Tired of being your ex's unpaid personal assistant? Sick of the "you didn't tell me" games when you KNOW they got the same damn email?

This is about the Access to Records clause—the paragraph most people don't know they need until it's too late.

Just because your custody agreement says "joint parenting" doesn't mean shit when your ex is playing information gatekeeper. Won't tell you what team your kid is on. Puts their NEW SPOUSE down on school forms instead of you. Conveniently "forgets" to add your email.

This is control. This is manipulation. This is why you need this clause.

In this episode:

• Why your ex refuses to list your info (it's control, not forgetfulness)
• How to stop being their secretary
• What to do when they leave you off forms
• The one question that saves your sanity

Here's the truth: If it's online, they can find it themselves.

You're NOT their secretary. You're NOT required to send screenshots five times. And you're NOT a bad co-parent because you won't do their work.

Stop asking someone who hates you to do you favors. Take your parenting plan to the school yourself and get added. Go to the doctor's office. Check the portal. Do the work.

When they accuse you of being a bad co-parent, ask yourself: "Is that true?"

No. Because you put their number down. You sent the link. Their laziness is not your emergency.

Bottom line: This clause stops you from being their secretary while ensuring equal access. Without it? Years of fighting over basic information.

Stop doing their work for them. Now go set some boundaries.

Here’s What You Can Actually Take Away:

• Stop Being Their Secretary - You're not obligated to constantly update your ex on information they can access themselves online.
• Both Parents Must Be Listed - A proper access to records clause requires each parent to list the other's contact information when registering children for anything.
• Digital Access Equals Equal Responsibility - If information is available online, both parents are responsible for accessing it themselves.
• Don't Ask Your Ex to Fix Their Own Sabotage - If they left you off school registration, go directly to the school with your parenting plan rather than begging your ex to add you.
• The "Is That True?" Test - When accused of being a bad co-parent, simply ask yourself if the accusation is factually true—usually it's not.
• High Conflict Parents Use Information as Control - Withholding schedules, team names, or doctor information is a manipulation tactic, not forgetfulness.
• Your Parenting Plan Needs This Clause - Without specific language about access to records, you'll spend years fighting over basic information sharing.

The Truth Bombs

• "If it's on the internet, your ass is responsible for finding it. We even take it a step further—if your child has a relationship with another adult, you're responsible for knowing who that adult is yourself."
• "Don't expect somebody that hates you to include you. That doesn't make sense, does it?"
• "When your ex accuses you of being a bad co-parent, simply ask yourself: Is that true? No it's not. Because here I am giving you the link I gave three weeks ago. You're just lazy. I'm not a bad co-parent because you are lazy."
• "I don't have time to lead you to water. We have to be careful about overextending ourselves into taking care of the other household."
• "When you go to a high conflict person to fix their own doing, you might as well hold your breath—death will come upon you faster."
• "You're walking around with a literal computer in your hand 24/7. The least you can do is use it to look up information instead of texting me."

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This podcast exists because way too many parents are slogging through divorce quietly and thinking they are the only ones dealing with this mess. You can share your story, ask real questions, or send in topics you want broken down without the fluff. Stories can be shared anonymously, and no, this is not legal advice, but honest conversations are where clarity actually starts.

Samantha Boss: All right. One would think that if it says joint parenting in your custody agreement, that it's automatically assumed that everybody has access to everything. And that's not necessarily true. And actually having access to everything does and can cause a little bit of havoc and problems. And I'm gonna explain.

So first and foremost, access to records should be a portion in your parenting plan. If it's not, you need to find an attorney that will include said portion into your parenting plan. 'cause what this paragraph can do is alleviate you from being someone's secretary, but also give you access to information.

And so I wanna be able to have both, right? I don't wanna be anybody's secretary where I'm constantly giving updates and I'm constantly have to tell them things, and I constantly have to keep them in the loop. That's not what I wanna do. If I sign the child up for something, I easily wanna be able to put your name and address and phone number and walk away, and you get the same info that I get.

Yay. Everybody has access to the same information because I put your information down. That is a problem right there. Do you know that there's parents out there that refuse to put the other parent's contact information down to keep it a secret and to keep it a seek and find? I had a parent who is literally trying to still figure out what field hockey team her son is on because her ex refuses to share the information.

When Your Ex Uses Information as a Control Weapon

He won't just write down the name of the program. He won't put her information down. He is refusing to share that information. Instead, he's getting letters from her attorney and, and messages from her and causing all this havoc just because he won't share what team the son is on. So having this paragraph in your parenting plan is critical because we want both parties to have access to information.

