Why Co-Parenting Counseling Can Be Difficult: Common Challenges After Separation and Divorce
By the time parents enter co-parenting counseling, the argument presented in the first session is rarely the first version of that argument.
A disagreement about a school decision may sit on top of years of disagreement about who carried more responsibility for the children. A dispute about reimbursement may contain remnants of the couple's financial conflicts during the marriage. A request to change a weekend can be heard through a history in which one parent felt controlled and the other felt chronically disregarded.
This is part of what makes co-parenting counseling difficult. Parents are being asked to construct a functional working relationship at precisely the point when the personal relationship between them may be at its least trusting.
In court-ordered co-parenting counseling, there is an additional complication: participation itself may not have been voluntary. One or both parents may begin the process believing that counseling is unnecessary, that the court misunderstood the situation, or that the only problem requiring treatment is the other parent.
Those conditions do not make the work impossible, but they shape it.
The most persistent challenges tend to involve more than communication skills. They arise from the difficulty of separating the relationship that ended from the parenting relationship that remains.
The Parents Are Often Working From Different Versions of the Same History
Divorcing couples rarely leave a marriage with identical explanations of what happened.
One parent may understand the relationship as having deteriorated because the other became increasingly controlling. The other may describe years of taking greater responsibility because his or her former partner was unreliable. One remembers repeated attempts to discuss problems; the other remembers repeated criticism. Both can produce examples.
After separation, those narratives provide a framework for interpreting new interactions.
A text that says, “Can you confirm pickup by 5?” may be experienced by one parent as an ordinary request for information and by the other as another instance of monitoring. A parent who does not respond immediately may regard the delay as insignificant; the other experiences it as further evidence of a longstanding refusal to cooperate.
Co-parenting counseling can stall when each interaction is treated as another opportunity to establish which account of the former relationship is correct.
There are circumstances in which facts matter enormously, particularly when safety, abuse, coercive control, substance misuse, or a child's welfare is at issue. Ordinary co-parenting treatment should not collapse meaningful differences in behavior into the convenient assumption that both parents are contributing equally.
At the same time, many day-to-day parenting problems cannot wait for former partners to agree on the history of their marriage.
The parents may never agree about whether a pattern began as control or as a response to unreliability. They may still need a procedure for confirming pickup.
Disagreement Can Be Mistaken for Failure to Co-Parent
Another common difficulty is the assumption that successful co-parenting should produce agreement.
It often does not.
Parents can have different judgments about how much independence a teenager should have, whether a particular extracurricular activity is worth the commitment, how closely homework should be supervised, what constitutes an appropriate bedtime, or how much screen time is excessive.
When parents live together, those differences have to be negotiated within one household. After separation, some continue to require joint decisions while others no longer do.
Problems develop when every difference is treated as evidence that the other parent is failing to co-parent.
A mother may strongly disagree with the amount of screen time permitted at the father's home. Unless the issue implicates the child's health, safety, a court order, or a matter requiring joint decision-making, the existence of a different rule may not be a problem that co-parenting counseling can or should eliminate.
This can be frustrating because the distinction between “I think this is a poor parenting decision” and “this is a decision I am entitled to participate in” is not always emotionally satisfying.
It is nevertheless an important one.
In some families, progress depends less on producing greater consensus than on clarifying the limits of each parent's authority over the other household.
Communication Can Carry the Conflict
High-conflict parents are not necessarily parents who rarely communicate. Some communicate constantly.
Messages grow longer because each parent wants a complete record. Every statement receives a response because leaving an accusation unanswered feels dangerous. Minor inaccuracies are corrected because allowing them to stand feels like conceding something important.
An exchange that begins with whether a child needs to bring a soccer uniform can end with several pages concerning who failed to communicate about activities during the previous school year.
From inside the conflict, the detail can feel necessary. Meanwhile, the original question has disappeared.
This is one reason telling parents simply to “communicate better” is inadequate. In some co-parenting relationships, the problem is not insufficient communication but communication that has acquired too many functions. It conveys information about the children while simultaneously documenting grievances, defending against anticipated allegations, correcting the historical record, and attempting to establish which parent is behaving reasonably.
