Co-parenting by Darylynn Starr Rank

These days everyone is super-conscious of the endless difficulties encountered by kids whose parents are separated or divorced.  The painful stories start at the most extreme end of the continuum about the issue of so-called 'custodial interference' - parents who actually kidnap their offspring. 

But the milder end of the continuum is also filled with myriad problems. Shared custody, with all the attendant issues that arise: two homes with kids shuttling back and forth, economic wrangles, scheduling nightmares. Infinite disruptions to infinite situations. Trying to figure out who's doing what, when and how. Who's in charge of what activity, at what moment in time. Making sure there aren't any gaps when no one's in charge!

Or the primary custody situation where the child lives mostly with one parent, while the other participates, to highly-varying degrees, in the child's life. My own personal history was rife with the struggles of visiting days, who gets the kids for the holidays, and the "What are you doing with them when you have them?" accusations. Then there was the endless echo of, "But you can't do that with them. They have homework to do!'

Now there actually are couples with shared custody who do it brilliantly. Cooperate, consult - a true and loving collaboration. There are parents who work in their visiting days without a hitch (somewhere, I'm sure). But usually there are ongoing and inevitable controversies about how to do it right.

When I hear the phrase 'co-parenting', those are the kinds of things I think about. The families that are broken-up/separated/split apart. 

But then, as I was talking to my husband about the subject for this column, he remarked that, unless a parent is completely on their own (as, tragically, many are, because of death or abandonment), most parents are co-parenting.  Whether they live together or apart. It's not as if the majority of these issues disappear because a couple is living together in harmony, no matter how much they're in love! 

What couple do you know that doesn't have issues about their mate's parenting style? "When I'm out he lets him stay up 'til all hours, then I can't get him out of bed in the morning." Or "The kids never have a chance to play. They're children. They need to enjoy themselves." Or "How could you let her go out tonight?  She has a final exam tomorrow."  Or, "Jeesh, I can't believe how you're spoiling him. He already has eleven pairs of jeans!"

Not to mention all the other issues…  "But I want our kids to have a religious upbringing. It's important to me."  "We have to go there for the holidays. They're the grandparents."  "No, he's too young to own a car!"  And it's all part of the grappling any couple has to do around - well, everything! -  finances, work, vacations, their own parents, what colour to paint the kitchen ("You want to paint the kitchen blue?!?")  You name it.

Fortunately, co-parenting is a normal part of most people's lives, whether the parents are together or apart. (The olden-times image of the non-participatory father is becoming exactly that - old-times.)  Co-parenting offers great joy and great benefits for the children. And it has the capacity to offer great support and sharing for the parents as well. It's a mistake to think of it as something that only couples living apart have to deal with - we're all in it together. But trying to manage anything at all by working together in a relationship, much less the extraordinary task of parenting children, takes a whole lot of work. 

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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