Co-parenting counseling is usually served up as a table for 2 - dad and mom, mom and mom or dad and dad. At the heart of co-parent counseling is reducing parental conflict and centering decision making around the children’s developmental stages and unique strengths and needs. The skills for reducing parent conflict are twofold: improving communication improvements and communication barrier reduction.
Co-parent counseling most certainly works for two parents dining at the table of their children’s well being.
What if you are dining solo - your co-parent isn’t interested? Maybe even blames you for the conflict?
More and more parents find themselves in medium to high conflict situations and in need of shielding their children from that conflict, in need of navigating peaceful paths to parental interactions and decision making. More and more online co-parenting courses, books and organisations are appearing with a dedication to conflict reduction between parents due to this phenomenon.
At the same time, not every parent is interested in or able to participate in co-parent counseling with the other parent. Do we throw out co-parent counseling all together - a table for two or no table at all?
Not necessarily. It only takes one parent growing their own communication skills to provide a layer of protection from conflict for the kids as well as some peace of mind around modeling healthy communication. The same skills used with 2 parents in co-parent counseling can be mastered solo and significantly reduce the kids’ exposure to conflict, even improve your quality of life.
Co-parent communication tools are like a restaurant menu - there are a variety of skills to choose from, sample and digest. In the area of enhanced communication, the menu items benefit you and reduce conflict even if your co-parent doesn’t order (learn) them.
A popular menu item for co-parent communication is brevity. If you digest (master) business-like brevity, it will be much more difficult for your co-parent to be reactive. Brevity means 1-3 sentences and business-like means without blame. For example, if your co-parent asks you to do something that you cannot accommodate, like pick up earlier or later than usual, keep the response brief and blameless (avoid talking about the past!). It’s much harder for your co-parent to find things to argue about in a neutral 2 sentence text or email than in 10 sentences of blame. With a simple change around simplifying communication, you can save yourself from being the recipient of a response that counters the multiple points you initially made. Even if your points are legitimate, often your co-parent cannot hear them, will misunderstand them or dismiss them. Save yourself the trouble by keeping communication brief and blameless. If you are with your kids, who wants to sit at their phone or email pounding out paragraphs to try to get your co-parent to understand when you have precious little time with your kiddo? If your kids aren’t with you, you are wasting your precious free time. You will get a better quality of free time or child time and, most important, your child will get a better quality of time with you once you master business-like brevity.
The same principle applies to learning to reduce communication barriers. Blaming is so natural and easy when communicating with someone who has been hurtful, disappointing or worse. And, blame is an enormous barrier to solving problems: it calls to the past, makes most people defensive and doesn’t generate solutions. If only one of you resists pointing fingers, it will be much harder for conflict to escalate.
There are benefits to dining alone (aka engaging solo in building your communication skills). For yourself, you can take pride in mastering new skills under difficult circumstances, reduce the amount of time you spend engaged in conflict and have peace of mind in how these changes reduce stress on your kids. For your kids, you are setting a positive communication example for your children, putting less strain on your kids and spending less time responding to inflammatory emails or texts when your kids are with you.
As you can imagine, there are also downsides dining alone (aka one parent engaging in co-parent counseling). The biggest is that your co-parent is not working on new skills or changing their communication. You very much will be focused on what you can do differently going forward. You are likely to still receive triggering communication from your co-parent. Fortunately, your co-parent counselor will be a source of encouragement and understanding.
You may not have a choice about dining alone - you’ve invited your co-parent to no avail. Nevertheless, you can sample the menu of healthy co-parent communication, enjoy the experience of mastering new skills and take in new views on how to be an effective speaker and listener.
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