Navigating Divorce in Play Therapy: Co-Parenting Vs. Parallel Parenting

One of the major tasks of play therapy is assessing the family system. 

What is the level of attachment? The quality of the parent child relationship? What are the sources of strength and resilience? Areas of difficulty? Opportunities for skills and growth?   

And in divorced or separated family systems this assessment is much more complex.

The research around separation and divorce is clear - the lower the conflict between parents the higher likelihood that kids and teens will have lower symptom levels and lower levels of impact from the divorce.  The research is also clear that (with few exceptions) kids do better when they have regular access to both parents. 

But in any given week families are navigating dance competitions, the science fair, pick ups, drop offs, and everything in between. So, as the level of contact and number of decisions to make goes up, so does the potential for conflict. 

I wanted to share two parenting styles that usually show up in the playroom and the pros and cons of each.  

Now, before we unpack these parenting styles - I do a deep dive HERE about how important it is to involve parents and caregivers in play therapy.  This is equally essential in divorced and separated family systems. 

Additionally, play therapy involving parents is all about increasing their confidence, competence, and effectiveness in parenting skills and attachment relationship. 

What it isn’t? Making any legal recommendations that are outside of your scope of practice. Learn more about what your role as a therapist is - and isn’t - with this free download HERE! 

Co-Parenting 

Co-parenting is a parenting style when both parents are able to jointly participate in decision making for their child or children.  Learn more HERE. These are parents that are able to have open conversations and make joint decisions about their children including where they will attend school, the sports or activities they will engage in, permissions, and even general rules and limits. 

Co-parenting isn’t always agreement, however. Co-parents might have strong feelings, big disagreements, and have some topics where they agree to disagree.  However, co-parents work hard to keep arguments and disagreements civil and away from the eyes and ears of their children.  Most of the time, even when they don’t see eye-to-eye, co-parents are able to collaboratively make decisions. 

Co-parenting can provide children with a sense of stability and predictability.  This type of parenting can also decrease loyalty conflicts and alignment with one parent or high levels of fears or stress about parents not getting along.


Parallel Parenting 

Parallel parenting is a parenting style where parents create conditions to significantly minimize any and all interaction.  These parenting systems may even have such low contact that all communication goes through a third party such as a mediator or they have agreed on text or email only communication versus phone or in person conversations. 

Parallel parenting is typically used for high conflict divorce or separation where parents have extreme difficulty keeping conversations civil and when high levels of conflict make cooperation difficult or impossible.

With parallel parenting, due to low levels or no ability to collaborate, there is a potential for kids to have inconsistencies with rules, structure, and expectations between homes. This is one of the factors with divorced and separating systems that can cause distress for kids and teens. At times, depending on how high conflict the divorce or separation is, parents have created a predetermined structure where they avoid being at the same event together such as a game, concert, or school conference. 

This parenting style can also be less flexible for issues or dynamics that pop up at the last minute where parents need to work together for the best interest of their child.  Some of these issues might be lack of ability to communicate about last minute needs for school or sports or when social plans pop up that were not pre-planned. 

Although parallel parenting has less flexibility, it also is often necessary for parents to decrease their child’s exposure to arguments, fights, and disagreements. 

For all divorced and separated families that present in your playroom what we know is best for children is if conflict is minimized and adult conversations are kept to adult spaces. 

This free guide HERE may be helpful in referring parents to resources to help creating parenting plans that minimize conflict, disagreements, and the need to frequently return to court - all which puts extra added stress on kids and teens. 

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