Research on post-divorce co-parenting has repeatedly distinguished conflictual co-parenting from cooperative or supportive co-parenting. A systematic review by Lamela and colleagues found that dimensions of the post-divorce co-parenting relationship were associated with parental well-being, parenting quality, and children's psychological adjustment. The literature also suggests that co-parenting cannot be reduced simply to how often parents interact; the quality and function of those interactions matter.
The therapeutic work may therefore involve reducing the number of jobs each communication is expected to perform.
An email about the orthodontist does not also have to settle whether one parent has historically taken greater responsibility for medical care.
Litigation Can Enter the Therapy Room
Court-involved co-parenting counseling has a problem that ordinary couples therapy generally does not: what happens in treatment may be viewed through the lens of an active legal dispute.
A parent may bring twenty pages of messages and want the therapist to understand what they establish. Another may be reluctant to acknowledge any mistake because of concern that the statement could later be used against him or her. An attorney may have advised a client to attend counseling, document cooperation, or be cautious about what is discussed.
The therapist can then become part of the conflict without intending to.
A parent may begin listening for evidence that the therapist “agrees” with the other parent. A clinical observation can be interpreted as taking sides. A recommendation about communication can be converted into evidence that the other parent has been communicating improperly.
The treatment now has an audience beyond the people in the room.
This is one reason role clarity is unusually important in court-ordered co-parenting counseling. The therapist is not conducting a custody evaluation, deciding which parent is more credible, or determining who should receive more parenting time. If treatment is organized around persuading the therapist of the merits of each parent's legal position, there is progressively less room to work on the parenting relationship itself.
One Parent May Want More From the Process Than the Other
Co-parenting counseling does not always begin with two equally motivated participants.
One parent may have extensive goals for improving the relationship while the other wants only the minimum communication necessary to comply with the parenting plan. One may want flexibility and collaborative decision-making; the other may believe that flexibility has historically produced conflict and prefer rigid adherence to the schedule.
Neither preference is inherently more psychologically sophisticated.
A highly collaborative co-parenting relationship can work well when both parents can sustain it. When every negotiation turns adversarial, however, a more structured arrangement may be considerably easier on the family.
This creates an important clinical problem. If the therapist assumes that increased collaboration is always the objective, the parent seeking more distance can easily be characterized as resistant. If the therapist assumes that reduced contact is always preferable in high-conflict cases, opportunities for workable cooperation can be missed.
The question is not which model looks more amicable. It is what level of interaction these particular parents can manage without repeatedly recreating the conflict treatment is intended to reduce.
Children Can Become the Most Efficient Communication System
When communication between parents is difficult, children can become convenient intermediaries.
Some examples are obvious:
“Tell your father you need to be home by six.”
Others are less apparent:
“Did your mom say why she couldn't take you to practice?”
“Who was at Dad's house this weekend?”
“Did your mother tell you about the school meeting?”
The parent may genuinely be seeking information. The child may nevertheless understand that the information has significance.
Over time, children can become part of the family's communication infrastructure. They carry schedules, explanations, observations, emotional information, and sometimes complaints between households.
Research on interparental conflict has paid particular attention to triangulation, loyalty conflicts, threat, and self-blame. A meta-analysis of divorced families by van Dijk and colleagues, encompassing 115 samples and 24,854 families, found significant relationships among interparental conflict, parenting processes, and children's adjustment. Several dimensions of parenting helped statistically account for the relationship between parental conflict and children's internalizing and externalizing difficulties.
The implication is not that every question about the other household is harmful. Children naturally talk about their lives.
The more useful distinction concerns whose need the communication is serving.
A child telling a parent about an enjoyable weekend is sharing his life. A child being relied upon to obtain information that the adults are unwilling to exchange themselves is occupying a different position.
Co-parenting counseling often requires moving that responsibility back to the adults.
New Partners Change the System
New relationships frequently expose unresolved questions about boundaries.
