Because your child needs a system, not a friendship.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud: sometimes your ex drives you up the wall. Their tone, their choices, their timing, their sheer ability to make a simple handover feel like a hostage negotiation. If you’re reading this thinking, “co-parenting feels impossible because I genuinely can’t stand them,” you are not alone – and you are not failing.

Here’s the truth I want to offer you at the very start: co-parenting is important even when you don’t like each other, even when trust is low, even when communication feels tense. Why? Because co-parenting is not about being close. It’s about building a stable, child-protecting system across two homes.

You don’t need to be friends.
You don’t need to agree on everything.
You don’t even need to understand each other.

You need a method that keeps your child out of the middle and your nervous system out of constant fight-or-flight.

1. Your child can feel the conflict – even when you’re not saying it out loud

Children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional weather. They may not see the text thread, but they feel the fallout. They hear the sharpness in your voice after a message lands badly. They sense the tension in the car on the way to handover. They notice the way your shoulders stiffen when your ex’s name appears on your phone.

When co-parenting is hostile or chaotic, kids experience it as uncertainty. And uncertainty is stressful for children, even if they don’t have the words to name it.

Co-parenting done well creates emotional safety.
Not because it makes adults happy – but because it makes life more predictable for kids.

2. Co-parenting is a long-term system, not a series of moments

One of the biggest shifts I teach is moving from a short-term mindset (“win this moment”) to a long-term one (“protect the system”).

When co-parents dislike each other, it’s easy to get pulled into micro-battles: who said what, who started it, who’s right. But your child doesn’t live in moments. They live in a system that repeats week after week, year after year.

The long game is where kids thrive.
It’s not dramatic. It’s boring. It’s consistent. And it works.

So the question becomes less:
“How do I get them to behave?”
and more:
“What decision protects the long game for my child?”

3. You don’t need a perfect relationship to raise a secure child

This is so important: your child doesn’t need you to like each other. They need you to manage the overlap between your two homes with steadiness.

Think of co-parenting like three circles:

• Your world (your routines, your rules, your communication style)
• Their world (their routines, their rules, their choices)
• The overlap where your child lives day-to-day

You cannot control their circle. You can strengthen yours. And when your circle gets calmer, clearer, and more consistent, the overlap becomes safer — regardless of what they do.

This is the freedom point.
You can co-parent well even with a difficult person.

4. The goal is “kids out of the middle,” always

If you take only one principle from this blog, let it be this:
kids out of the middle.

Your child is not your confidant, messenger, therapist, or referee. Even subtle triangulation puts them in a loyalty bind: “If I support Mum, I betray Dad. If I support Dad, I betray Mum.”

Co-parenting matters because it removes that bind and gives children permission to be children.

A quick internal filter I teach:

Before you speak or send a message, ask:
“Will this keep my child out of the middle… or pull them in?”

That question alone changes everything.

5. Regulation before resolution

When you can’t stand your ex, your body often reacts before your mind does. Your heart speeds up, heat rises, old injustice floods in. That’s not weakness – it’s your nervous system trying to protect you.

But here’s the catch: dysregulated communication creates dysregulated children. Not because you’re bad parents, but because systems are contagious.

So the first “skill” of co-parenting isn’t a clever script.
It’s regulation.

Try this simple pattern:

1. Pause before reply
2. Breathe three slow breaths (longer exhale than inhale)
3. Name what’s happening in your body: “I’m triggered.”
4. Choose the long-game response
5. Then send.

It sounds small. It is huge.

Regulation first keeps you in leadership.
Resolution comes after.

6. Meaning-layer awareness: what’s really going on here?

Many co-parenting fights aren’t about the surface issue. They’re about the meaning underneath.

The surface issue might be:

• a late pick-up
• money
• holidays
• a school choice
• a new partner

But the meaning layer often sounds like:

• “You don’t respect me.”
• “You always get away with it.”
• “I’m not safe with you.”
• “I’m still being controlled.”

When you don’t see the meaning layer, you keep fighting the same fight. Over and over. In different outfits.

Co-parenting matters because learning to spot the meaning layer keeps you from replaying the past on your child’s present.

You don’t have to solve every meaning layer.
You just need to stop letting it hijack the system.

7. Boundaries and robust agreements

Here’s what boundaries do in co-parenting:
they remove negotiation from every interaction.

When boundaries are unclear, everything becomes a debate. When they’re clear, conflict loses oxygen.

Start with the boundaries that protect kids most:

• Notice rule for changes (e.g., 48 hours unless emergency)
• One-topic messages (no spirals or multi-issue texts)
• One channel for logistics (email or app, not 17 different places)
• Handover protocol (what time, where, who waits how long)
• Child not messenger (from both sides)

Boundaries aren’t punishment.
They are kindness for the future.

8. Rapid rupture-repair

Even the best co-parents rupture. Misunderstandings happen. Bad tone days happen. But what matters is whether you repair.

Repair is how trust builds over time. It doesn’t need a big emotional apology. It needs a clean reset.

Try a repair sentence like:

• “Can we reset? That didn’t land how I meant.”
• “I hear you. Here’s what I’m proposing now.”
• “Let’s return to the plan and keep it practical.”

Co-parenting matters because repair stops drift.
And drift is expensive for kids.

9. Co-parenting is about who you become – not who they are

This might be the hardest and most liberating truth:
your co-parent doesn’t have to be easy for you to co-parent well.

You can’t control their growth, their personality, or their emotional maturity. You can control your steadiness, your clarity, your boundaries, and your long-game leadership.

And when you do, two things happen:

1. Your child gets calmer and safer
2. You get your nervous system back

Co-parenting isn’t about becoming close.
It’s about becoming skilled.

A final word

If you can’t stand your ex, I want you to hear this clearly:
you are not expected to like them.
You are not expected to forgive everything.
You are not expected to pretend it’s fine.

You are expected – by your child and by your future self – to build a system that protects the long game.

Your child will not remember every message you sent.
They will remember how safe childhood felt.
They will remember whether they had to carry adult tension.

Co-parenting matters because they deserve a childhood where they are not the bridge between two adults. They deserve to love you both without managing you both. And you deserve a way to do this that doesn’t require your ex to be someone they’re not.

If you want support building that system, the Programme is designed to do exactly that. And the book is there when you want the full method in your hands, at your pace, for the long game.

You’re not trying to win a moment.
You’re building a childhood.

Written by Marcie Shaoul, author of The Co-Parenting Method: Six Steps to Raise Happy Kids after Separation and Divorce 

Available to buy now click here