Divorce or separation presents unique challenges for children.  I offer services for divorcing parents to reduce conflict and resolve disputes.

Divorce and it’s associated stresses and losses can pose great disadvantages to your children.  The Longevity Project found that the divorce of one’s parents as a child, shortens a child’s life more than the death of a parent.  The single strongest social predictor of early death in adulthood is parental divorce during childhood.  Many of the harms of divorce can be mitigated by focusing on the needs of the children and reducing conflict with your co-parent.  Communicating effectively is essential to reducing conflict.  Here is a useful guide on co-parent communication. 

It is often useful to be familiar with research findings about parent-child time sharing in making decisions about these issues.  I have assembled some of the most useful information on this issue here .

Co-parenting therapy

Co-parenting therapy is intended to improve the quality of communication and effective collaboration of divorced parents for the benefit of their children. Divorced parents often have difficulty working together, for obvious reasons. Yet, parental conflict is well known to create poorer outcomes for children, while cooperative co-parenting leads to child outcomes indistinguishable from children in intact families (see https://chriswehl.com/high-conflict-divorce-services/parenting-after-divorce/ ). I typically begin by meeting individually with each parent, to understand the issues from their perspective. I will usually meet with parties jointly, with some side communications about problem behaviors. We will discuss issues of dispute, but the focus will be on how the problems are discussed, as much as whether you can agree on a solution.

Co-parenting therapy is for co-parents who want to learn to discuss their children and parenting in a collaborative, respectful way, can avoid discussing personal grievances from the past and focus on the needs of the children, want to learn about parenting and co-parenting “best practices,” want to discuss and resolve outstanding issues, such as scheduling, school concerns, behavioral concerns, recognize and accept the importance of both parents in the children’s lives, can accept that this process is about your child, not you. If you cannot answer yes to each of these, you are not a good candidate for co-parenting therapy. You may need to do some work in individual therapy first, to get to this point. Both parents must be able to endorse these goals to begin co-parenting therapy with me.  Click here for more details.

I am no longer providing Special Master, Parenting Coordination, or reunification therapy.