Parent Coordination After Divorce
Parent coordination is a problem-solving approach for divorced parents who want help to keep their children shielded from their parents’ conflicts.
While conflict is a normal part of divorce, how well parents manage that conflict affects both the short-term and long-term well being of their children.
For some parents, conflict continues to create distress for them and their children beyond the divorce. Problems may arise over issues that are not specifically addressed in their parenting plan. For example, the parenting plan may say that parents decide together on extra-curricular activities for their children but not indicate how to deal with disagreements about these activities. When a conflict arises, children often feel caught in the middle. This situation may put them at a greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems such as poor school performance, anxiety, uncontrollable anger, and depression.
Even parents who have been able to protect their children from conflict during the divorce process may encounter problems when new situations such as remarriage or a change in financial status may occur.
Returning to court with these conflicts is both financially and emotionally costly. Even more, courts are not ideally equipped to provide lasting resolutions because of the competitive “win/lose” nature of the court-based legal process.
In these situations, a parent coordinator can support parents to resolve conflicts more readily and protect children from stress.
As a parent coordinator, my activities are matched to the specific needs of each divorced family. I may do any or all of the following:
-help parents identify sources of conflict between them and consider ways to address it;
-facilitate communications between parents and between parents and others who relate to the children such as grandparents, school personnel, and therapists;
-use negotiation techniques to deal with specific areas of conflict;
-apply arbitration procedures in certain defined areas when parents are otherwise unable to resolve a dispute.