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Podcast Transcript: Ten Kids Two Docs with Guest Joe Dillon

The Two Docs: Welcome to Ten Kids Two Docs, parenting insights from pediatrician moms. I’m Dr. Sylvia Bank and I’m Dr. Vivian Carlin. Welcome back. We are so excited today because we have a special guest, Joe Dillon. Joe has a master’s degree in finance and completed specialized training in negotiation and mediation. He founded Equitable Mediation Services and that offers a more peaceful and dignified path towards divorce.

We learned from our season one that one of our most popular episodes was on the loss or death of a parent. And that was the first episode we’ve done on what is referred to as ACEs, adverse childhood events. There are many ACEs: any type of abuse, child neglect, mental illness, parental or household substance use or alcoholism, witnessing domestic violence. One of the ACEs that is the most common is when there is parent separation or divorce. As a result of that, we really wanted to highlight this topic. We have a guest on the show who I think is just perfect, who’s really devoted his career to navigating families through divorce in a way that really minimizes the stressful effects on children and has their best interests in mind.

I would point listeners to healthychildren.org, which has a handout entitled Childhood Adversity: Buffering Stress and Building Resilience. It says, “For many families, events happen that are unpredictable. These events can be traumatic and affect how a child feels and behaves. For example, when parents make the hard decision to separate or divorce, it can be very confusing for young children. They may act out, cry, or feel sad, lose developmental milestones, or have trouble sleeping. Some have problems concentrating and have a hard time at school.” I’m really excited about this discussion.

Welcome to the Ten Kids Two Docs podcast. Seasoned pediatricians and longtime friends, Sylvia Bank and Vivian Carlin have counseled thousands of parents and are raising four and six kids, respectively. Join these doctor moms as they incorporate fun and their combined wisdom and experience to share parenting insights for anyone looking for practical and trustworthy guidance. Please note that this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your doctor.

Joe, we are so excited to have you on our show. When I first learned about you and your business, one of the things that really drew me to have you on our show is that you clearly are very motivated to help parents walk through this so that they can do this in the best way possible for their child. I know you’re also partially inspired by your own story. I was hoping you would take a few moments to introduce our audience to you, tell us a little bit about yourself as well as your story.

Joe Dillon: First of all, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the audience because absolutely, Vivian, you bring up an important point that the children are the littlest victims of divorce. As adults we are so wrapped up in our own thing that sometimes we forget that there is collateral in the process and we need to be very careful about the impact the divorce will have on children.

A little bit about me personally and professionally: I’ve been mediating twenty-eight years, in private practice with Equitable Mediation for seventeen. My background as you mentioned is in finance and really when I think about divorce I think about it as a parenting plan with a financial component. That’s what a divorce is. My dad was in construction. Whenever I talk about divorce with people with children, I say the parenting plan is the concrete foundation on which your divorce house will be built. You wouldn’t put up the walls, you wouldn’t put up the roof first, you don’t put in the windows. You make sure you have a solid foundation. That is the parenting plan. I’d like to spend some time today talking about what that means.

My parents didn’t really get that. They litigated their divorce. As we’ll explore today, I’m a mediator. I try to help people avoid attorney involvement, litigation, adversarial divorces. They went back and forth. I was a teenager. As doctors, you both know teenagers are in a really tough place. The hormones and it’s all about me and how could you do this to me. The impact that it had on me was pretty severe because my parents were so busy litigating and fighting, they kind of forgot about me. I just sort of quietly suffered through it and really had to spend a lot of time working on my own emotions and what I was feeling and what I was going through. I was really angry and it was because my folks completely, really mostly ignored me through the process. They litigated and I sat in the back of the courtroom and did all that stuff.

We don’t as adults sometimes understand the profound impact our words, our actions have. That’s what I want to bring in here today and that’s what I’m always pushing in my practice where I’m saying if your kids were sitting in this room right now watching the two of you, what would they think of you? That’s a really powerful question. I come at it both as a practitioner as well as the child of a litigated divorce.

The Two Docs: This is what our podcast is all about, both being experts and experiencing it firsthand as you know for us moms and pediatricians.

