Co-parenting after divorce is one of the most difficult challenges parents face. In this solo episode of the Children First Family Law podcast, Krista draws on her experience as an attorney, mediator, and child advocate to share practical strategies for improving communication between separated parents. With Colorado’s focus on the best interests of the child, Krista emphasizes that effective communication isn’t just a convenience; it directly impacts children’s stability, peace, and well-being.
Krista explores common hurdles like old wounds resurfacing, mismatched communication styles, tone problems, and mistrust, all of which can derail even the most routine exchanges. She explains how parents can shift from reactive arguments to constructive conversations using the BIFF method (Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm), and why choosing the right communication platform can reduce conflict and create a reliable record.
From setting boundaries on response times to prioritizing the child’s needs, Krista provides actionable ways parents can work together as a team. She stresses that communication should be approached like a business partnership with one shared goal—the care of their children.
Krista also highlights resources for families in Colorado, including co-parenting apps, mediation, parenting classes, and counseling options, all of which can help parents strengthen their approach when communication feels impossible. The episode concludes with an important reminder: children notice how their parents speak to and about one another. Respectful exchanges model cooperation and reassure children that they come first.
This episode is a practical guide for parents, professionals, and anyone supporting families navigating life after divorce. By adopting healthier communication strategies, parents can reduce conflict, protect their children’s peace, and build a more supportive two-home family dynamic.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Communication challenges divorced parents face
- How the BIFF method helps diffuse conflict
- Why using co-parenting apps improves clarity and accountability
- Ways to set boundaries and avoid emotional reactions
- The importance of keeping children in the center, not the middle
- Resources in Colorado for co-parenting support
Resources from this Episode
highconflictinstitute.com/high-conflict-strategies/how-to-write-a-biff-response
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggXhQLihi54
www.childrenfirstfamilylaw.com
All states have different laws; be sure you are checking out your state laws specifically surrounding divorce. Krista is a licensed attorney in Colorado and Wyoming but is not providing through this podcast legal advice. Please be sure to seek independent legal counsel in your area for your specific situation.
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Co-Parenting After Divorce: Tips for Successful Communication Podcast Transcript
Intro/Outro 00:00
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast. Our host, Krista Nash, is an attorney, mediator, parenting coordinator, and child advocate with a heart to facilitate conversations about how to help children flourish amidst the broken area of family law. As a child advocate in demand for her expertise throughout Colorado, and as a speaker on these issues at a national level, Krista is passionate about facilitating and creatively finding solutions to approach family law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice. As always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to like, subscribe, and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
Krista Nash 00:51
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Krista Nash, and you are stuck with me today on one of my periodic individual solo episodes, where I talk to you about things that I’ve noticed and learned in my journey as a practitioner in family law, both as an attorney, a guardian ad litem, a child advocate in divorce courts, and as somebody who cares passionately about trying to help you flourish if you’re going through divorce or the aftermath of divorce and family breakdown. I have a lot of people listening to the podcast who are parents, but we also have mental health professionals, judicial officers and attorneys, and I think that this co-parenting and communication topic really should resonate with all of you. As attorneys, we have the ability to try to help our clients do better, and as judges, we have certain things that we can encourage, especially since there are so many pro se or not represented by attorneys, parents who go through the court system. Judges can learn a lot from this, of course, mental health professionals as well, I hope can get some tips here that they can help their clients with and, of course, parents. I hope everyone will stick through. I’ve got some great examples of how to communicate better, and this resonates with people, regardless of where you are on the planet, but I hope that, particularly here in Colorado, where I do most of my practice, though I’m licensed in Wyoming, I really do believe that parents everywhere can benefit from this. So, let’s get going. I just know that as an intro, I wanted to say that even if you and your former partner both want what’s best for your child, communication can be so difficult. Divorce obviously leaves behind hurt feelings, mistrust, and patterns of conflict that just make a lot of our communications, even just a short text, feel loaded with emotion. I did hear one person once say that being in the position of a co-parent is like being on a group project for the rest of your life with the person you may least likely want to be in your group project. And of course, that group project is the most important group project on which you will ever work on, the raising and care of your children. I think that resonates with people too. The hopeful part, though, is that communication is a skill. It is not something you were born knowing how to do with a co-parent, but it is something that