A new partner may attend a school event, help with homework, drive a child to practice, discipline within the household, or develop an important relationship with the child. To the parent in that household, these developments may feel like an ordinary consequence of building a new life.
To the other parent, the same behavior can feel intrusive.
The conflict is rarely only about whether a new partner should attend the soccer game. Questions about replacement, authority, loyalty, privacy, and the meaning of family after divorce can all be present.
New partners can also become participants in the co-parenting conflict themselves. They may write messages, confront the other parent at exchanges, advocate for their partner, or develop strong views about how the parenting relationship should operate.
A dispute that began between two parents can now involve four adults, each with an interpretation of what is happening.
Co-parenting counseling generally works best when the responsibilities of the parents remain clear. A new partner can be important to a child without becoming a third co-parent in disputes between the child's parents.
Money Does Not Stop Being Relational After Divorce
Financial conflict also tends to survive the end of a marriage.
Parents may disagree about extracurricular expenses, medical costs, tutoring, private school, clothing, phones, cars, travel, or what constitutes a necessary expense. The parenting plan or court order may answer some questions but cannot anticipate every expenditure that will arise as children grow.
The dollar amount is not always the entire dispute.
A $150 expense can carry an argument about entitlement, control, generosity, responsibility, or whether one parent has historically borne more of the financial burden. Parents with substantial resources are not immune from these conflicts; in some families, greater financial complexity simply creates more categories over which disagreement can occur.
A request for reimbursement can therefore reopen the marriage's financial history.
The co-parenting task is narrower: What does the governing agreement require? Which expenses require advance consultation? What documentation is expected? How will discretionary expenses be handled? How quickly should reimbursement occur?
Clear answers to those questions reduce the likelihood that each new expense will require another argument about all the expenses that came before it.
Sometimes the Stated Problem Is Not the Problem
Parents often identify a concrete complaint at the outset.
“He doesn't respond.”
“She changes the schedule.”
“He undermines my rules.”
“She sends too many messages.”
Those descriptions may be accurate, but they do not always explain why the problem persists.
A parent who does not respond may be avoiding conflict, exercising control, overwhelmed by the volume of communication, or simply careless. A parent who sends repeated messages may be anxious about obtaining an answer, attempting to create a record, accustomed to carrying the family's administrative responsibilities, or trying to force engagement.
The same observable behavior can serve very different functions.
This is where co-parenting counseling requires more than rules about email etiquette. Structure is useful, but structure imposed without understanding the function of the behavior can simply move the conflict somewhere else.
The work involves determining which problems need a procedural solution and which are being maintained by a relational pattern that has not yet been adequately understood.
Progress Is Often Less Dramatic Than Parents Expect
People sometimes enter counseling expecting the other parent to change substantially.
That expectation can make meaningful improvement difficult to recognize.
The former spouse may never become more flexible. The parent who dislikes texting may never become communicative. The two households may continue to operate differently. Neither parent may revise his or her account of why the marriage failed.
Yet the family can function better.
Parents can learn which disagreements require engagement and which can be left alone. Messages can become shorter. Schedule changes can stop triggering historical arguments. Children can cease carrying information between households. A new partner can attend an event without the occasion turning into a dispute about parental status.
None of these changes resolves the divorce.
They do something more relevant to co-parenting counseling: they reduce the extent to which the unresolved parts of the former relationship continue to organize the family's daily life.
References
van Dijk, R., van der Valk, I. E., Deković, M., & Branje, S. (2020). A meta-analysis on interparental conflict, parenting, and child adjustment in divorced families: Examining mediation using meta-analytic structural equation models. Clinical Psychology Review, 79, 101861. Corrigendum published 2021 in Clinical Psychology Review, 88, 102060.
Lamela, D., Figueiredo, B., Bastos, A., & Feinberg, M. (2016). Typologies of post-divorce coparenting and parental well-being, parenting quality and children's psychological adjustment. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 47, 716–728.
Regina Abayev, LMFT provides court-ordered co-parenting counseling for separated and divorced parents in Hermosa Beach, the South Bay, and greater Los Angeles. Learn more about Court-Ordered Co-Parenting Counseling.
