By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
You have separated from this person. You have, in some meaningful sense, ended the relationship. And yet here you are, still in it, just a different version of it. The same number comes up on your phone. The same habits of communication, or the same failures of communication, reassert themselves in texts about pick up times and GP appointments and what the children have said they want for their birthdays. Separation ends the romantic partnership. It doesn't end the parenting one.
That gap between what people expect co-parenting to feel like and what it turns out to involve is where, in my experience, most of the difficulty lives. Many parents approach separation hoping that once the relationship is over, the worst of the friction will be over with it. Some find this is true. Others discover that the relationship that needed to end was the romantic one, and the parenting relationship, which can't end, is carrying all the weight of everything that went wrong between them. This piece is about that relationship: what it requires, what gets in its way, and what makes a difference.
In brief
Co-parenting is a working relationship. It does not require friendship, and it can go well between two people who are still hurt.
Research on separated parents suggests that conflict between them is linked with how children fare, and that how parents manage conflict matters, not only whether they separate.
Communication usually breaks down because the channel is carrying the old relationship's unresolved hurt, not because either parent is unreasonable.
Practical changes to the channel, the medium and the timing often help more than trying to have better conversations in the same place.
Support can help, and the earlier the better, in my experience.
What Co Parenting Actually Is
It's worth being precise about what co-parenting means, because the word gets used loosely in ways that can obscure what's being asked of two people. In my view, co-parenting is not the same as being on good terms with an ex-partner, or wanting to spend time together, or having mutual warmth. It is a specific working relationship, defined by how two adults coordinate the shared task of raising a child rather than by how they feel about each other. That distinction matters, because it means co-parenting well is a separate skill from repairing the relationship, and one that doesn't require the other.
Researchers have broken co-parenting down into several dimensions. One group of researchers, in a study of divorced parents, measured four: agreement between the parents, exposure to conflict, undermining or support of each other, and the division of labour (Lamela et al., 2016). A well-known framework for research and intervention describes co-parenting as a central element of family life that influences parents' adjustment, parenting and child outcomes (Feinberg, 2003). None of these dimensions requires friendship. All of them require some functional capacity to communicate.
Why Communication Breaks Down
In my experience, the most common reason co-parenting communication fails isn't that both parents are unreasonable. It's that the communication channel between them is still carrying freight it was never designed for: everything that didn't get resolved in the relationship, compressed now into exchanges about school uniform and weekend arrangements.
A message about a child's doctor's appointment lands on top of a year's worth of accumulated hurt, and it gets read through all of that accumulated hurt. What appears on the screen as a factual question reads, to the person on the receiving end, as a criticism, or a dig, or evidence of exactly the kind of behaviour that made the relationship impossible. The reply comes back charged with all of that, and the cycle that characterised the relationship at its worst is now the cycle in which the logistics of the children's lives are being conducted.
This is not a character flaw in either parent. It is a structural problem. Two people are being asked to maintain a new, functional working relationship using the same communication patterns that broke down in the old one, and without any of the warmth, physical closeness, or shared investment in the future of the relationship that might once have smoothed things over. The surprise isn't that co-parenting communication fails under those conditions. The surprise is how often parents manage to hold it together anyway. If the old argument patterns are what you recognise, my piece on how to stop arguing with your partner describes the cycle and what interrupts it.
What the Research Says About Co Parenting and Children
Research on separated families points in a consistent direction. A review of the evidence on interparental conflict and young people's mental health concluded that children are affected by how their parents express and manage conflict, across a range running from silence to violence. It also reported that children's emotional, behavioural, social and academic outcomes, and their future relationships, are adversely affected by conflict between parents or carers whether the adults live together or are separated (Harold & Sellers, 2018). That is an encouraging finding in one way, because it means the issue is not separation itself. It is how conflict is handled, and that is something parents can work on.
A large meta-analysis looked specifically at divorced families. It combined 115 samples covering 24,854 families and examined how conflict between parents, parenting, and children's adjustment fit together. The associations were mostly in the expected direction and of small effect size. Parental support, hostility, structuring, intrusiveness and role diffusion (where the boundaries between the parent's and child's roles blur) helped to explain the link between conflict between parents and children's internalising problems, such as anxiety, and externalising problems, such as acting out. The findings hinted at a stronger impact of negative parenting behaviours than positive ones, and role diffusion was considered a particular risk after divorce (van Dijk et al., 2020). I read this as saying that what matters is not only whether parents argue but what happens to the parenting when they do, and that keeping children out of the middle of the conflict matters.
