Parenting Coordination and Co-parenting Counseling: Choosing the Best Intervention for Families

• Author: Annette T. Burns
• Pages: 36-40

36 FAMILY ADVOCATE www.shopaba.org

Parenting Coordination and

Co-parenting Counseling

Choosing the Best Intervention for Families

BY ANNETTE T. BURNS

parties enhances the desire to blame, as parents who believe

they were wronged feel they can convince a third party how

right they are and how wrong the other person is.

Collaborative eorts such as mediation or parent educa-

tion may fail to resolve conict at this stage. Being involved

in court isn’t good for co-parenting. For a variety of reasons,

litigants don’t make good co-parents. e characteristics of a

litigant are directly in conict with the characteristics of

eective co-parents.

Interventions help remove parents from the most adver-

sarial environments and focus on their children. Whether

parenting coordination or co-parenting counseling is chosen as

a solution, the parents are more likely to stay out of court and

focus on their status as co-parents rather than combatants.

Any analysis of what might help co-parents should

recognize that some families need less assistance, while others

are engaged in what is known as intractable conict (conict

that causes harm to both children and relationships) that

may involve multiple returns to court. When parents

experience mild to moderate conict, co-parenting education

with a skilled therapist can provide information that parents

will put into use in their own families. John Moran, David

Weinstock & Kolette Butler, Matching Parent Education

Programs to Family Treatment Needs, in Evidence-Informed

Interventions for Court-Involved Families: Promoting Healthy

Coping and Development (Lyn R. Greenberg, Barbara J. Fidler

& Michael A. Saini eds., 2019). When parents are taught to

gain insight into their own relationships and behaviors, and

how their behaviors aect their children, they may be able to

learn skills to lessen damage to the children.

When a family court judge or lawyer needs

to choose among available co-parenting

interventions for families, two of the

best-known interventions are parenting

coordination and co-parenting counsel-

ing. Both choices are designed to help and educate parents

who share decision-making and parenting time of their

children, although both processes can also be helpful even

where one parent has sole or primary decision-making. Of the

two, parenting coordination is the more intensive process.

Early in a separation or divorce case, the co-parents’

feelings about each other are aected (and often destroyed)

by their long-standing conicts, ineective communication

styles, anger, diering parenting styles, substance abuse,

sexual issues, and feelings of abandonment and unfairness in

the relationship. Debt and nances are often major points of

stress and anxiety. In many cases, one parent was almost

entirely in control of the child’s day-to-day activities, and

with separation, that parent expects to continue in that role,

which will not be the case when joint legal decision-making

and almost equal parenting time orders are created.

As the divorce case progresses, those conicts tend to

escalate. e parties may have taken positions against each

other, and may have positive and negative advocates (attor-

neys, family, and friends who have taken sides). Intractable

conict is exacerbated by legal threats, court dates, fees and

costs, and third-party involvement, including custody

evaluators and judges. When the parents do communicate,

they may be blaming, defensive, and threatening and want to

rehash past perceived injustices. e involvement of third

Litigants Co-parents

Advocate a position Look for compromise

Distrust other party Attempt to create trust

Focus on own interests Focus on child’s interests

Have a win-loss mentality Compromise/child “wins” mentality

Blame the other party Takes responsibility

Spend $$ on attorneys/litigation Spend $$ on counseling

Rely on court for resolution Competency in creating solutions

(Adapted from Matthew Sullivan & Annette Burns,

Effective Use of Parenting Coordination: Considerations for Legal and Mental Health Professionals

,

58 Fam. Ct. Rev. 730 (2020).

Published in Family Advocate, Volume 43, Number 4, Spring 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof

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