you can practice and learn and get better at. You really can improve over time, and when you do, your kids notice; everyone notices. Your new relationships flourish more because you’re not so caught up in the fight with your ex; your kids feel safe, and they see their parents working together, even if you’re living in two different households. That is really one of the most powerful gifts that you can give your kids. So, in this episode, we’re going to share practical strategies for communicating better with your co-parent, and I’ll sprinkle in some real life examples, many of which are at least loosely based. They’re not exact examples, but loosely based on things that I see in my child advocacy role, where I am in that middle seat trying to help parents do this better. Hopefully this will help you know how to encourage others around you, or your own co-parenting, to really be better in everyday situations. So, the first thing I want to talk about is the Colorado context. This is true of many states that follow the best interests of the child as a standard, but in Colorado, that is our main point for children. You’d want to say that’s true everywhere, but in our family law system in Colorado, we are guided by the best interest of the child; that’s how we analyze what’s best for kids. That means that judicial officers and everybody in the family court system are looking for parenting plans and arrangements that give children the most stability, predictability and peace. It doesn’t matter what town you’re in in Colorado. It can be anywhere: Denver Metro, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, all the way west to Grand Junction and all the way east to the very, very edges of the state. Here’s an example I want to give you. I worked with a family where the parents disagreed constantly about holiday schedules. They were both good parents, but they argued about every detail, drop off times, how long the kids would stay, Christmas…etc., and the judge ultimately said, “If you can’t learn to communicate better, the court will decide for you”. That was a wake up call, and they realized that continuing the same fight would only hurt their kids and increase their legal costs. So, what did they do? They figured it out, and they did so in a way that managed it, in a way that really met their kids needs, and in a way that kept it out of court. That really highlights something important in Colorado, when parents communicate well, they’re often able to solve problems without going back to court, but when communication breaks down, cases tend to drag on and go back to court over and over again, and kids get stuck in the middle. I work with judges in every single jurisdiction in Colorado. I would say that maybe, there are a couple I haven’t touched, but mostly, I’m in almost all of the jurisdictions. There are a lot of them, but all across the Denver Metro area, Jefferson County, Douglas County, Denver certainly, and El Paso, where Colorado Springs is.. I’ve got Weld County, Larimer County, wherever you are, it’s the same problem. The problem is that we don’t want kids getting stuck in the middle, and so the better you communicate, the less likely that you’re going to spend a ton of money in court getting somebody like me appointed as a child advocate, and the less you will keep your kids stuck in the middle of your warfare. So, keep that in mind, that the best interests of the children is what matters, and in Colorado, your communication matters when courts are looking at how you are doing as a parent.
So, let’s talk about the second section here, common communication challenges. So, if you’re finding it hard to communicate with your co-parent, you are not alone. Almost every family I see runs into one or more of these hurdles. So, first I’ll explain, for example, that old wounds resurface. Let’s say during the marriage, one parent often felt dismissed after the divorce, a simple scheduling question such as, “can you pick her up at five?” might stir up these old feelings of not being respected. Suddenly, the conversation isn’t really about pickup time, it’s about years of built up frustration, particularly if the person receiving the message feels like there’s some kind of tone or undertone that they read into picking old wounds about these challenges that you had in your marriage or relationship when you were together. Secondly, we have different communication styles. Maybe, mom prefers detailed emails, that’s pretty common, but Dad wants short communications, like short texts, that might have been something that happened even during the relationship when you were together, or we might have somebody who’s really avoidant of communication altogether. That mismatch really can create confusion and challenges. Thirdly, scheduling confusion. I’ll give you an example. One parent assumed that the weekend meant Friday after school to Sunday evening, but the other thought it just meant Saturday morning to Monday morning. You can imagine the blow up that happens when both parents showed up at school on a Friday afternoon. So again, scheduling confusion really can cause problems. Fourthly, tone problems. A parent might text, “why are you late again?”, meaning it as a simple question, but the other parent hears it as, “why are you late again?”, like it’s sarcastic or accusatory, and here we are, off to the races on the fighting. Fifthly, I’ll explain that another big problem is just mistrust. If one parent has a history of not following through, even a reasonable request can be met with suspicion. I will remind you that earlier in the podcast episodes, I spoke with leading international researcher, Dr. Michael Saini, about this very topic, about incremental trust building and how essential it is for parents to co-parent well. So, if you want a deeper dive on that issue of mistrust and how to fix it, I would send you back to at least start off with that podcast. These situations are all really frustrating, but they’re all really normal, and recognizing them is the first step to improving them.