A study of 314 divorced, heterosexual parents in Portugal gives a more specific picture of co-parenting patterns. Researchers grouped parents into three patterns based on how they rated agreement, exposure to conflict, undermining or support, and division of labour. The three patterns were a high conflict group, an undermining group and a cooperative group (Lamela et al., 2016). Parents in the high conflict group reported lower life satisfaction, more negative feelings about the divorce and more inconsistent parenting than parents in the undermining and cooperative groups. Parents in the cooperative group reported better family functioning and fewer emotional and behavioural problems in their children, both internalising ones such as anxiety and externalising ones such as acting out. The authors suggest that a positive co-parenting alliance may be a protective factor after divorce.
There are limits to what any of this can tell us. The Portuguese study was a single study in one country, of heterosexual parents, using parents' own reports at one point in time, so it shows associations and not causes. The meta-analysis found small effects, and the review concerns children's mental health at the level of groups, not any one child. None of these studies tells us about same sex families or families with more than two parenting adults. I would not assume the same three groups would appear in every family. It is also worth knowing that the Portuguese study's three groups did not include a separate 'parallel parenting' group, so I cannot point to research here on whether parallel parenting, where contact between parents is minimal, does better or worse than other arrangements. In my own view, parallel parenting is not failure. For parents who cannot yet manage close cooperation, it can be a sensible holding arrangement that reduces conflict while the harder emotional work is done, but that is a clinical judgement and not a finding.
If the communication between you has reached a point where even a text about pick up times reliably escalates, couples therapy, or specifically co-parenting support, can help establish a different kind of channel.
Co-parenting is a specific functional relationship, one defined by how two adults coordinate the shared task of raising a child rather than by how they feel about each other
Practical Shifts That Help
Some of what helps with co-parenting communication is structural, a matter of setting up the channel differently rather than trying to have different conversations in the same channel. These suggestions come from my clinical experience and not from research.
Keep the channel narrow
Co-parenting communication tends to work better when it's restricted to the children: their wellbeing, their schedules, their needs, and nothing else. Not relitigating the separation. Not processing the relationship. Not anything that doesn't have a child's name in it. This sounds obvious, and in practice it's genuinely hard, because the channel is the same one through which the relationship was conducted. One useful rule is to ask, before sending anything, whether it would make sense in a message to a colleague about a shared work project. If it wouldn't, it probably shouldn't be sent.
Match the medium to the message
Text and messaging apps are fast and convenient, and they're also the most compressed, context stripped form of communication possible. Tone is invisible. Ambiguity gets filled in by the reader's current emotional state. For anything beyond simple logistics, a brief phone call, or a scheduled time to speak, tends to produce better outcomes than a thread of messages that accumulates misreading on misreading. Some parents find apps designed specifically for co-parenting communication, which log exchanges and reduce the ambient emotional charge, genuinely useful. Not because technology solves the underlying difficulty, but because a more neutral medium can reduce the opportunity for escalation.
Separate what you feel from what you send
The feeling of wanting to say the thing that expresses how unfair this is is legitimate. Acting on that feeling in a co-parenting exchange is, in my experience, almost always counterproductive. This doesn't mean suppressing everything. It means having somewhere else to put it, whether that's a therapist, a trusted friend, or a journal, so that the co-parenting channel stays as clean as possible. The feeling and the communication are two different things, and treating them as the same thing is where I see most co-parenting communication breakdown.
Keep the children out of the middle
The research on role diffusion above is a reminder that children do better when they are not asked to carry messages, take sides, or comfort a parent about the other parent. In practice that means not using a child as a messenger, not asking them to report on the other household, and not sharing adult grievances with them. Where you notice it happening, it is usually a sign that the adult channel is not working and needs attention, not a sign that anyone is a bad parent.
Plan for the hard moments in advance
Handovers, birthdays, school events, Christmas: these are the predictable flashpoints where co-parenting communication is most likely to falter. Working out in advance, when there's no immediate pressure, what each of these will look like and what the agreed approach is, reduces the number of decisions that must be made in the moments when both parents are least equipped to make them well. If the school holidays are a pressure point, I have written about why six weeks together is harder than it looks, and about getting through Christmas without falling out.
When One Parent Is Making It Much Harder
Not all co-parenting difficulties are symmetrical. Sometimes one parent is doing the serious work of keeping communication functional and the other is not, whether through unresolved anger, deliberate obstruction, or simply an inability to separate the former relationship from the parenting one. This is one of the most isolating positions in co-parenting, because the standard advice assumes two people who are both trying.
What tends to help in this situation, in my experience, is a combination of making the channel as resistant to escalation as possible, keeping records of exchanges, maintaining consistent, low temperature communication regardless of what comes back, and accepting that the quality of the co-parenting relationship right now reflects where both parties are right now, not where either will necessarily be in two years. Some highly conflicted co-parenting relationships do eventually settle, in my experience not because one difficult event resolves everything, but because the logistics of shared parenting over time create a kind of necessary functional contact that can gradually reduce the charge. I cannot point to research on how often that happens.
