I agree Div, though my Ex doesn't have 50% care due to his own choice (before we broke up we agreed that we wanted DD to be with one or other of us all the time and not in nursery and because i was BFing at first it ended up being me who gave up work and that is how it's stayed), we both work very hard to make sure the conflicts we have are resovled fast and away from DD and her needs are put first. At the moment i still have to pick up his slack sometimes but he is getting better all the time. Kids don't know what "normal" is. Normal is your life - if you grow up having 50% of your time with mum and 50% with dad that will be normal to you. I agree that conflict in the family situation whether it's between two households or two members of one household is the thing which causes damage.

My DD has had time between this house and her daddy's since she was 4 months old. She is happy and secure and trusts us both, she is confident and outgoing and doesn't even notice if i'm in the room when i'm at toddler group. She has never been left with anyone but us and knows exactly who her family is. She has that "main-carer" closeness with us both, which is so precious to me, i am glad her daddy gets his share of it - when we lived together he hardly looked at her before we broke up. She might have lost the one-home-to-rely-on security but she has gained the two-calm-loving-homes-to-rely-on security. I have worried about all this in the past too, how it will affect her (especially as i'm so much stricter than her daddy can be about some things) but thus far she is thriving.

The most difficult and important thing i think i did was to prove to my ex he could trust that i would genuinely act in what i believed to be DD's best interests and force myself to treat him as though he would do the same. WIthout the suspicion and second guessing we started to make real headway.

Bx