So now, let’s get into some tips in our third segment for successful co-parenting communication, and I want to give you some practical strategies. First of all, keep it business-like. Think of your co-parent like a colleague. For example, imagine if your co-worker emailed, “you never do your share around here”. That wouldn’t go well, particularly if it had a bunch of exclamation points or it included curse words or some rude emojis or things like that. What if they said, “Can you have your part of the report ready by Friday?” That’s direct and professional. Try to approach co- parenting communication that same way. Stick to the facts, keep emotions low or out entirely, and treat it like a business partnership with one shared project, raising your child. Secondly, choose the right medium or communication platform. Not every issue belongs in a text. For example, if your child has an upcoming surgery, texting about it could create confusion. A longer email could keep the details more clear and documented. The other thing you should consider is using a co-parenting app like Our Family Wizard, or Civil Communicator, or Talking Parents. I will tell you that I am doing podcast recordings with each of those three companies so that you can learn what different ones offer. I have only recorded one of those so far. I won’t tell you which one it is, but it was incredibly helpful. I have been familiar with these platforms for years and years, and I learned so many things in this one recording about what these different applications actually offer that are far more comprehensive and helpful than I even realized. I will send you to those upcoming podcasts I’m going to do one with each of those three entities, and if you know of any others, please reach out and let me know of those. I think these are the three leading ones that I see in my work in Colorado and that I know are used, for example, in Wyoming and Texas and some other states. One of the benefits of that kind of application is that it really makes it easy to document the details of your communication, and I will refer you to those upcoming podcasts to learn more about that and why that’s important. It’s also fine to text some things like, “I’m running 10 minutes late for pickup”. That’s appropriate for a text, as long as your plans allow for texting in Colorado, no matter, again, where you are, no matter what jurisdiction you could be…up in Fort Collins or in Larimer County. You could be all the way south, down near Pueblo, or in our mountain communities like Eagle County, Vail,or Aspen. In these places, the judges often recommend or require co-parenting apps because they create a reliable record of communication. Parents like them too. Also, because they’re a little less intrusive, they don’t ping as a text. You can set them to show up a little bit differently, and that can really help prevent this sort of text war where you’re just popping off too fast in a reactive way. So, again, choose the right medium for what the communication is about. Thirdly, I want to tell you about this method. There’s a book and some other materials about this. I need to probably have this person on my podcast in the future. His name is Bill Eddy, and he has something called the BIFF model. B, I, F, F, like F, as in Frank. So, this is a tool that I think is really helpful to people. And the BIFF method stands for Brief, Informative, Friendly and Firm. I will repeat that: Brief, Informative, Friendly, and Firm. You will find, in my show notes and resources, links to this BIFF method. I also have created a little handout that you can use that basically just gives you some reminders on these things. So, take a look at that, and if you don’t find it in the show notes, you can find it on my website under resources. It’s a communication method designed to diffuse conflict and to keep things focused on the kids. I’ve had parents say, “Wow, that really is like a secret weapon for co-parenting communication”. I don’t love it being phrased that way, because it’s a positive thing, not a negative thing, but it is something that is a secret tool, I would say, is a better way to put it, to make your co-parenting communication better. Again, remember, BIFF, and that there’s a book about it. You can order that book on Amazon, and I’ll put it in my show notes as well, so that you know where to find it. That is the kind of book that you might want to dive into more deeply if this piques your interest. All right, so I think it’s kind of a game changer if parents actually follow this model. So the first part is brief. Keep your responses short; one or two sentences, if possible. Do not get pulled into long explanations or arguments. Don’t over explain long messages or invite arguments. Secondly, make it informative. Stick to the facts. Share only the information that is needed, not more, not less. Just stick to the facts. Leave out opinions. Blame old stuff, personal attacks, bold hurts, anything that is these triggering words, like “you always” or “you never”. Those are blaming kinds of words. Avoid those. Third, we want to keep it friendly. Use a neutral, respectful tone. I prefer when parents are actually not just neutral, but friendly; being kind and demonstrating that you can be kind of like you would be to a co-worker. For example, keep the tone polite, or at least neutral. You obviously were in a relationship. Almost everybody who has a child was in some kind of relationship. That isn’t always the case, but usually, it almost always is. So, you know what bothers them, and they know what bothers you, and so try to use that for good and not for bad. It’s a friendly thing to not try to trigger somebody, to not try to use words or language or content that you know is going to set the other person off. Try to not do that. Don’t use that in a weaponized way. Fourthly, so we’ve got brief, informative, friendly and lastly, firm. Be clear and direct. Don’t leave room for misinterpretation or ongoing back and forth. Try to close the door and back and forth arguing by being clear and decisive, but also not rude. All right, so let me give you an example. Let’s say your co-parent sends you a message, “You’re always late, you don’t care about anyone but yourself”. A BIFF response might be,” I’ll be there at 5:10, thanks for your patience”. Okay, so you see that it’s short, it gives the needed info, it has a polite tone, and it doesn’t invite more arguments. It also doesn’t say anything at all about, for example, if somebody says to you, “you’re always