Peacemaker Divorce Mediation Blog

People are often disappointed after choosing to litigate their divorces. What they thought would be a forum to air their grievances with their spouse may turn out to be a high-pressure, high-cost ordeal that lasts half a decade. In this article, I present two options — a non-fiction Choose Your Own Path if you will.…

Prenuptial agreements are versatile tools that can provide reassurance and guidance for the couples who take advantage of them. That said, there remain many misconceptions about what a prenup can and cannot do — so I thought I would take some time to demystify the process in this post. What Is a Prenuptial Agreement?A prenuptial…

Any person who has been through a divorce will tell you that the topic of introducing a significant other to the children is a sticky one at best. Even people involved in the most amicable of divorces struggle with this. So, the question is, how do divorcing parents navigate this difficult topic? Here are a…

Often times in my mediation practice I get asked the question: How do I change my last name?Many people are under the misconception that as soon as they sign the divorce papers, they can legally change their last name back to their maiden name — but that’s not true. The changing of your last name…

One of the issues to be decided in mediation is how frequently child support will be recalculated. In New York, child support is calculated pursuant to the Child Support Standards Act (CSSA) In calculating child support, the CSSA looks at the gross income of the parties, minus standard deductions such as FICA, and then calculates…

Nesting is an arrangement in which the parents agree to rotate in and out of the marital home while the children continue to reside in the marital home full time. The parents create a schedule where only one parent is at home with the children at any given time — for example, mom is in…

When a couple decides to end their marriage, there will be many stressful moments to come — sometimes those moments reach levels of epic proportions. In a high-stress argument, the heart starts pounding and muscles tense up, sometimes unconsciously. You may even start to perspire and feel like you are losing your composure. This effect…

There is a saying: “If you’ve met one child with autism, then you’ve met one child with autism”. This could not be more true—and those of you who are raising a child with autism know exactly what I mean. Divorce knows no boundaries and is indeed a reality to many families who are raising a…

When I attend various networking events, or if I am meeting a person for the first time and sharing with them what I do for a living, I often speak about divorce mediation in terms of it being a more holistic approach to divorce. We often hear the term holistic used in medicine. So what…

Time and time again, clients come to mediation not only because they don’t want the added stress of litigation, but because they also want to save money. This is especially true when their bleak financial circumstances have already caused them to incur mounds of debts. In fact, many of my clients come to me with…