For employers
A company can help hold a parent and child together.
When a couple separates, what is most at stake is the bond between parent and child. An employer, though, sees that person every day, and often stands closer to them than any other adult around the family. That is exactly why a company can protect that bond very effectively. Not with therapy. With ordinary support at the right moment.
Sometimes you can act early, while the bond is still whole. That is prevention. A colleague going through a divorce needs time for their children, not a quiet penalty for taking it. A manager who has their back helps keep the child and the parent in contact before anything breaks.
And above all: sometimes the divorce goes wrong, and the employee ends up in the wrong part of the Custody Matrix, a map of where the custody system pushes a safe parent out of a child's life. This is not weeks, it is years. Holding on to a relationship with a child across that kind of separation is a marathon, not a sprint. And the employer is often the only stable ground the person has left. That is where a company can matter most.
What the Custody Matrix is, and where the system corners a decent parent, are laid out in the map of the system.
I run two experiential seminars on this. Not lectures. Using real cases, I show what managers, HR, and colleagues can actually do, in prevention and over the long haul.
How a company helps keep an employee connected to their child
A half-day or full-day seminar for owners, managers, and HR: when the parent-child bond can be protected early and what the company can do, and how to stand by an employee when the divorce goes wrong and the fight for contact drags on for years. Not a script of phrases, but concrete steps managers, HR, and colleagues can take.
Real safety for employees' children
The biggest threat to a child is rarely online. It is losing a safe parent, pushed out of the game by the other parent with the system's help. A seminar for parents on your team: how to keep both safe parents in a child's life, and how to protect them online too. Digital safety is only part of the picture. It draws on four years at a cybersecurity company and work around child protection.
The seminars are led by Aleš Pektor, founder of Divorce Optimist. Get in touch and we'll agree on a format and a date, and I'll scale the price to the size of your team.
The point is to keep a child and their parent in contact. The company getting a steadier person back is what tends to follow.