Keep a private journal

The journal is somewhere to write down what happened, in your own words, that nobody else in the family can read. Not a message, not an event: a note to yourself, kept with the date it was written.

It is the one thing in Coparia your co-parent never sees.

Write an entry

1. Open Journal.
2. Select + at the top of the page.
3. Write what happened, and save it.

Two dates are kept for every entry, and only one of them is yours. When it happened is the one you choose. When it was written comes from Coparia’s own clock at the moment you save, and cannot be edited by anybody, including you.

That second date is the whole reason a note like this is worth anything later. A record that could be dated the night of an incident, months afterwards, would be worth nothing to anyone.

Say when it happened, if it matters

Leave the date blank and the entry is about now, which is true of most of them.

If you are writing something up later, set the day it happened. The time beside it is optional: give a day on its own and Coparia does not invent a clock reading for it.

Keep the photograph with the entry

An entry can carry photos and PDFs: a photograph of a bruise, a letter from a school, a discharge summary. Select the paperclip beside Attachments while reading an entry, and choose a file. Audio and video files can’t be attached.

Each file can be up to 25MB. How much you can keep in total depends on your plan, and the plans page says which. A file stays with the entry it was attached to, and removing one removes it for good: there is no second copy anywhere.

Take a copy

Select the three dots at the top of the page, then Download journal, for a PDF of everything you have written, oldest first, with your photographs in it. It is there on every plan once you have written something.

The document reads in the opposite order to the screen. The screen answers “what did I just write”; a document read start to end is the record of what happened.

Taking a copy is free on every plan. So is reading what you have written.

What private means, and what it does not

Private here means the other parent cannot see it, and neither can a helper. There is no setting that changes that and no way for anybody to ask for it.

It does not mean protected. A journal kept in a separation app is discoverable, like any record you keep: if there were ever a legal process it could be requested. That is true of a paper notebook too, and it is better to know it now than to find out after a year of entries.

Who has one

Every parent in a family has their own journal, separately. A helper has none, because a helper is somebody you granted access to a schedule rather than a member of the household’s history.

Writing is part of Coparia Plus. Reading what you already wrote never is, and neither is taking a copy of it: a family whose plan changes keeps every entry and can still export them.

See also what anybody looking after your children should know, for the standing facts that are shared with everybody rather than kept to yourself.