late. You don’t care about anyone but yourself”, you might say back and take the bait, “You are constantly accusing me of that, but you’re late yourself too. Leave me alone. Stop bothering me. You don’t need to text me. You don’t know why I’m late.” I could give you 100 examples or more of how you could respond to that, but listen to this response: “ I’ll be there at 5:10. Thanks for your patience”, and then let it go. You’ve delivered the message, even if the co- parent comes back and says, I can’t believe it’s 5:10. Why are you always so late? You know, you’re so disrespectful of me”. You really don’t need to respond to that, because you’ve already given the information. You don’t need to say it again. You just leave it alone. So why does BIFF work? It really works because it shuts down the conflict cycle, and instead of defending yourself or attacking back, you calmly deliver the necessary information and you move on over time. The style really can set the tone for healthier exchanges. So, I’m going to give you some examples now of how this works in the real world. We already talked about the first one, the accusation about being late, “you’re always late. You don’t care about anyone but yourself”. Is another version of how that could come across, and a BIFF response? There could be many, but I will reiterate the other one, and you could use these exact words, “I’ll be there at 5:10. Thanks to your patience.” First of all, try to not be late, because that helps build trust, and it erodes trust to not to not be on time; but, it’s okay if you’re going to be late, and maybe when you’re late and you should be sending a proactive message saying, “Hey, I’m going to be there at 5:10. Thanks for your patience” before you get the text that says “you’re always late”. So, that would be another thing to be a little more proactive. Example two, let’s say there’s a disagreement over an activity. Your co-parent says something like this, “you’re wasting money on piano lessons. She doesn’t even like it, and you’re just doing this to control everything like you always do”. A BIFF response could be and again, I’m making up kids names here, “Ella has her piano lesson on Thursday at four. If you’d like to attend, you’re welcome to. She’d like that. Let me know if you need the address”. That would be an example of a response. Example three, for a holiday schedule conflict, your co-parent might say, “you’re so selfish for keeping the kids on Christmas morning. You never think about my family”. A BIFF response could be, “the parenting plan says I have Christmas morning this year. You’ll have them at 2 pm. I’ll make sure they’re ready with their gifts.” You can see how that diffuses things and gets the right information across. Example four is financial frustration. Let’s say your co- parent says, “you never pay your share of the medical bills on time. I’m sick of covering for you.” a BIFF response could be, “I received the bill. I will send my portion of $142 by this Friday.”
Example five: there might be name calling or a personal attack. The co-parent might say something like this, “you are a terrible parent. The kids don’t even like being with you”. A BIFF response could be, “I’ll pick the kids up at 3:30 as scheduled”. It’s like not taking the bait, and it’s not getting into the conflict. Example six: this is our second to last one, school decision disagreements. Your co-parent might say, “you’re ridiculous for wanting him in public school. You just don’t care about his future”. A BIFF response could be, “the school registration deadline is May 1. I’m available to discuss options with you before then. Would you like to meet with a school counselor together?” You can see that as an example that might be helpful and diffuse things. Example seven: last minute schedule changes. Your co- parent might say, “I can’t believe you’re asking to change the weekend again. You’re so irresponsible”. A BIFF response could be, “I’d like to switch weekends so the kids can attend my cousin’s wedding. Are you available to swap weekends with me? If not, I’ll keep the regular schedule”. So, you can see the difference. Instead of fueling the fire, BIFF cools it down. You’re modeling calm, child-focused communication, and over time, that sets the tone for the whole relationship.
I want to circle back just for a minute here, because we talked about choosing the right medium, and I feel like it was a little thin on some things. I do want to just add in a couple more things about specific use of technology. One of the things I want to share with you is about how we fight a lot about expenses and schedules. I do want to point out that, when it comes to using technology wisely, those different applications or Google Docs, but I prefer those applications, can do things like help you keep all your communication in one place and reduce the conflict that you have, because everything is able to be looked at. You can see when people read the messages and when they responded to them, or if they didn’t respond. You’re not always going back to look at your texts and trying to produce those for court if you are going back to court, and then it also allows you to share your calendars, expenses and documents. So keep in mind that the next communication tip is to proactively plan ahead on these things where you populated your calendars with the actual parenting plan. Plan who when the kids are exchanging, at what time, and what dates. You can do color-coded calendars that the technology apps do really well. Also, you can track your expenses. You can share your receipts that way. You can do things like share your medical card, your insurance card, information from the school, and different links. So again, take a listen to those upcoming episodes about those apps. I’m not getting any kind of payment from these companies at all to promote this in any way. I just have seen a lot of people use these really well. Certainly, you can do it through text and Google Docs and all those sorts of things, but a lot of the apps will allow you to do that in a really easy way for not a ton of money. So, think about that, and really consider that you need to be clear. Clarity is kind and so we want to be clear for the sake of the children, while using communication mechanisms where things are published to each of you so that you can reduce conflicts around scheduling, expenses, who’s supposed to be where, and things like that. In and of itself, documenting everything can make things a lot more calm and a lot more respectful.
