For parents thinking about divorce or at the beginning stages, your primary concern is likely your children. How do you make this process as easy as possible on them? In recent years, one less-talked-about method is birdnesting or nesting.
Birdnesting or nesting
Birdnesting or nesting is the practice of not selling the family home. Instead, you and your soon-to-be ex-spouse share the home in some way where your child lives.
For some nesters, when it is their parenting time, they live in the house, and when it is not, they live somewhere else. For others, they share the residence, but live in separate sections of the home or in detached structures.
For example, if there is a guest, pool or garage apartment, the parent not parenting lives there. For other families, they may share a separate off-site premises or have their own separate residences. Each family can design their own nest that works for them.
How does it help the child?
A lot of the trauma from a divorce occurs because their lives are essentially destroyed overnight or over a very short period of time. In addition, if the parents are fighting, this further traumatizes them and inhibits normal parental emotional bonding. However, for nesters, their lives essentially remain unchanged as they stay put in their lives, and the only change is that their parents no longer parent together.
For those parents who can remain amicable, go to family counseling or therapy and who always keep the best interests of their children in mind, the children can exit divorce largely unscathed. Indeed, many find that they can avoid divorce trauma entirely in their children through appropriate nesting.
Benefits for the parents
Child custody and parenting time are supremely important, and nesting can maximize that time. This is in addition to the trauma that you can avoid for the sake of your children.
However, there are additional financial benefits as well. If cost maximization is the goal, you can continue to share the home with your soon-to-be ex-spouse or an off-site Long Island, New York, apartment. This allows you to split costs. In addition, since everything stays the same for your child, neither spouse must purchase anything additional for the child.