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    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap: Essential Parenting Skills When a Child Resists a Parent
    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap: Essential Parenting Skills When a Child Resists a Parent
    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap: Essential Parenting Skills When a Child Resists a Parent
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap: Essential Parenting Skills When a Child Resists a Parent

    By Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D., John Moran, Ph.D. and Tyler Sullivan

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    About this ebook

    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap helps parents understand the reasons why some children resist a parent during divorce—a reality that touches many families. Combining years of experience in intensive work with families struggling with parent-child estrangement, Overcoming Barriers’ first publication offers practical insight on two central questions: • Why does a child resist contact with a parent? • How can I best support my child to have healthy relationships with both parents? This guide details practical strategies for working through the significant challenges both parents may experience with a resisting child. Common scenarios and concrete solutions are presented both for preferred parents and resisted parents.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 1, 2015
    ISBN9781483554884
    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap: Essential Parenting Skills When a Child Resists a Parent

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    • 5/5
      Really excellent book which is easy to read and packed with helpful advice for parents going through a gnarly divorce. Therapists and attorneys helping such parents and children alike will find the book really helpful as well.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap - Matthew Sullivan, Ph.D.

    Resources

    Background, Family Camp, and Acknowledgments

    THE ESSENTIAL SKILLS GUIDE grew from the authors’ experiences working with families through Overcoming Barriers programs and private practice. Thankfully many people have collaborated in this work and contributed to this project.

    The Overcoming Barriers Family Camp (Camp) originated from the work of Peggie Ward, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and leading expert in the field of parenting coordination, who attempted to reunify a resisted father with his son at Common Ground Center, a family camp in Vermont. The intervention was unsuccessful as the preferred parent did not follow court orders and the children refused to leave the car.

    Dr. Ward began to develop a specialized intensive family camp model in collaboration with Common Ground Center, realizing the very complex and specific needs of families in which a child’s resistance of a parent is deeply entrenched and out of proportion to the parenting skills deficits of the resisted parent. They assembled a team that included psychologists Matt Sullivan, Ph.D., and Robin Deutsch, Ph.D. and court personnel, judges and attorneys to develop a camp intervention model that would include all members of the restructured family system (parents, spouses, siblings, step-siblings). Camp is designed to deliver intensive treatment to high-conflict families in which a child is resisting or refusing a relationship with a parent.

    For Camp, the entire restructured family is hosted at a sleep-away retreat where they are immersed in psycho-educational and skills building groups, family therapy sessions, and milieu therapy. Each morning there is a 3-hour group for the preferred parents, a 3-hour group for the resisted parents, and a 3-hour group for the children. In the afternoons, each family has individualized family sessions for the co-parents which may include the children. In the afternoons and evenings the staff organize fun activities for all Camp participants, which provide resisted parents and their children with a means of beginning to reconnect in a mutually enjoyable manner.

    The overarching goals of the Overcoming Barriers Camp are to increase co-parenting communication and cooperation so that the parents can resolve ongoing family conflicts without litigation, and to increase positive connection between the child and the resisted parent. Family members find that they get as much out of the program as they put in. The first steps, breaking the stalemate of the co-parenting trap, are often the hardest, and Camp provides families with extra support and encouragement during this critical juncture.

    Overcoming Barriers began in 2008. Camp’s success is due in large part to contributions from the founders mentioned above; Common Ground Center Director Jim Mendell; Overcoming Barriers’ Executive Director Carol Blane; Donna Feinberg, LICSW; Veronica Gadbois; Barbara Fidler, Ph.D.; and the many families who have participated.

    Special acknowledgment is due to Shawn McCall, Ph.D. for his assistance in developing the Essential Skills guide, and to Transitioning Families in Sonoma, CA, for their innovative work with families and encouragement with this guide.

    Introduction

    WHEN A CHILD RESISTS A PARENT, both parents are faced with parenting challenges far outside the realm of everyday parenting. The resisted parent tries to save a relationship with a child who resists—sometimes rudely—affection, communication and connection. The preferred parent is dismayed as the child conveys unhappy, angry and anxious apprehensions about the resisted parent. Both parents confront extreme parenting challenges as they try to preserve their child’s sense of family, love and security.

    Beginning around 1985, the behavioral health community became broadly aware of the problem of children resisting their relationship with a parent following marital separation and divorce. Since then, the issue has been the subject of in-depth research and discussion, sometimes heated, about how a child’s resistance to a parent may be related to family dynamics that include interpersonal family violence, child abuse, parental neglect, differences in parenting styles, children’s temperaments, parental alienation, parenting skills deficiencies, personality disorders in parents, the attachment history of children, restrictive gatekeeping¹ by the preferred parent, the role of stepparents and extended family, and failed interventions by behavioral health counselors, litigation and the courts.

    At Overcoming Barriers we believe that understanding and intervening in families in which a child is resisting a parent is a work in progress. Other than general agreement that in some families children resist a parent, and that their resistance might be justified, unjustified, or both, there is no single or simple explanation for why it happens or how to best respond. Furthermore, just as each family is unique, how they overcome their family relationship barriers will be unique. Still, there are commonalities in what families experience, how they get caught in the family conflict trap, and how they work their way out of intractable conflict toward cooperation, negotiation, and solution-finding.

    The essential parenting skills we present are based on the work and experience of the Overcoming Barriers Team and review of books and articles about parenting and divorce, parent-child contact problems, family therapy, negotiation and communication skills, and even international peace studies. In our experience, it is critical that we try to intervene on all the factors that contribute to a child resisting or rejecting a parent. The ideas and skills we present are from a wide array of sources and are not intended to endorse any one author or approach to the issues.

    The essential parenting skills are examined in four areas: 1) the resisted parent and the resisting child; 2) the preferred parent and the resisting child; 3) co-parents and the co-parenting trap; and 4) working through anger, resentment and forgiveness.

    Overcoming a child’s resistance to a parent almost always is a complex and irksome process. The families asking to participate in an Overcoming Barriers program usually have had little success in reducing family conflict and restoring family relationships even with the assistance of the courts, attorneys and behavioral health professionals. Increasing each parent’s skill in responding to the unique challenges of a resisting child appears

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