Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way

Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way Review

Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way Feature

• 1998 - Random House - Paperback - 1st Edition
• Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way
• By M. Gary Neuman L.M.H.C.
• With Patricia Romanowski
• New - Collectible

Kids tend to blame themselves when parents divorce. The Sandcastles workshop--now mandatory in over a dozen counties throughout the United States--is a half-day group session for children of divorce between the ages of 6 and 17. This intensive workshop helps kids open up and deal with their feelings through drawings, games, poetry, role playing, and other activities. Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce details many of the workshop exercises, all designed to increase communication, understanding, and togetherness between parents and kids. The book is also packed full of suggestions on everything from the best way to break the divorce news to a child (it differs according to age group) to facing the holidays, visitation, custody arrangements, anger, discipline, co-parenting, single parenting, overcompensation, sorrow, custody fights, and much more.

Author Gary Neuman never patronizes or preaches, and although he is technically a child advocate, he proves himself to be an advocate of every member of the divorcing family. Neuman takes a hands-on approach and believes that children need not be permanently scarred by divorce--that with work and time, divorce can actually become a positive force for change. A powerful tool for protecting children caught amid parental struggles, Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce should be required reading in all divorcing families. --Ericka Lutz Divorce is painful and confusing. Perhaps now more than ever, you want to give your child all the love, support, and guidance he or she needs, but everything seems harder and more complicated. Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way can help. Based on Gary Neuman's phenomenally successful Sandcastles program, which has helped more than fifty thousand children cope with divorce, this warm, empathetic guide shows you:


  How to build a co-parenting relationship--even when you think you can't

  When you or your child should see a therapist

   Age-appropriate scripts for addressing sensitive issues

  What to do when a parent moves away

  How to stop fighting with your ex-spouse

  How to navigate the emotional turmoil of custody and visitation

  How to help your child deal with change

  How to cope with kids' common fears about separation

  How to introduce significant others into the family and help your child cope with a new stepfamily

More than a hundred pieces of artwork from children of divorce will help you appreciate how kids perceive the experience. Dozens of special activities and fun exercises will help you communicate and get closer to your child. This guide shows you that divorce need not be an inevitable blot on children's lives, but an opportunity for them to grow and strengthen the bonds with their parents.