Children don’t need perfect parents or perfect lives to be healthy.

Enlightened Coparenting
 

A coparenting approach that aims:
to improve the relationship between coparents,
to deepen the relationship between parents and children, and
to help parents begin the process of healing and improving their relationships with themselves.

Children don’t need perfect parents or perfect lives to be healthy.  The goal of Enlightened CoParenting is to work to maximize family and individual strengths while minimizing family and individual risks.

Dr. Jodi Peary

In Enlightened CoParenting the emphasis shifts from who is at fault for the dissolving of the marriage and toward the degree to which parents are able to minimize the risk factors associated with negative outcomes in children while maximizing protective factors.

Relationship Between Parents

Divorce is a complex process involving a chain of marital transitions, family reorganizations, altered roles and relationships, and different stages of individual adjustment. This makes coparenting equally complex.
One of the hardest tasks for separated parents is to redefine their relationship and to create new, more positive, communication patterns.
One of the most documented risk factors for negative outcomes from divorce in children is high conflict between parents.

Enlightened CoParenting is designed to help coparents redefine their roles with each other and create new boundaries.

Enlightened CoParenting Provides Concrete Tools Parents Use To Communicate Better as Coparents.

1. Identify the Negative Interaction Cycles of Conflict

Until we identify the conflict cycles, we cannot begin the process of developing new communication patterns that facilitate healthy coparenting. Negative interaction scripts often operate seemingly automatically and have become ingrained in communication over years of repeating them throughout the marriage.  

 2. Realize The Negative Interaction Cycles are the problem rather than each other.

Reframe problems not as what one or the other parent does but as the self-reinforcing negative cycle that they are both caught in and the cycle’s impact on their coparenting and their individual well-being.  

 3. Apply ingredients to dissolve the cycle.

Examples of boundary setting phrases
I’m not comfortable with this/with what I hear/with how this is going/etc…

Sorry, but this does work for me because…

I don’t know yet. I want to think about it first, ok?

Sorry to interrupt, I’d like to/I need/etc…

I’m feeling troubled by…

Please stop yelling at me, or I will need to…

I’ll need to think about that/check my calendar/etc… and get back to you.

I see your point, but I think differently about this.

Example:
Mutual trust
Dissolve Competition
Dissolve Need for Continuous Validation
Nuanced perspective vs. Always, Never, & Nothing
Limit High Pressure Decision Making

Recognize Bullying

Leveraging by Leading with an Assumption

Avoidance

BIFF: Brief Informative Friendly Firm
Understanding that they are on the same team
Create a climate of courtesy in your families and community.

Values Reminder

Create a values reminder to act as a values affirmation tool to build resilience during stressful life events that occur when co-parenting.

Try not to focus on specific outcomes that one hopes to achieve.  Instead, remember general values that they consider important. Unlike goals, which represent what we want to achieve, values are ways of living. The focus is on what is important to the parents rather than on what he/she aims to achieve.


Parents’ Relationships With Children

Cultivating Emotional Intelligence in Children
Learn and apply the 5 steps to increasing emotional intelligence in children.
Gain the tools needed to be an emotionally responsive parent.
Learn how to respond to children with empathy and understanding while effectively limiting their negative behaviors
Emotion Coaching is a research-based parenting skill that is divided into five steps:

1. Be aware of your child’s emotions

2. Recognize emotions as an opportunity for connection or teaching.

3. Help your child verbally label the emotions.

4. Communicate empathy and understanding.

5. Set limits and problem solve.


Learn and identify the ways children cope.

Engage in shared parenting practices designed to minimize stress and uncertainty for children.


Minimize Interference in Child’s Relationship with Each Parent

Ex. Rituals and routines are both about delineating between space and time and creating a grounding rhythm, a predictable structure with a reassuring, calming, and stabilizing effect.

Relationship With Self & Self Care and Healing

This is super important. We can't be good parents if we are not well ourselves!