Fifth, I want to explain that another pro tip here is to set boundaries. You don’t need to respond to every message immediately. Give yourself space that can help you craft an appropriate response. A good rule of thumb that I’ve seen parents use is to wait about 24 hours to respond to a co-parenting communication that might make your blood pressure go up a little bit, unless it’s an emergency, of course, then they do need to respond right away. That gives you time to breathe, calm down and write something constructive. If your co-parent is sending you a flurry of messages, you certainly can respond and say, “I received your messages. I appreciate your perspective. I will get back to you by x time or X date”. You can say, “I’ll get back with you within 48 hours”, or something like that. If this continues to be a problem, and it is a problem in a lot of the cases where I’m watching what parents are doing, I will recommend that you create a rule. This doesn’t have to be done in court, it can just be between you, or if you’re early in your case or going through a modification, you can make it part of your parenting plan that you are going to have a response time baked into your plan. So, let’s stop pinging each other with all these messages and expecting immediate response. Let’s have some provisions of how we expect to respond in and what timeframe, and that is good boundary setting. A lot of co-parents, sometimes it’s just one, sometimes it’s both, sometimes it’s about different topics that one parent or the other is more passionate about, but you tend to trigger each other, and particularly if you’ve got a parent that wants to keep embroiling you in a fight, they are going to. That parent’s going to be pinging you constantly, and it just gets very, very frustrating. So, really consider what those boundaries are, and think about it as a business. What is the appropriate response time? Maybe it’s within a day that you respond.I had a professor in college who said some of these things are a three shower rule. That sounds funny, but that means, let’s say you shower every day. You’re gonna wait three days to actually respond on something. If your blood pressure is up on something, use that as your body giving you a warning that you’re likely to kind of have the smoke coming off your thumbs if you’re texting or off your fingers if you’re typing or in a voicemail. Again, going back to my first point, which is the best interest standard, every time you write a text, every time you send an email, every time you leave a voice message, those are things that a judge can look at in the future, or that a child advocate can use that really can make you look bad, or can reveal kind of who you are and how you communicate, and you don’t want that. You don’t want that kind of record. It’s bad for your kids, but it’s also bad for your case. So, set those boundaries, calm down, don’t respond in this passionate way even if you were really wounded by this person. You still have to figure out how to do this for your children, and that’s true. There’s different rules when we start talking about domestic violence. I’ve got lots of podcasts on those, and there are different ways to consider that when there is domestic violence that’s been involved, but most of the things I’m talking about are still exactly what you still need to do, because you still do need to co-parent. There’s obviously different provisions if there are protection orders in place, and that’s really for a different topic than today.
Sixth, put the child at the center, not the middle. I love that, and it’s such an important thing. It’s worth putting on a sticky note and putting it somewhere where you see it a lot, on your bathroom sink or bathroom mirror, or on your computer desk, or something like that, or wherever you’re communicating with your co-parent. Just remind yourself to put a photo of your children in front of you and say,” I’m going to put them in the center, not the middle”. You can think through what that looks like, and what the difference is between being in the middle and being in the center. I once had a teenager tell me, “I feel like a ping pong ball to my parents”, and that just breaks my heart. It should break yours too. Kids should never carry messages back and forth. If Dad’s going to be late, he needs to text mom directly, not ask the child to say it. We don’t want kids embroiled in these conflicts. We want parents to feel united in the way that they are trying to go about this, or at least be the grown ups in the room. Be the grown ups in the family still, because you are still a family, and we want to protect kids from that conflict, and that means really trying to think about, what does that mean to have my child in the center, not in the middle, not in the middle of the conflict, like the net in a ping pong competition with the ball going back and forth, but actually at the center of everything as you’re considering about what is best for your children.
