Sometimes, there are situations and issues that make co-parenting, difficult or inappropriate. For some, the divorce or separation was accompanied with mental and physical abuse, substance abuse or protective orders and other high conflict issues, and then parallel parenting may be more effective.
For Our Kids Parenting and Co-Parenting Services understand that conflict with the other parent is bound to occur, but it doesn’t have to hurt your kids if you take steps to prevent it. Try to keep all arguments away from your kids, and don’t make negative comments about the other parent to your kids. If you treat communication between yourself and the other parent as a job, then conflict and arguments should be less likely to occur. The other parent may not approach parenting like you, but that doesn’t make their approach wrong – just different. Tolerance of these differences will go a long way toward reducing some of the conflicts, and it will help your child to see that you, and the other parent can still be respectful of each other.
Face the facts, if parents are high conflict, it may be in the best interest of the child to have less back and forth. It may be better to have one parent have the child for school and activities because the parents are too conflicted. The stakes are just too high to let the battle get in the way. Visit our website at: www.4ourkids.org and learn how to co-parent from a distance, when communication with the other co-parent is at “zero levels." Let us give you the parenting skills, parenting tools, resources, along with an easy to understand parenting plan, which will help you and your children during this time of transition.
The first step to implement Parallel Parenting is:
1. Disengage from the other parent
2. Learn to parent independently from the other parent
3. You don't want to rely on the other parent for your
information.
4. Resist telling the other parent how to parent
