After getting out of a divorce, the last thing you likely want to do is immediately dive back into cooperating and communicating with your co-parent. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and you still need to raise your child, providing support for them in this difficult time.
This is where parallel parenting may come in handy. This temporary form of parenting may help you eliminate quarrels while providing all the support your child needs.
Limiting contact
Healthline discusses ways to create a mutually beneficial parallel parenting plan for everyone in your family. Parallel parenting works by limiting how you and your co-parent can communicate. You may only speak via text-based mediums like letters or emails. Often, this is enough to limit or even eliminate the possibility of getting into disputes or disagreements. After all, if you cannot talk to one another directly, you are less likely to find something to argue about.
Personalizing your plan
When deciding on a parenting plan, you can customize many parts of the plan, as well. You can come up with pick-up and drop-off points, decide how to divide your time and create plans on what to do in the event of an emergency.
With time, the goal of parallel parenting is to eventually upgrade to a more interactive, hands-on and cooperative form of co-parenting. A judge will periodically review your case to see if you are ready to move on to that next step yet. However, there is no set timeline to follow, so it is difficult to tell when you might “graduate” from parallel parenting.