The next thing, and this goes back to the documentation and the tools that you can use, but number seven is to plan ahead. Imagine your child has a big soccer tournament in three weeks. If you wait until the night before to tell your co-parent, you are almost guaranteed conflict. If you give notice early, you set everyone up for success, and planning ahead will really reduce stress for parents and give kids predictability. In most families of divorce or family breakdown, we want parents engaging with the kids. Now, there are some instances, of course, where parents cannot be in the same location or the same vicinity, but if you’re allowed to, your children would be so happy if you could actually just be respectful to your co-parent, and not turn this into a war about who gets to go to the game or the choir concert or the graduation. Here’s a pro tip from the future: If you do that, then you’re probably going to get one parent determining if one parent is invited to a wedding or the birth of a child and not the other parent. So, model what you want this to look like in adulthood, and try your best to not make this about you, but about what your child needs, and that generally is both parents involved in that child’s life. That planning can go really far. It also is true for major expenses that are coming. You’ve got to over communicate a little bit about the plans, like, “I see an upcoming event in the next few months”, or , “we’re going to have to get braces for Johnny, and that’s going to be expensive. We need to talk about how we’re going to do that. I want to make sure that we both have enough information to make good decisions about this. Let’s have a conversation about that”. That way, it’s not a surprise. What you don’t want to do is say, “I went and did a consultation to get Johnny braces yesterday, and I signed up for it, and now it’s going to be $8,000 and I want you to pay 70% of that”. Most parenting plans have good provisions about how those major decisions get made and when those communications need to occur. If your plan doesn’t have that, you really should put some plans together yourself to be able to make that predictable. I get parents all the time complaining that the co-parent is dropping on them some emergency that is not an emergency. “You know that we need to pay for this tomorrow”. It’s the first time that they’re hearing about it. So that’s not good, and it doesn’t help with trust building. It isn’t good for your child and isn’t good for the co-parenting relationship.
Eight. I will say you need to hit pause when emotions are high, and this is sort of the three shower thing, but I want to give you another tip about this pause. Draft a message, but don’t hit send. Sleep on it. Reread it. Ask yourself, “if a judge saw this, how would it reflect on me?” If you really need to get a trusted friend to take a look at it and say, “What do you think about this?” Or, if you have a counselor, ask them, “what do you think about this?” That pause can save you from sending something you regret. Another good tip I have is to have you use Chat GPT. Put your draft message in there. Try to not put names in there, because Chat GPT and some other AI tools are generative, meaning if you put your names and last names and all this information, it is creating this big encyclopedia out in the wherever AI lives in the universe. It’s learning as it goes. You don’t want to give it information about you and your family, but you can give a general non name, like, “Hey, I’m a co parent, and I want to send a respectful message about this. Here are a couple of drafts. What do you think I should do? Rewrite this for me to be more polite, better, and more amicable”. I will tell you I’ve done this with my own messages to other attorneys. I’ve done this when attorneys have sent me jerky messages, and I’ll use those to show my staff how to be better business people and more productive in their communications by showing them a jerky message I’ve gotten from another attorney. And I’ll say, can you evaluate this for its professionalism and its problem solving. It’ll break it down and say, for example, “though this is a professional email, it has three problems. It’s, you know, boom, boom, boom”. It’s making assumptions. And there’s a better way to do this. It fails to provide problem solving suggestions, for example. So,rely on the tools that you have and do not react in emotion. That is one of the biggest things I see, is parents reacting emotionally in their communications, and their co-parenting communications show it. That emotion just comes, seeping out of it like there’s no barrier. So, we don’t want to do that.
Nine. Celebrate small wins, wins like W, I N, S. Small wins, even small moments of cooperation matter. Maybe your co-parent did something finally that you think is helpful or more friendly, or agreed to swap weekends without a fight for the first time, or maybe you both cheered for your child together at a school play without tension. Those moments are victories. You should recognize them because they build hope for future cooperation. Everyone likes a compliment, right? So, don’t hide that compliment. Share it. Send a message to your co-parent like, “I really appreciate that we were able to be at the play together, and I think Little Susie really appreciated it too. Let’s try to be more like that”. Or, “I really appreciate that you switched that weekend with me. Let me know when you need a swap, and I will. I think this is really good for our child”. Let’s try to do more co-parenting in this manner.
