• The adversarial nature of the court process only serves to exacerbate the problems, not resolve them.
• High conflict families frequently spend more of their time (and their financial resources) fighting over parenting issues than actually parenting their children.
• In formal court hearings – in which time is limited – information comes before the judge in a formal question-and-answer format, and hearings on complicated issues frequently require more than one hearing date. These can be scheduled weeks or even months apart – providing a poor setting for resolving the highly personal disputes that lead to high conflict relationships.

Even traditional mediation is poorly equipped to help high conflict parents reduce the level of conflict and avoid disputes in the future. This method’s emphasis is on short-term resolution of individual problems in order to avoid litigation.

Similarly, the traditional counseling process is often insufficient for many high conflict situations.

• Individual counseling for children has little impact on the broader family problems that are at the root of most disputes. Moreover, parents often use counseling for the children as a battleground in their war with each other or terminate counseling altogether as a tool in that war.
• Individual counseling for parents often does not address the needs of the entire family and may require many months to produce changed behaviors or significantly impact personality disorders.
• Family counseling many times cannot focus enough on the parents’ frequent and often pressing needs in order to resolve co-parenting conflicts, allowing those conflicts to fester or even develop into full-blown litigation. Many parents use family counseling as an opportunity to prove the other parent is to blame for the family’s problems, rather than focusing on solutions that make sense given the situation in which the family finds itself. Most notably, family counseling does not provide decision-making authority that allows resolution of a dispute when the parties are at an impasse.

Parenting coordination fills the gaps in the traditional litigation and counseling processes.

It does so, first, by providing a better opportunity for fact gathering and assessing the needs of the family. Unlike litigation, in which a judge learns facts in a very highly structured environment, parenting coordination allows the fact finder to assess the situation in the same manner in which we answer questions and resolve conflicts in our day to day lives. The parenting coordinator meets directly with the parties, sometimes together and sometimes separate, and is able to hear their stories and ask questions to get a full understanding of the facts. Where the facts are in dispute, the parenting coordinator can seek the additional information needed to help clarify those facts, meeting with individuals with relevant information, reviewing reports and other documents, or even directing the parties to submit to other professionals for evaluation. This process facilitates the fact finding and assessment process. Parenting coordinators often have a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the facts than a judge can possibly get from the bench, and typically are able to do so much more cost effectively than the court process allows.

Second, parenting coordination creates an opportunity for parents to better understand co-parenting issues and learn how to deal with them. One of the primary goals of parenting coordination is to educate or coach parents about their children’s needs. Parents often learn needed skills like anger management, communication, and problem-solving. Parenting coordination facilitates effective communication between the parties. Instead of a “see you in court” attitude, parents learn to develop a “how can we deal with this” approach.

Third, much like mediation, parenting coordination provides the parties with the best opportunity to resolve their disputes themselves. No matter how effective the fact-gathering process, the parties themselves always know and understand the facts better than any third party. Therefore, the parties are almost always in the best position to determine whether a particular solution will really work, or to identify and explore options that third parties might easily overlook. More importantly, a parenting plan or other agreement the parties reach together is much more likely to be followed in the future and bring lasting peace – or at least an enforceable truce.

Fourth, parenting coordination provides a cost effective forum to help parents interpret, implement, and modify parenting plans. No matter how thorough or well-written a parenting plan, no parenting plan can address every possible contingency. There will almost always be questions about what a parenting plan means or how it applies under a given set of facts. Parenting coordination allows the parties to solicit input from someone experienced in these issues in order to better understand their parenting plans, craft parenting plans that meet their unique needs, and modify those plans as necessary. Plus, parenting coordinators have more flexibility to “try” a particular solution to see how it works. Instead of forcing the parties to return to court every time a proposal does not work out to the parties’ satisfaction, a parenting coordinator can put a particular provision in place, then alter or modify that provision to make it work better.

Fifth, parenting coordination provides a more effective and less expensive method. This allows the parties to monitor compliance with a parenting plan, create reasonable consequences for noncompliance and, where necessary, resolve parenting and related disputes. Again, courts can do all of these things. But the structure of parenting coordination allows these issues to be addressed more thoroughly and more cost effectively than can be done in court, in an atmosphere that causes much less stress on already strained relationships. Remedies can be more easily tailored to the unique circumstances of the parties, making consequences more effective and future compliance more likely. As a result, issues are resolved quicker and more cost-effectively and, “win” or “lose,” the parties often feel like they have obtained a fairer result.