Why don’t you talk a little bit about your life experience being a child of divorce? Maybe highlight a little bit about what it was like before the split happened living in that household and then leading up to the separation and divorce.

Joe Dillon: That’s a great question, Sylvia. One of the things that I think as adults we really underestimate is the intellect of our children. They know what’s going on. They’re observant. Kids are sponges. If you don’t want someone to know something, don’t tell a kid, don’t be around kids. Kids, they’re like radars up. When I was a child, I noticed the patterns. My parents would go from sitting on the couch next to each other to watching TV in separate rooms, sleeping in the same room, sleeping in separate rooms. Dad would come home really late on purpose so he wouldn’t have to see mom.

As a kid you’re watching this unfold and you know something’s wrong, but you’re not old enough to really understand what this all means. It started maybe when I was around eleven, twelve years old where it really got worse and worse. There was always arguing prior to that. But as an observant child watching this all unfold, I’ll never forget I never got the conversation from my parents. The way I found out they were getting a divorce was my dad was driving out of the driveway with his car filled with stuff. Listeners, let’s just emphasize the point that that is not the right way to do this. Unfortunately some people don’t think that way.

I remember my mom just apologizing and crying. I said to her, first of all, if you didn’t think I knew what was going on, come on. I’m not living under a rock. The second thing which I think really shocked her was she was so apologetic, I’m sorry through her tears and I was like, you know what? I am relieved. She stopped and said what do you mean? I said, “Do you know what it’s like to live in this house with you all screaming at each other? And then silent for months at a time, and I’m not really sure which end of this conversation is going to be happening. Is it silence? Is it screaming? Is it polite?” I’m like, I’m just relieved. Thank goodness.

The Two Docs: Can you describe a little bit more personally about the emotions that you felt during this time? How do you feel like that affected your life during the time that this was happening?

Joe Dillon: Certainly. A number of ways. The first I would say is I was very scared. My background is Irish and Italian. So two very calm, level-headed nationalities, quiet folk, real just not demonstrative at all. There’s a lot of yelling. Yelling is scary and I’m an only child, so I found comfort by hiding in a closet, which was good fun. I had my stuffed animal, go in the closet or grab a book or whatever. Just stay out of the way basically. That was scary. The yelling and it was so erratic that you always felt like you were walking on eggshells. You never knew if there was going to be an explosion, if mom and dad were talking or they weren’t.

Confusion also set in because sometimes they’d be screaming and then you’d see them holding hands. As a kid you’re looking at this and saying okay, I thought you weren’t talking to each other because you haven’t talked to each other in two months and now all of a sudden you’re laughing. That was really confusing.

Anger, that was the most powerful one. I was angry that I had to make accommodations in my life as a teenager that my dad just took off. I didn’t see him. There were all these things happening where I was spending time in my mom’s lawyer’s office or in the courtroom. My life was on hold. It was like suspended animation for years, not knowing what was happening. I was very angry, pushed a lot of people away really. As a kid, you don’t recognize that people were just like, well this guy’s a jerk, I’m not going to hang out with him. It really kind of pushed a lot of folks away even through high school, even in college, even after college. This went on for a long time.

Then finally, believe it or not, at age thirty, I hit this wall and I said, okay, you’re going to have a heart attack if you don’t really process what happened, even though it’s been fifteen years. I really sat down, did the work, and said okay, this is not good. I need to really course correct. I took a very hard right turn and made that conscientious effort to acknowledge that happened. It wasn’t my fault. It didn’t happen to me. It happened around me, I guess. I said, well, those folks are adults. They made their own choices. I’m sad that my father chose not to stay in my life. I never saw him or heard from him again after my folks got divorced. Sad about that. Sad about my mom was so severely impacted that she really, her life stopped at age forty-five. She never dated. She really didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t really do much. Her life was ruined in my estimation.

I made that decision that that was not going to happen to me. That’s another thing that folks, even for all the anger they’re spewing at the time, they don’t realize the impact it has right back at them internally. If they go through a process like a divorce in an adversarial way, it’s damaging the other person, it’s damaging themselves, it’s damaging their kids, it’s draining their bank accounts. There’s no good that comes out of this. That’s my message to people: no matter how angry you are, remember your kids, remember yourself and make sure that you keep those emotions in check.

