In contentious divorces, every decision parents make about their children can become a battleground. Enlisting the help of a parenting coordinator to implement the terms of their settlement agreement can be very effective to avoid battles but, if drafted improperly, the provision for the use of a parenting coordinator can create additional roadblocks to effective decision-making. By making smart decisions upfront, parents can design an agreement that is clear and advances the goals of their parenting coordination process.

Explicit Agreements Reduce Confrontation Later

The American Psychological Association defines parenting coordination as "a non-adversarial dispute resolution process that is court ordered or agreed on by divorced and separated parents who have an ongoing pattern of high conflict and/or litigation about their children…The underlying principle of the parenting coordination intervention is a continuous focus on children's best interests by the [parenting coordinator] in working with high-conflict parents and in decision making." (Coates, Deutsch, Starnes, Sullivan, & Sydlik, 2004. Parenting Coordination for High-Conflict Families. Family Court Review, 42(2), 246-262; Deutsch, Coates, & Fieldstone, 2008; Kelly, 2002, 2008).

The operative words in this definition are "ongoing pattern of high conflict" and "high-conflict parents."  These descriptions include behaviors such as argument escalation, stonewalling, gaslighting, coercive control, or abuse, that impede parents from coparenting effectively without the help of a third party, and which often put the children in the middle unfairly, forcing them to choose or align with one parent over the other.