Divorce Mediation: Advantages

Divorce mediation has many advantages that can help couples with difficult issues (including child custody) to resolve. Everyone has their own agendas and often conflicting sets of best interests. But creating effective resolutions can often be best achieved by finding common ground rather than fighting each other.

Mediation helps couples resolve the most intractable disputes, and is an especially well-suited tool for the needs of people facing family law issues. Divorce mediation has a number of advantages over the traditional means of resolving family law issues through the courts.

Mainly, time and savings are a huge advantage. Instead of using the traditional divorce litigation method through the court system (which can be upwards of eighteen months or more until a divorce settlement is reached), mediation is completely up to the couple as to the length of time it takes to reach a settlement that they can be confident in. Most mediations are scheduled for two-hour sessions, and few mediations are resolved within a single session.

However, even if your mediation takes several sessions to reach an agreement, you have saved thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees, as well as untold emotional stress on yourself and your children. In regard to cost savings, the average cost of a contested divorce ranges into the tens of thousands of dollars per spouse, whereas mediation costs are considerably less. If spouses are able and willing to work together, divorce mediation can save them money in comparison to a traditional divorce.

The reduction of stress within yourselves as well as within your children is a great advantage to divorce mediation. In cases with children, it can help develop peaceful decision-making skills within yourselves as parents, and within children as they grow. Children follow the examples of their parents, and if they see their parents working together (even in the most difficult season of divorce), they can be confident in their parent’s abilities to be their parents no matter what happens in life. This ultimately protects children from unnecessary stress as well.

Divorce mediation also keeps the ultimate decision-making power in your hands rather than ceding that power to a judge. You and your spouse know yourselves and your family better than anyone else. By working together through compromise, you are able to keep control over your family’s future.

I know that divorce is hard, no matter the circumstances surrounding each couple. For over 40 years, helping people secure the effective resolutions they need to difficult family law matters has been goal. If you are in Kansas City and believe divorce mediation is the right step for your family, contact me, Hugh O’Donnell, today to schedule a consultation, or feel free to call (816) 533-5152 with any questions you have regarding your divorce.