The Two Docs: That’s very good perspective. You had mentioned that you had made accommodations in your life during the teenage years when this was going on. Can you maybe give examples of that?

Joe Dillon: Sure. A perfect example, I played soccer and I had to quit soccer to get a job because my mom at the time, I know it’s not correct to say these days, but she was a stay-at-home mom. We say she worked inside the home. She was raising me and that was a decision. Back in the day, your parents could live on one income. It was a little different. I think as she got an inkling that something was wrong, she got a part-time job in a jewelry store. But that still paled in comparison to what my father was making.

There we were now. He leaves. She kept the house. We’re trying to run the house. I had to contribute to my own things. Whereas prior to that, I lived a very comfortable middle class existence where my folks could have bought me a car or could have paid for my car insurance or could have easily paid for my college, those things, and I then had to contribute.

On top of that, the other thing that happened was my dad being in construction and being a very handy guy, he was the man around the house. He did all the things that needed doing. Now dad leaves. I’d never once started a lawn mower. My mom is looking at me like, well, you need to figure out how to fix the lawn mower, how to cut down that tree, how to clean the gutters, how to repair the broken electrical outlet. I’m like a fourteen-year-old kid. She wants me to do electrical work around our house, which by the way is really bad idea for a fourteen-year-old who’s his own electrician. But I did my very best I could and that was always how I was spending my time rather than hanging out with my friends or playing sports or going out with my girlfriend. I was really beholden to the house and it really had a significant impact on me. That’s a lot where that anger came from where you’re thinking to yourself, well my friends are going to parties and hanging out at the football game and I’ve got to clean the gutters. This is not fun.

The Two Docs: It’s almost like you had to become an adult too early, financially and with real responsibilities in the house.

Joe Dillon: Yeah. Not just clean your room. My mom, God bless her, worked multiple jobs. I remember she worked in retail and retail stores close at like nine o’clock at night and I’m by myself unsupervised, which these days people would probably call youth services. But I was at home by myself after school until she got home.

Now I will say the positive from that, it was both a double-edged sword. I had to cook, I had to do laundry, I had to clean. My wife adores me for that because in our house I cook, I clean, I do the laundry, and she’s like there is a silver lining to this. Something good did come out of it. I will say I will thank my mom. She’d write instructions on how to cook. This is before the internet. You’d have to write all: put the oven on three-fifty, do this, do this. That was a positive but still that’s how I was spending my time and wasn’t exactly great. I’d rather have my carefree childhood rather than having to run a household.

The Two Docs: Tell us about in light of this personal experience, how do you take parents through developing a parenting plan? Where do you start?

Joe Dillon: We have a philosophy. This is my personal philosophy. Because even adults, they’re so overwhelmed. I ask them, how do you think your kids are feeling when you’re going to drop this news or if they already know, the uncertainty of what’s going to happen?

I say as parents, think of your kids literally as crawl, walk, run. That’s how we all learn. That’s how we get as mobile humans. That’s how we start. Let’s start with the crawling. The crawling is high level. You want a parenting plan where it’s fifty-fifty or where one of you has more overnights with the kids. Let’s just start really fifty thousand feet. Okay. Fifty-fifty then. Okay. What does that look like? Is that one week on, one week off? Is that switching every day? Then we come down to thirty thousand feet. We keep doing that until we dial in what I call the base plan. That’s just a normal Tuesday or a normal Saturday during the school year. It’s not a holiday. It’s not a summer. It’s not a break week.

Then from there, we also do the same for holidays, summers, then exceptions. What you do is you get some momentum going. Then I also start with parenting. Little secret for the listeners, hopefully I’m not revealing my mediator secret here, is that really I’ve never run across a set of parents who have been able to at least with a straight face look at me and say, no, Joe, I do not want what’s best for my children. No, I do not like my kids. I don’t love them. I don’t want them. You can trick them into getting along.