Now, we're not just talking about extracurriculars because I'm just telling you right now, I'm from the decades before where everything was on paper. They would hand you a practice schedule on paper. Can some of you even fathom that right now? Can you even comprehend that that happened? That there was a time when people handed you paper and it had a literal 30 day calendar on it, and it would be marked three 30 to five 30, the high school gym, you know, five 30 to eight 30 in the high school gym, and went back and forth like that.

Like it was a time and it sucked. But one of us would have to either give that information to the other parent and or make a copy. And then we're having to write it down or keep track of it on our own calendar. But this whole idea of being able to have it all digital now genius. But the one starting point is that, is that you have to share the other parents' contact information, like their phone number or their email to make it all digital.

So they get that digital information. Now, let's move on school stuff.

School Registration: The New Spouse Problem

When I register the kid to school, I should be putting the other parent as party number two. Do you know how many people don't do that? This is just a warning. That's what this podcast is about, the ugly truth, but is this, parents do not put the other parent down.

You know who they put down the new stepparent or nobody or grandma before they'll ever put down the other parent. So this portion would say that you know, this party A, would be this parent party B needs to always be listed, and if party B signs the child up, then party A should be listed as the second parent and such.

So in school, again, everything is digital. You guys are so lucky that all I have to do is put their email down or their phone number down, and they're gonna get the same notifications, the same reminders, the same emails. Now when we get into doctor's offices, it's a little bit trickier on who is the primary care provider.

Medical Records and Insurance Complications

With that insurance and does the other parent have access to records? Now, I can't give you a definitive answer here because I'm not your insurance provider. I don't know what the rules are gonna be for your doctor's office in sharing that information, but this is stuff that you have to get ahead of when you're building your parenting plan, especially if your ex is already shown signs of doing this behavior where they're leaving you out.

They're icing you out. They're not putting you down as a contact. They're not putting you down as an informative person that can get the, the medical records. So we really have to look at what do you want, especially the medical portion to look like. If your child is in therapy, does your ex have access to who that therapist is?

And I'm just gonna be a, a bearer of bad news here. If you're in high conflict, which means you're dealing with somebody with some type of personality disorder, narcissism, they are gonna hate that your child is going to therapy and they will try to intervene with said therapists and they will try to get that therapist to drop your case because they don't wanna deal with your ex's bullshit.

Because your ex will nonstop call the office, harass the office, threaten the office and and such. And so when you're working with your attorney, I want you to really pay attention to this section and making sure that it's worded to protect your future self, that you're not back trying to. You know, get access or reduce access.

So if you're the primary insurance holder, how does that look for the other parent? Yeah, they have access to the child's records, but how do they get those if they're not on the insurance any longer? Okay. And some of you might be. You know, able to share that through portals and different things with different types of insurance.

But I want you to just be thinking about that. How will this other parent who's not on the insurance have access to my child's records? Will I have to be that person that does that in and shares that information out? Am I gonna have to jump into a secretarial role where I'm gonna have to share what happened at that doctor's appointment?

But here's the caveat to that. Will that high conflict parent believe what happened out of your mouth? Most likely no, because they're high conflict and nothing you say is honest or truthful. Ask them. They'll tell you.

Put Your Big Boy Pants On: How We Write Access to Records

So access to records, essentially, and I love the way my team writes this up because we essentially say in a professional way, put your big boy pants on and take care of this shit yourself.

Meaning if it's on the internet, you can find it. So there's no calling your ex and saying, what's the baseball schedule? When parent teacher conferences, what grades do the kids have? If it's on the internet, your ass is responsible for finding it. We even take it a step further and we literally tell in the parenting plan, if your child has a relationship with another adult, whatever that means, you're responsible for knowing who that adult is and building that relationship yourself.

So there's no going to parent A and saying, Hey, how's a therapist? What kind of person are they? what times do they go? You figure that out. You're a big person. Go research that. Go find out who the, who the teacher is. You wanna know who the pediatrician is. Look it up. Go there. I've told you once.

I'm not telling you again. Go meet with the doctor if you wanna know about them. I don't have time to lead you to water. We have to be careful about overextending ourselves into taking care of the other household. We'll go back to parallel parenting here. I know that I wanna go to appointments 'cause I wanna be informed and I wanna be there.

So I go, it's not my job to keep another parent informed who knew about the same appointment, they knew about the same appointment and they chose not to go. Now again, if they asked me cordially and nicely what happened? Absolutely, but let's be real. You wouldn't be on this channel if it was cordial and nice.

So we have to be careful of what does the parenting plan say I have to share, and what is the other parent able to get on their own information? If it's more than three clicks. Cool. Go find it. But it's clickable, so if it's there somewhere, go find it. I just see a lot of my clients, my one-on-one clients going down this rabbit hole of like, oh, Sam, I sent that screenshot like three weeks ago when we signed the kid up for soccer, and now he wants it again.