Ten. Please remember that the kids are watching even when you think they’re not. Kids notice how you talk about and to the other parent, and they internalize it. I cannot tell you how many parents think that they are hiding this from their children when they are absolutely not. Parents are overheard on phone calls, their tone, their tears, their body language, their tension in their shoulders, the words they choose, the way their eyes look. These are things that kids notice. They know you so, so well, and they know when you are reacting. When you pull up to an exchange and you and your new partner refuse to make eye contact with the other parent or say hello, you are engaging in warfare. That is just like putting a dagger in your kid. It is destructive. You have to figure out how to be a grown up and say hello and be cordial and do that exchange in a peaceful way. There’s no reason that you need to treat this person like the enemy in co-parenting, even if they were the enemy for you relationally, and you’ve got to just remember it’s bad for your kids when you treat the other co-parent in that very problematic way. It is like you’re treating your child that way, and I see so many cases years later where the child then rebels against that parent who acts that way because they get so tired of it. They get even if you think you’re in the right, the children oftentimes end up going to choose the other parent because they get so resentful. The kid gets so resentful of the way that the parent managed this. I will give you another shout out back to a previous episode of the podcast. It’s with Ellen Bruno, who is an international filmmaker, and she did the SPLIT film. Actually, there are two films. It’s SPLIT: Split the Early Years and then, SPLIT Up: The Teen Years. She’s been on the show, and you can find and buy her films online or on her website. They’re very brief films, but they’re all about the voices of children, and they start with kids who are young, and then the split up the teen years is ten years later, and those kids speak more poignantly than I can to you about the kids always listening what they take on, and how it affects them ten years later, I can’t recommend that more highly. It is a really, really good thing to go watch and to really try to internalize as you’re co-parenting, because the kids are watching. Your kids will thank you, though, even years later, for protecting their peace if you do this well. Let me give you an example. If your child hears from you, even talking to your mother on the phone, or you know, the kid’s grandma, or your friend, or you’re in the backyard talking across the fence to your neighbor. If your child hears you say, “My ex is impossible, he just never pays attention”, they carry that stress. If instead, you don’t say that at all in the kids hearing that’s much better. Let’s say that quote, though, is something you said to the child, “your dad is impossible. He never pays attention. He’s always late. He’s always irresponsible”. That carries stress for the child. Instead, you can say, “I’m not sure what time your dad will get here. I’ll text and ask him, and let’s ask him if he’s going to be on time, or if we think he’s going to be a little bit late”. Instead of saying, “Your dad is impossible. He never pays attention”, we can say “that’s a question for your dad. Let’s ask him together.” Then, they feel safe knowing that their parents can handle things and that their parents can co-parent together, communicate together. One of the best mindsets I share with parents is this, you and your co-parent are both on the same team. You’re not on different teams. The team is TEAM blank’s name. So Susie, if that’s the kid’s name, we are Team Susie. We are Team Susie and Johnny. We are whatever the kid’s name is. Let’s imagine your child’s name is Lily. Instead of thinking it’s me versus my ex, shift your perspective to, we are both team Lily, and that should be a rallying cry for you and your ex to say, are we doing this in a way that’s team Lily. That means every decision, every conversation, every compromise, is about supporting Lily’s well being, not about keeping score between the adults. Let’s say, for example, Dad wants Lily to go to a basketball camp the same week that mom had planned a family vacation. Instead of arguing about who wins, they should ask, “What should we do as team Lily?” Maybe they decide the vacation gets moved a few days so she can enjoy both events. Maybe they can get a different basketball camp. Maybe there are ways to navigate this in a way that is a win win. Or, maybe we have to make a choice, but we need to do it not in what mom wants and what Dad wants, but what is best for Lily. When parents think like teammates, even if they don’t like each other, even if there’s a complex history between them, it changes the tone. I see it happen all the time. The child feels supported, not tugged back and forth. So when you’re in conflict, ask yourself, “Am I making this choice as part of Team Lily?” That question can redirect conversations toward cooperation instead of competition and toward problem solving. This goes all the way to saying, for example, “how are we handling holidays?” I have a totally separate episode about handling holidays as co-parents, but I had one kid once say, “I can’t believe my parents got me a present together. They’ve never done that.” So, when you think about things like that, every single question you ask about your children, like, “should we both do parent teacher conferences, or only one of us? How should we handle back to school night? How should we handle the first day of school?” These are questions that you should filter through. Am I making this choice as part of Team X?
