When you go through a divorce, you will likely end up on the other side with a lot of negative, tense and unresolved emotional conflict. This can make even the notion of co-parenting together a difficult one to swallow.
Fortunately, you have the option of parallel parenting. This may act as a bridge to help you recover from the trials of divorce and end up at a place where you can co-parent together in a healthier way.
Limiting communication
Healthline discusses parallel parenting plans and how they might suit different families. A parallel parenting plan allows you to parent your child together, while still keeping some distance between you. In many cases this is the much-needed distance that allows you to recover from the divorce, giving you time and space to process and move on.
It does this by limiting your communication, keeping it to written text like emails or letters. You can even avoid speaking to each other entirely, simply writing down information about visitations in a notebook and passing it along with your child when they go from house to house.
Tailoring your plan
You can also tailor your plan in a way that suits you best, altering things like how you will handle cancellations, establishing pick-up and drop-off points, and deciding how you will divide the time that your child will stay with each of you.
A judge will monitor your parallel parenting period, and will eventually decide when it is time for you to move on to a more cooperative form of co-parenting. However, there is no strict timeline by which this may happen, and it will progress depending on how your situation unfolds.