Coparenting Through Separation & Divorce
Coparenting after separation or divorce can be emotionally challenging and stressful. Therapy can help you manage conflict, improve communication, and focus on your child’s well-being while navigating your own emotions. Support can also include setting boundaries, reducing stress, and building a more stable coparenting relationship. You deserve support as you adjust to this major life transition.
What often matters most is not whether parents stay married, but how children are supported through conflict, change, and the new family structure.
The co-parenting relationship after separation is often even more impactful to children than the marriage itself — because the impact of conflict is magnified.
Research consistently shows that one of the strongest predictors of resilience in adulthood is the level of collaboration between caregivers, not whether parents stay together.
My role is to offer immediately applicable ways to prevent children from having to bear adult burdens — and to help parents build a stable, emotionally safe structure across homes.
Divorce is not just a legal transition — it’s an emotional and developmental transition for us as parents and our children.
Coparenting Before, During, and After Divorce
helping children stay out of the middle
identifying and reducing inadvertent loyalty binds
supporting resilience and emotional stability
helping parents coparent effectively even when the other parent won’t participate in the process
helping parents coparent as a united front when possible
incorporating filial therapy skills in divorce contexts
offering groups for separating/divorced parents to support you to support your childen
writing therapeutically informed, developmentally appropriate parenting plans
Parenting plans are often written by attorneys who are experts in the law, but may not always have specialized training in child development or family dynamics. As a result, many parenting plans unintentionally overlook how children’s emotional and developmental needs change as they grow.
A parenting plan that works well for a toddler may not meet the needs of a nine-year-old. Likewise, a plan designed for a ten-year-old may no longer fit when that child becomes a teenager.
When parenting plans are overly rigid, vague, or developmentally mismatched, conflict between parents often increases — and children are the ones who carry the emotional impact.
I develop therapeutically informed parenting plans designed to support children’s well-being while helping parents navigate coparenting more smoothly. These plans are structured to reduce conflict exposure, clarify expectations, and adapt to children’s developmental stages over time.
Over the past two decades, these parenting plans have been reviewed and used by many family law attorneys to help families create clearer, more child-centered agreements.
Therapeutically Informed Parenting Plans
Starting the Process
(Options for Separated/Divorcing Parents)
You and your co-parent schedule a joint session with me. You share hopes and concerns, I describe the process and make recommendations from there. Typically, I will then meet with each of you for an individual session, and after that, we meet together again and I share personalized recommendations.
Option 1
Amicable Coparenting Dynamics
Option 2
High Conflict or Toxic
You each schedule an individual session with me first, and then we meet together as three. This can feel safer for some people because you have space to share openly before meeting jointly.
Divorced Parenting Series
A series supporting parents through separation and divorce with practical strategies to prevent children from getting stuck in the middle.