Regular phone contact is very important to most parents, particularly if you are the noncustodial parent and only see your children every other weekend and one day during the week. It's also very important to most children, It provides them with the feeling that their absent parent is interested enough in their day-to-day lives to call and speak with them routinely. Phone calls offer children time to bond with the absent parent and increase their feelings of security.

Again, if the parents are civil to one another, they can usually agree to reasonable telephone contact without any limitations. Some can agree on some general parameters for calls, like between 8 A.M. and bedtime. Other parents need a specific schedule for calls, like Tuesday evening between 7 and 8 P.M. Still others require very specific parameters, such as limiting phone talk to one call of no more than fifteen minutes in length every Saturday to avoid abuse of phone calling privileges.

Abusing Telephone Calls

Sometimes a parent calls to badmouth the other parent or to tell the children how lonely she is. Sometimes one parent refuses to answer the phone at all or says the children can't come to the phone or are in bed. In more extreme cases, a parent will completely interfere with telephone contact in other creative and destructive ways. For example, an angry parent may record telephone conversations between the children and the other parent and then talk to the children about things that were said. Or, an angry parent will listen in on an extension phone and make nasty remarks to the other parent during the phone call or to the children after the phone call is concluded. These tactics are extremely detrimental to children and often result in them distrusting the guilty parent.

Other Alternatives for Contact

Today, alternatives to the telephone exist. E-mail makes frequent contact with your child possible and allows you to have private conversations with your child that aren't time dependent or intrusive. While it's not the same as hearing your child's voice, it's a good substitute. Also, with cell phones, you and your child can talk to each other when the other parent is somewhere else, giving you the opportunity for a private, pleasant exchange.