Where there is genuine coercive control, or behaviour that goes beyond difficulty into harm, this is a different situation, and one that is better addressed through legal advice and specialist support than through attempts to improve communication. Co-parenting guidance assumes both parents are operating in good faith, however imperfectly. Where that assumption doesn't hold, different support is needed. My piece on coercive control versus conflict explains the difference.
LGBTQ+ Families and Non-Traditional Configurations
Co-parenting after separation in same sex families can carry some additional layers. Where children are being raised by two parents of the same gender, the separation may surface questions from children about how their family is changing that don't map exactly onto the standard scripts, particularly if the family structure was already something children had learned to explain to their peers. In my experience the co-parenting communication itself doesn't work differently, but the context around it may need some additional thought. This is a clinical observation, and the studies cited above did not include same sex families.
For families where the parenting network includes more than two adults, whether through consensual non monogamy, blended family structures, or other configurations, the question of who is co-parenting with whom, and what communication those relationships require, may be more complex. The same principles tend to apply: keeping exchanges child focused, reducing conflict, supporting each adult's relationship with the children. But the number of relationships requiring management is larger, and the potential for misalignment between adults is correspondingly greater. Being explicit about roles and communication expectations early tends, in my experience, to reduce difficulty later.
Getting Outside Support
Co-parenting is one of the situations where I find therapeutic support can help in a concrete way, because the problem is often structural rather than personal. The people involved are usually not lacking in goodwill or intelligence. They are caught in a communication dynamic that the relationship itself created, and trying to change it using only the tools the relationship gave them.
There is some research on support for separated families, though it is mostly about parenting programmes and not couples therapy. In a randomised trial of 240 families, mostly divorced mothers, a parenting programme designed to reduce children's mental health problems after divorce was followed up 15 years later. Young adults whose families took part reported less of the feeling of seeing life through a filter of divorce than those in the comparison group, and the effects varied with how much risk the family faced at the start. The authors concluded that programmes for families after divorce can have benefits for long term feelings about the divorce and its links with adjustment problems (Christopher et al., 2017). That was a programme for mothers, in a mostly White American sample, so it does not tell us how couples therapy compares. I am not aware of a study I can point to showing how much couples therapy helps with co-parenting specifically, so that part is my view and not a research finding.
Couples therapy in the co-parenting context isn't about repairing the romantic relationship. It's about establishing a different kind of working relationship, with clear communication norms, a shared understanding of what the children need, and somewhere to process the ongoing difficulty of the situation without those feelings infecting the parenting channel. In my experience this support is often most useful before things have reached a full breakdown rather than after. If you have recently told the children about the separation and the co-parenting relationship is already showing strain, addressing it now tends to be considerably easier than waiting until patterns have set. If you are looking after yourself as well as the children, life after separation covers the individual side.
The question of whether to stay together for the children's sake is often where this journey starts. Co-parenting after separation is where it continues, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. It's a relationship that deserves the same care and attention as any other long-term relationship between two people who matter to each other's children, which is what, ultimately, you both are.
If it would help to talk through where things stand, a free consultation is a low-pressure starting point.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist, and the founder of Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice offering couples and relationship therapy across Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington in London, as well as online consultations. His approach draws first on Imago Relationship Therapy, alongside integrative relational, attachment-based, Gottman, and systemic approaches. Mark works with couples of all kinds, including LGBTQ+ couples and those in non-traditional relationship structures such as consensual non-monogamy, as well as with individuals working through relational issues.
References
Christopher, C., Wolchik, S., Tein, J. Y., Carr, C., Mahrer, N. E., & Sandler, I. (2017). Long term effects of a parenting preventive intervention on young adults' painful feelings about divorce. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(7), 799 to 809.
Feinberg, M. E. (2003). The internal structure and ecological context of coparenting: A framework for research and intervention. Parenting: Science and Practice, 3(2), 95 to 131.
Harold, G. T., & Sellers, R. (2018). Annual research review: Interparental conflict and youth psychopathology: An evidence review and practice focused update. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(4), 374 to 402.
Lamela, D., Figueiredo, B., Bastos, A., & Feinberg, M. (2016). Typologies of post divorce coparenting and parental well being, parenting quality and children's psychological adjustment. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 47(5), 716 to 728.
van Dijk, R., van der Valk, I. E., Deković, M., & Branje, S. (2020). A meta analysis on interparental conflict, parenting, and child adjustment in divorced families: Examining mediation using meta analytic structural equation models. Clinical Psychology Review, 79, 101861.
