4 Reasons to Use a Co-Parenting App

While a divorce or separation is often the best choice for some families, it doesn’t mean that co-parenting comes without its challenges. Learning to coordinate, communicate and work together with the other parent comes with a learning curve. It’s easy to misread a text, lose track of an email or forget to pass along information on extracurricular activities — all of which can cause conflict in your co-parenting relationship. Whether you’re trying to find a way to keep track of papers, notices, expenses and who has what holiday or you just want to find a way to make communication more civil, a co-parenting app can help. 2houses was designed with divorced parents in mind and helps make dealing with two separate households a little less stressful.

4 Benefits of Using a Co-Parenting App

Co-parenting apps can’t magically make your relationship and interactions with the other parent perfect and conflict-free, but they can help streamline communication, help you keep track of paperwork and make it a little easier to deal with a tenuous situation. Below we’ve covered just a few of the main benefits you can get from using a co-parenting app.

1. It Helps Foster Communication

Communication is key to successful co-parenting. The more of an open exchange of dialogue involving concerns, upcoming events and just general updates on the children’s lives you can have, the better for your co-parenting relationship and for your children. However, this isn’t always as easy in practice as it is in theory.

Sometimes, it’s one parent who won’t cooperate. You send them texts and emails keeping them updated on school events and sports practices for the kids, but they claim they never received them. Or maybe you’re dealing with a situation where the other parent is actively trying to sabotage co-parenting by withholding information or sending angry and derogatory messages.

Other times, communication issues happen just because there is so much to keep track of. This can be especially true in situations where there are multiple children. Every child has their own homework that needs to be done, extracurricular schedules, playdates and meetups with friends, and sometimes things get lost in the shuffle and not communicated to both parents.

2houses can help with all of these issues by giving you a way to keep track of all communication in one easy-to-access place. So whether you need to confirm vacation plans, send along the snack requirements for your son’s soccer practice or ask the other parent for medical forms, everything can be communicated through the 2houses app. The messaging center offers secure messaging much like an email system with timestamps of when things were sent and read, and while you can archive conversations once they are not needed anymore, nothing can ever be deleted, so you can always go back and follow up with something if needed.

2. It Keeps Everything in One Place

One of the more common hazards of co-parenting and trying to manage children between two households is that there is a lot of paperwork. And when you consider that now some places such as schools and doctors’ offices are going digital and emailing records or allowing you access via apps, it can get even more challenging to know where to look for information that needs to be shared with the other parent. Just a few of the things that parents often need to share include:

• Information on teacher names
• Medical records
• Expense records and reimbursement requests
• Permissions slips
• Insurance information
• Clothing and shoe sizes
• Christmas and birthday wishlists
• Phone numbers and addresses for friends and family

If you have multiple children, the paperwork starts to grow exponentially. If you’ve ever tried to find a school lunch bill in a stack of papers or ended up having to ask the other parent for a medical bill again after misplacing it, you know how easy it is for things to get lost, misplaced or  just plain forgotten about. It can be very difficult for either parent to keep track of what’s been sent and what hasn’t or what information is being kept where. That’s where the co-parenting app comes in.

One of the main features of 2houses is the information bank. It lets you upload virtually everything you could ever need to provide the other parent with in one place. There are dedicated places for things like bank information and vaccination records, but there’s also document storage that lets you upload any paper directly to the app and share it with the other parent. You can also organize your documents after you’ve uploaded them however you need to, such as by child or by category. This ensures the other parent has everything they need, but it also makes it easier for you because it’s like an instant online filing system. Anytime you need insurance information or need to double check your child’s shoe size, it’s all already in the app.

3. It Lets Both Parents Stay Involved

It used to be that people believed that a two-parent household was the gold standard as far being the best for kids. But now, we’ve recognized that the best thing for children is to have two happy, healthy parents, and sometimes, that means those parents making the choice to no longer be romantically involved or live in the same house. The most important thing is that both parents stay active and involved in the children’s lives.

It’s obviously impossible to keep up the same level of involvement as if both parents were living in the same household with the child, but technology has advanced so much that it’s not as difficult as it once was. This is especially true in cases where the parents have joint physical custody and both parents are having frequent face-to-face contact with the children. Video calling and texting have allowed parents to stay more in touch with their children than in years past, but co-parenting apps like 2houses can also help.

While just being able to have all the notices and the schedule in one place can make it easier for both parents to attend functions and ensure they are actively participating in their children’s lives, two other important features of 2houses that help parents stay connected to their children are the journaling and photo album capabilities.

The in-app journal lets parents and children share everything from thoughts on the day to feelings about upcoming events or just recapping for memory keeping purposes. Children can have their own access that is controlled by the parent account so they can contact both parents and send messages without also having access to private communications between the parents.

For those times when one parent isn’t able to be there in person, the photo album allows either the children or the other parent to upload pictures so they can still “be there” virtually. Common applications for this are for birthdays, school functions, vacations and even just silly candids of the kids.

4. It’s Automatic Documentation

Even in the best of co-parenting situations, there are bound to be some conflicts. One of the best things about using a co-parenting app for all communication and file and paper transfers is that you have built-in documentation. If you run into a situation where you think one thing was said but the other parent believes it was something else, it’s easy to just go back to the messages and reread it word for word. These messages are also built into the system which means there’s no possibility of common situations like one person deleting texts or not having “received” an email. For example, if one parent sends the other parent a notice that the children have a school play on Friday night at 6 p.m. through the app, the other parent can’t claim they didn’t attend because they didn’t know about it.

If you’re ever in a situation where you end up needing to take an issue back before the courts, using the 2houses co-parenting app makes it much easier to keep your documentation straight and have everything you need to present your case. Consider an example of one parent who claims that the other parent is interfering with their parenting time and not letting the first parent see the children. If Parent Number 2 has the documented messages from the app that show that Parent Number 1 cancelled at the last minute or no-showed several times, this can help Parent Number 1 show that interference is not the issue with the parenting time.

Whether you are just starting on your co-parenting journey or you’re trying to make it even smoother, co-parenting apps can be an important piece of the puzzle. Learn more about the features 2houses has to offer and how it can help you make positive changes in communication between you and the other parent, help you organize your paperwork and keep everything handy for documentation purposes if needed.