Our Family Wizard Alternative Communication Tools

For nearly 15 years, the OurFamilyWizard website has helped families across the world obtain more amicable communication and shield children from divorce conflict by providing a central location for co-parents to securely document parenting time and visitation schedules, track expenses and payments, record important family information, and create an accurate log of communication. Whether living in multiple homes or still under the same roof, Our Family Wizard offers alternative communication tools that are designed to fit the needs of different family situations. This can be especially helpful when methods of communication formerly used by divorced or separated parents no longer suit their needs properly due to frequent miscommunication, lack of organisation, or constant conflict. Let's take a look at a few reasons why the tools on the OurFamilyWizard website offer a useful alternative to other methods of co-parent communication:

• Basic email and text messaging: Basic email systems and text messaging allow people to send and receive messages from anywhere with an internet or network connection, and this can be helpful for co-parents who are separated by a long distance or who have a difficult time communicating face-to-face. While that is true, co-parents who are prone to conflict may find that long email exchanges and vague text messages create ambiguity and miscommunication. This can easily become a catalyst for even more friction between parents. Moreover, important information can be easily confused or lost amongst other email or text message correspondence, making it difficult to document and compile only the relevant messages when needed for court purposes. 
  In many instances, co-parents only need to correspond about a few quick details such as scheduling issues or updates about how the kids are doing. Our Family Wizard offers an alternative to basic email and text message communication by providing four main features with tools that help to organise co-parent communication in such a way that keeps the focus on the matter at hand. Parents will use these different sections to discuss different topics, and each section has rules built into it to promote clear and unambiguous communication. For instance, conversations about a potential trade in custody time only requires the exchange of a few important details, but discussing this in an email can be difficult when unrelated comments flood into this conversation, making it hard to focus on the time-sensitive matter at hand. Parents might even feel nervous to ask for these kinds of trades, fearing that doing so might just result in an argument or mean comments from the other parent. Using Our Family Wizard, this brief conversation can be held right on the calendar using the patented Trade/Swap tool. This tool allows a parent to enter the dates of the potential trade, indicate the day by which they must know whether the trade is agreed to, and a brief reason for making this request. The other parent is notified to respond, and their response is as simple as pushing one button to approve or refuse the request. This helps to eliminate the long email chains that could have been created due to this one request that really only contains a few short but important details. It also gives parents the confidence to send these requests without fear of receiving a lengthy or hurtful response in return.
  
  Most of the time, communication between co-parents can be held through these alternative features to the message board, but there are some cases where sending a message may be preferred. When used, the Our Family Wizard message board will maintain a full and accurate record of co-parent correspondence. Parents cannot edit or delete any messages, nor can they use this system to message anyone else outside of their family on the website. Also unlike other messaging tools, Our Family Wizard offers a built-in feature called ToneMeter which helps co-parents analyse the tone of their messages before sending. ToneMeter will flag out any phrases that could be perceived negatively by the recipient and give the writer a chance to adjust their tone in these areas. This can help weed out parts of messages that could have potentially caused more conflict or miscommunication. 
   
• Online Calendars: There are numerous online calendars available that help multiple people work off of a shared schedule. For co-parents, in particular, sharing an online calendar allows them to track family events and other important dates across multiple homes. However, many online calendars lack the tools needed to track more than one type of schedule on one calendar. Co-parents need to be able to differentiate between events specific to the kids, events specific to each parent, holidays and special occasions, and just the basic parenting time schedule. Without the right tools to help organise all of this material, managing a family schedule on a shared online calendar can become difficult very quickly. Co-parents with a particularly busy shared schedule should seek out an alternative calendaring tool to aid in keeping track of all of this information.
  
  The OurFamilyWizard website provides one such alternative to other online calendars by offering one that is specifically built to document shared family schedules. Parenting time schedules are documented as a coloured bar above each date on the calendar. This helps to differentiate which parent has parenting time on which days, and it also helps to separate that information from the numerous other events that populate a busy family calendar. Events posted to a family's calendar are also colour coded, so parents can quickly recognise who is attending each event and who will be taking the kids to and from it. Unlike events, holidays will adjust the regular parenting schedule according to who will be with the kids over a particular holiday. While co-parents will use their shared family calendar quite often, other family members may want to see the schedule as well. Other family members can be granted access to view the calendar with their own username and password, keeping the family schedule only available to those who the parents choose to see it.
• Talking Through Lawyers: Every divorce situation is different, and some co-parents require an alternative to private one-on-one communication. Co-parents who are especially prone to conflict or who deal with a tumultuous past may need the assistance of lawyers or other legal and mental health professionals to aid in their communication. Communicating through third parties can help each parent to protect them self from the fear or pain involved in communicating with the other person alone. While this is true, lawyer fees, mediation sessions and other professional fees can add up very quickly, making this kind of communication hard for some people to maintain. Also, constantly copying your lawyer or other professionals on emails to and from your co-parent can become confusing for your counsel as they decipher what is important and what is not. 
  
  Our Family Wizard offers an alternative way for parents to work directly with lawyers and other professionals while also empowering themselves to communicate and take care of their own matters. Professional Access allows lawyers, mediators, GALs, therapists, and other types of legal and mental professionals to access and monitor client correspondence happening directly through the website. Professionals can link to one or both parents in any family in order to get a bird's eye view of co-parent correspondence. This type of access to professionals gives parents the confidence to correspond directly between each other with the knowledge that their communication is monitored by their legal and neutral third parties. With access to every message and other types of activity created by clients, professionals are no longer left to search through hundreds of email cc's that are clogged amongst their other important emails. Working with clients on the OurFamilyWizard website, professionals are able to clearly see a full, unaltered history of parent activity, making it easy to break through the "he said, she said" and get straight to the facts. Also, compiling records from the OurFamilyWizard website is easy. All parent correspondence on the website is savable to PDF and printable from any computer, or business declarations of correspondence can be requested by any professional linked to a client or family. 

The OurFamilyWizard website is dedicated to helping divorced or separated parents to obtain more amicable communication while keeping the kids out of the middle of conflict. Click here to learn more about each of the communication features offered by the OurFamilyWizard website.