Okay. well I can easily scroll through. I also know how to search for images, so I don't know that you need to send that again 'cause you've already sent it once. They're just being lazy slash controlling slash manipulating to see if you'll send it to them again. And if you don't, they're gonna label you as a bad co-parent.

Are you a bad co-parent?

The "Is That True?" Question That Changes Everything

So we had a good doctor on TNC. If you don't know what TNC is, it's monthly membership group for moms for the men. Sorry. We don't have anything yet. On hold for that. But for moms, we had this amazing doctor come in and they were talking about this connection between us feeling like we have to constantly play secretary and take care of them and do all these things and make sure that we're keeping up with, you know, keeping them informed and keeping them informed and, and them telling us, well, you're a bad co-parent if you don't, well, you're a bad co-parent.

I'm gonna take you to court. I'm gonna take the kids. If you don't tell me, if you don't, tell me if you don't keep me informed and all this shit. And it plays a fuckery on our heads. And what the doctor end up saying is, all you have to do is when your ex accuses you of something, of being a bad co-parent, you simply ask yourself, is that true?

No it's not. Because here I am giving you the link. I gave it to you three weeks ago. You just wanna get it. You're lazy. I'm not a bad co-parent 'cause you are lazy. So ask yourself when your ex accuses you of something it's so simple, you guys. It really is. If I would've done that all those years ago, I probably would've switched to parallel parenting a lot faster than trying to hold out for co-parenting.

But this access to records is, you know, if you're ex is accusing, you have to keep me informed. You gotta tell me that information. you, you didn't tell me about parent teacher conferences. Is that true? No, because I put your number down just like I put my email down and your email down and I got the same fucking email I know is in your inbox somewhere, whether you read it or not, that's not up to me.

That's up to you. But I don't have to remind you of parent teacher conferences because you're a big person and if you can vote, then you can look and you can read on your own and get the information. If it's on the web, you have access. Right. They're walking around with a literal fucking computer in their hand, 24/7, attached to their hand and take it to the fucking bathroom.

The least you can do is use it to look up information instead of, or thumb, thumb, thumb back to you and saying, Hey, let me know when this is happening. Why didn't you let me know this? You have access to the same information. And I see this a lot on social media where there's parents saying, you know, my ex won't give me information.

My ex won't tell me about this. My ex. The internet is wild with information. It's wild with information, and if you have legal custody of your child joint or just partial, you can call said school and say, I am a legal guardian of this child. I deserve to have my information down. But so many of you go the rabbit hole of telling your ex to put down your information.

I had a client years ago the wife, the ex-wife put the mom put down her new husband's information and left dad off. Now, dad went ape shit as he should because he was left off of school registration. Now they didn't have a paragraph like this saying that she had to write down his information, so she did what she wanted and she wrote down her new husband's information and dad went ape shit again.

Yes. You should go nuts. But what he did wrong was he went to his ex-wife to change it. You should put me down. You should put me down. He spent hours, thousands of dollars with attorneys telling the ex-wife to change it, change it, change it, change it. What I would've done is I would've taken my parenting plan signed, dated, and and approved by a judge and slapped that on the secretary's desk at the elementary school in a nice way, 'cause it's not her fault, and said, Hey, we got some update to do.

Okay. I don't know what Ms. Susie over here told you or put down 'cause she did it from home on the internet. My information needs to be on here. I'm the legal guardian of this child. I mean, this is not rocket science, but when you go to a high conflict person to fix their own doing, you might as well hold your breath.

Death will come upon you faster. They're not going to change. This is who they are. They thought they'd get away with it. So this is common practice to have a paragraph where we both say, put your big boy pants on, find the answers yourself, but also just enough respect that we're obligated by our parenting plan to both put information down that includes both one another.

Again, something you don't look for in a parenting plan before you need it, right? But then when you need it, you're like, shit, where's that paragraph that Sam was talking about where we have to put each other's information down? Yeah, it's not there, right? So the paragraph we list inside of ours that we build for people doesn't have loopholes, right?

Doesn't have vagueness. It just has. You're both grown adults. Here's what you're gonna do, and if not, you're easily in contempt because it says right here you are supposed to do this. But again, I want you to all realize if you are in a high conflict journey. You are gonna have to have a workaround once or twice, if not daily, in dealing with your high conflict X.

And you're gonna have to figure out a way to make sure this shit happens on your dime, and you go find those schedules, you go find those doctor's appointments, you put yourself on the Remind Me app, you make sure your email got added. You go to that school and make sure you're listed. You have to go do the work.

Don't expect somebody that hates you to include you. That doesn't make sense, does it?