In week six of Children of Divorce and Changing Families' 8-week program, we do an exercise where we ask each child in the 10-12 year old group to create a set of rules that they wish their parents would follow to ease post divorce stresses.
The rules they write privately are then shared with the class, the goal of which is to create a list to present to the parent's group. Rules that start out specific to each child merge with other similar requests. The kids tweak the wording for these and other parallel rules until "stop saying mom is stupid" and "don't tell me my dad abandoned us" gets written down on a large strip of paper as the all encompassing: "Don't say bad things about my other parent".
The top ten rules listed below were the most commonly wished for, compiled from the many times I've conducted this exercise (3 times a year for the last 5 years).
