation when a child prefers to spend more of their time with one parent than the other
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Favoring one parent in a co-parenting situation

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It’s not unusual that occasionally a child doesn’t want to visit the other parent. There’s several things that we should look at – one is the age of the child. Young children often have difficulty with separation; teenagers oftentimes don’t want to leave one home to go to another home. We also want to look at – and ask each parent to look inside – and say, “Am I doing anything that’s making it difficult for this transition to happen? Am I being too loving at the moment that the transition is to take place? Am I not encouraging this? Have I said anything about the other parent that would make the child hesitant to want to go over there?” If none of those things happened, then we want to encourage the child to speak directly to the parent that they’re having trouble going to their home. And we’d like the child to sit down and say, “Mommy or daddy, I have a hard time coming over here. And here’s the reasons.” We’d like the parent to know number one – listen, create an environment that the child feels heard and then together, they could come up with some solutions that might make the transition smoother and easier for the child.
ALL PARENTS, Divorce, Co-Parenting

Allan Yellin, PhD Psychologist & Family and Marriage Therapist, shares advice for divorced parents on how to best handle a situation when a child prefers to spend more of their time with one parent than the other

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Alan Yellin, PhD

Psychologist

Dr. Alan Yellin is a licensed psychologist as well as licensed marriage and family therapist.  He has been in practice for over 30 years working with children, adolescents and adults. Dr. Yellin did his post-doctoral fellowship at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. In his practice, he sees children with learning problems, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, fears and social skills issues. Additionally, he has a sub-specialty in working with children from divorced families as well as helping parents deal more effectively with their divorce. Dr. Yellin’s practice also includes working with adolescents and adults with depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive issues as well as issues around life passages. Dr. Yellin believes that therapy works best when the client and therapist have a collaborative relationship as they explore thoughts and feelings and work towards solutions, and uses a combination of scientific data along with humor to help people achieve change. He is in a long-term happy marriage and has two grown children.

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