Legally Speaking Military Focused Family Law Facts By Tana Landau, Esq.
Parallel Parenting: Is it for You? Most people are familiar with the term co-parenting, but have you ever heard of parallel parenting? In an ideal divorce, parents would separate but be capable of coparenting their children. Unfortunately, all too often this is not the case as one parent either refuses to do so or is caught up emotionally in the negative feelings they are harboring toward the other parent. In high conflict cases, communication and co-parenting can be practically non-existent. Parallel parenting is a method utilized in situation where traditional co-parenting will not work. It minimizes contact between parents. What is the Goal of Parallel Parenting? The goal of parallel parenting is simply to avoid conflict; particularly in front of your children who are negatively affected by it. The purpose is not to keep parents away from their children, but to minimize interactions between parents. How Does Parallel Parenting Work? In a traditional co-parenting situation, parents work together to raise their children. For example, the parents may consult each other on topics like household routines, school events, what extracurricular to enroll their child in, what days it occurs, who can take the child on each day, what the costsplitting will look like etc. In parallel parenting each parent has their own, independent parenting style and rules when the children are with them. In a parallel parenting scenario, a parent would enroll the child in an activity on their time. No discussion with the other parent is needed as long as it does not interfere with their time or require the other parent to pay for it. They would simply just inform them that they were enrolled. Similarly, the other parent would be in control of the activities the child participates in on their time. Everything is separate. Parents do not attend the same school events, extracurriculars, meetings, or appointments. If one of these events falls on their time, they attend. If it’s on the other parent’s time they don’t Parallel parenting allows the parents to parent while being disengaged from the other parent.
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The parents detach from each other and do not communicate about most day-to-day custodial decisions while the childrenare under either parent’s care. Instead, each parent has control over their respective parenting responsibilities during their parenting time. Parallel parenting is essentially an alternative to traditional co-parenting that can be utilized in high conflict custody matters. Coparenting can be viewed as collaborative efforts of parents who live apart that implies a certain level of cooperation in the common and everyday tasks of raising their child. Whereas parallel parenting is where parents operate completely independent of each other while avoiding any discussion and minimizing communication. While parallel parenting minimizes communications, it does not eliminate it. Typically, any communications are business like.
