Building and Enhancing Efficacious Coparenting in Parenting Coordination

Abstract

Parenting coordination is a dispute resolution process to assist the subset of separating/divorcing parents who remain entrenched in high conflict coparenting post‐separation/divorce. Based on factors known to impact positive child outcomes, its goals include assisting parents to protect children from their conflict and implementing a framework that will assist the child to have a good relationship with both parents. Despite significant efforts, parenting coordination often falls short of achieving its intended goals, which include not only healthy child adjustment but also efficacious coparenting, which is itself an important mediator and moderator of child outcomes. This article raises questions and concerns about the extent to which child outcomes may be limited if the goals of parenting coordination are limited to establishing and implementing a disengaged, parallel model of coparenting, while avoiding or giving up on efforts to build and enhance cooperative coparenting. Given preliminary findings indicating some parents note change here express dissatisfaction with the process and outcomes, it is necessary to consider whether the seemingly intractable subset of parents referred for parenting coordination might benefit from something more or different. We discuss two innovations: One aims to strengthen individual parent readiness and responsiveness and the other brings parents together in a child‐centered team‐building approach. Though cooperative coparenting is a challenging and unrealistic goal for some parents, further research is necessary to understand more fully which interventions help which families, when and in what manner.

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