Then when I go, look at you guys. You’re doing so great. You agreed on this parenting plan. Let’s talk child support. That really helps.

The Two Docs: I love how your mediation is focused around the kids. Let’s talk about the child. The child needs a voice at the table. I love how your mediation style kind of is that child’s voice. I think for listeners it’s important to recognize not to underestimate the impact it has on the kids, how observant they are, but also as I shared to make sure if you are going to go through this path, speak to them, sit down with them, share with them what’s going on. You don’t have to give them the whole detailed story but you do have to explain to them about what’s happening with mom and dad.

That’s such a good point. I feel like there’s almost a generational difference there where we’ve learned that you talk to your children about these hard things. As pediatricians, we talk about when you’re talking to your children about death, you use the words that they died. You talk to your children about adoption. That used to not be a thing. You talk to your children about sex. We know they’re absorbing so much from that world around them. We want to be there to be the ones having honest conversations with them, not only so they have a chance to voice their concerns and to hear from you, but also so that they know going forward they trust that you are telling them, you’re not surprising them with something catastrophic.

Where do you feel like in that process? I know it varies from family to family and situation to situation, but in your opinion, where along that process do you feel like communication that things aren’t going well should begin to take place? Should it happen once the parents have decided to separate and divorce or earlier than that?

Joe Dillon: I believe it should happen once they’ve decided to divorce and also once they’ve gotten into mediation and have a parenting plan. Kids are going to ask a lot of questions and the worst thing as a parent, we know this: kids look up to you to have all the answers. What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the superhero. You’ve got all the answers. You’re in charge.

I believe parenting plans are the number one most important thing. It’s after that session where they can go home. Kids may have the idea or they may have said something, but at least now they’ll have information that says, okay, we sat down, we talked, we’ve decided this is what the plan’s going to be. Here’s the days with mom, the days with dad. I really think kids are afraid of the unknown. Even if you’ve mentioned it before you enter the mediation process, personally I think ideally is after that first session, at least in our world, when they have a parenting plan that they can share with them and explain how it’s going to work and what’s going to happen moving forward.

The Two Docs: I can imagine based on how you’ve shared your own personal story there’s so much fear of the unknown of the change that’s happening in the life of a child. Having a really well-laid-out parenting plan gives them some type of stability of this is what the future will look like.

But at the end of the day we also want kids to feel empowered. For that out of control feeling, I do have clients working with a couple right now and they’re like, listen, I have a teenager and we want him to feel empowered. We structured their parenting plan that says, this is how many days each of you mom and dad are going to get. Then you can sit with him on Sundays and say, this week, I think I’d like to spend three with dad and four with mom, but I got a game next week, so I’m going to spend four with dad because he coaches. You guys can work that out together.

Joe Dillon: Which also I think gives the child and in this case a teenager a sense of some control in a situation where they feel very out of control like you described so well in your own adolescence. That completely out of control fear of the unknown, not knowing what was happening next. As much of that as we can take off the child’s plate is better. The kids are so anxious and nervous, we don’t need to pile anything else on their plate. They’ve had enough.

The Two Docs: I want to thank our guest speaker today, Joe Dillon, for coming on our episode and sharing his personal story of divorce and what he does in formulating the parenting plan in his mediation. I do want to point our listeners to his web page, equitablemediation.com. It has some great resources, courses, and kits learning about mediation and divorce options. Please check out the website. It is very carefully written and it is a plethora of information that I think would be useful for a parent who’s undergoing a divorce.

Thank you so much for coming on our show and being special guest today.

Joe Dillon: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really a lot of fun and I really appreciate the conversation.

The Two Docs: Yes, thank you. This is Ten Kids, Two Docs. I’m Dr. Sylvia Bank and I’m Dr. Vivian Carlin.

Joe Dillon: And I’m Joe Dillon.

The Two Docs: We’ll see you next time.

Thank you for listening to Ten Kids Two Docs hosted and created by Sylvia Bank and Vivian Carlin. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and recommend our podcast to other listeners. Visit our website at 10kids2docs.com where you can find links to social media and leave comments or suggestions. Back next week with more topics in parenting.