Support recently divorced/separated parents, and those who are still divorcing or separating

Are you a parent with a school-aged child or teen? Affected by divorce or separation?

Consider participate and earn up to $260. All research activities can be done online.

Participation is voluntary and confidential. (IRB protocol: H22-0045).

My name is Neftali. I’m one of the participants from the Healing Heart App. What made me interested was I was at a fatherhood seminar. I saw their booth, was curious, and wanted to see what it was and if it could help me.  It was a really good experience in the study. The friendly reminders, being able to talk after each chapter with somebody, giving my input. And it just flowed. It was a very good experience.

What makes the study important is that dads need help. There’s not a lot of resources for them out there. And it’s really important that, just like this app, there’s plenty of other programs we need to keep building and moving forward and making sure dads have these type of help available. What made it both meaningful and rewarding was that I felt my voice was heard and that my input was gonna help somebody down the road. 

If you’re like me, life happens, you get distracted, but you just gotta stick with the program. Keep doing it. If you can do it every day, great. If you can’t, you gotta sit there. You finally get that one, two hours to yourself. You just sit there and you just go for it and you work the program. Just because stuff happens doesn’t mean you quit. This is for you at the end of the day, just like how I did it for myself. 

When I divorced my daughter’s father last year, creating a new life for my children and I required so much intention. It often felt like everything was on me. While I had wonderful friends and resources to support me, I still found myself carrying much of the emotional weight inward. There is no magic puzzle piece for navigating divorce, but over time we each find pieces that help us to build our new reality. For me, one of those pieces was the Healing Hearts app. What I found most impactful wasn’t necessarily the promise of solving my problems, but the encouragement to slow down and find intention and strength in things that I was already doing. Whether that was shifting my mindset while walking, managing the emotions I could control for myself and my children, or navigating the responsibilities of being our sole source of income. Not everything in the app resonated with me, but I don’t think that any one resource could solve every piece of the puzzle. But the overall experience was absolutely worth my time.

I had a wonderful experience working with the research team and felt genuinely empowered to share my perspective. What stood out most was knowing that my experience, both what resonated with me and what didn’t, could help shape something that would make other parents’ journeys maybe a little bit easier. No two families experienced divorce in the same way. We each have different stories, family dynamics, and co-parenting relationships, which makes it so important that a variety of voices are included in creating a resource like this.

Healing Hearts gave me a small glimmer of time just for me to pause, breathe, reflect, and remember that I was more than just surviving.