Family breakdown is never easy and often it is extremely stressful and painful for everyone involved, parents and children. Everyone needs help and guidance, from friends, counsellors, therapists and lawyers.
Mediation can help enormously, providing a real viable alternative to court proceedings which can often exasperate the inevitable consequences of family breakdown: fear, anger, betrayal, worry and anxiety about the future but most of all anxiety about how the children will cope.
Court proceedings and endless correspondence between solicitors can do nothing to help with those very common and very understandable emotions. Mediation can.
Mediation is ideally and uniquely equipped to be able to help parents focus on the needs of their children and to involve the children.
Specially trained Mediators can see the children in confidence and speak to them about how they feel, what they would like their parents to do and how they see the future. Those views can then be fed back to the parents if the children agree.
In this way, the parents can make informed decisions about the future knowing and taking into account what their children have said.
This is in addition to all the other benefits of family mediation:
- It is quicker
- It is cheaper
As part of Family Mediation Week, and the initiative of the Family Mediators Association (FMA), there is a wealth of very helpful material available including:
- An article by David Emmerson, explaining more about mediation
- A video by Bill Hewlett “my parents are divorcing; what do I do?”, looking at family breakdown from the child’s perspective
Meet our mediators
Here at Stowe Family Law we strongly support the use of mediation when managing a relationship breakdown, and are pleased to have the following mediators in our team:
- Graham Coy, London Chancery Lane Office, 020 7421 3300, [email protected]
- Gavin Scott, London Chancery Lane Office, 020 7421 3300, [email protected]
- Sushma Kotecha, Nottingham Office, 0115 759 4534, [email protected]
Graham Coy
22 January 2019