Next, I want to talk about our sort of fourth overall segment. I want to talk about resources in Colorado, and then we’re going to wrap this up. If communication still feels impossible, there are some resources to help now. These resources are pretty thin. I’m going to give you guys a little glimpse into the future. I will formally launch this later, but I am going to be launching a parent coaching option through my firm, and I’m really excited about it, and I will share more later on so stay tuned. It’s going to be a little while, because my team members are just about to start training on this, and we’re going to be opening a completely separate entity that will become a resource that I hope will be incredibly helpful. It’s going to be great. So stay tuned for that in the future. It will be in the vein of a parenting class, so keep your eyes out for that. There are not very many parenting classes in Colorado. You can go listen to the episode I did with the Center for Divorce Education, and they handle, I think about 46 states. They have an online co-parenting after divorce class. Those are four classes that are done,I think, almost all online, maybe not true nationally, but certainly across Colorado. Most people take them online, and you’ve got to produce a certificate to the court in Colorado that says you’ve done this and you completed that course. It is actually a helpful course. So, whether or not maybe you took it a long time ago and you’re kind of needing a brush up, you can go on to the Center for Divorce Education and find classes and take it again, or find other classes online that are helpful. I would highly encourage that, because there’s some good tips in those. I get so many parents saying, “I’m already a parent. I’ve been a parent for so long. Why do I need to take a parenting class?” That’s not what we’re doing. We’re teaching you how to co-parent, which is really different. So that’s a way we can get some practical strategies to start using right away. There’s a lot of online parent classes available. Google great parenting classes for co-parents for divorce or family breakdown, and take some of those classes and maybe suggest them to your co parent, not in a jerky way, but in the BIFF way. For example, “I’m thinking about taking this so we can work better together. Maybe you want to take it too. Is that something you want to do together?” Don’t say, “maybe you want to take it too”, or something like that. Secondly, mediation is an option. If you and your co-parent can’t agree on summer vacation plans, you can say, “Let’s not go back to court. Let’s go to a mediator”. You can even do a mediator arbitrator. You can appoint, in Colorado, a parenting coordinator/decision maker, who I think I’ve talked about this on other episodes. In fact, one of my early episodes is, what is a PC/DM because I serve in that role. You can go back way to the beginning, maybe one of the first four or five episodes which talks about my different practice areas. So, you can learn more about the PC/DM rules there. That’s something where you’re getting another problem solver on board. We do that level of mediation for people, too, if they just want to come and have us help them come up with an agreement, or get through something that is causing them trouble. We can do that. We can even talk to your children about it, talk to their therapist, and talk to their schools. We have a lot of creative things that we do to keep it out of court completely. So, that’s a resource. Thirdly, co-parent counsel is something that is possible. It’s therapy as opposed to coaching, but it’s not about rehashing the marriage. It’s about learning skills like how to send neutral messages and how to set boundaries in a safe space. I have had on the podcast, Shelly Bresnik and Jill Reiter. They did a podcast together with me called, “Co-parenting with Respect”. They do that work as therapeutic resources for parents.. I’ve had other people on as well. So, take a look through the episodes, and you’ll find some other co-parent counseling options that can be really helpful, and some of them engage your children too. There are also community resources. Many counties have family resource centers that offer classes, workshops, and even supervised communication help for high conflict families. That can be really helpful as well. Also, you can go get books. There’s lots of books about, and I have a whole bookshelf full of them, of authors, many of whom have already been on my podcast, who give practical tips and actual insight into research around this, and I will promote on my podcast. We have an episode every week that comes out, and almost all of them are about how to co-parent better. So, I bring you leading people each week. I’m super blessed to have people from around the world engaging in this now, and so I’m really bringing you leaders in research and in thought, leading about these very critical co-parenting processes and the research that supports the way that we should be doing things. I’ve got all sorts of things about sobriety testing, all these different co-parent communication applications people are going to be on it. I’ve got the leading people talking about new ways to think about co-parenting and how to do that really, really well. So, check that out. You don’t have to figure it out alone. A lot of us in family law are trying, in Colorado and beyond, to give tools and support to people, and really, you just have to go try to find those. There’s many resources out there for you.
Let’s bring this all together in our fifth segment. Co-parenting after divorce or family breakdown is hard. There is just no sugar coating that at all, but communication, healthy, respectful communication, really can be that pivotal thing that can change everything to make this better for your children. So, what I hope you take from today would be these final tips. You don’t need perfect communication. You just need communication that works for you and your co-parent and your children. Secondly, the BIFF method, or something like it, is one of the most powerful tools for keeping conversations calm, focused and business-like. Thirdly, I want you to think of yourselves as a team. Insert kids’ names, because that changes the entire dynamic. It puts your kid in the center, not the middle, and it makes you more teammates than adversaries. Fourth, when emotions run high, pause, please. Pause before you send that smoking message from the smoke coming off the fire in your texting or your email or your voicemail. Pause. Wait. Just say “I’m going to get back to you in a little bit”, or “I need to think about this, and I will get back to you by tomorrow”. Then, do get back by tomorrow. Pausing before you respond can save everyone stress, most importantly, your child, and it can make you just more effective in being professional and business-like. Lastly, when it feels too hard or you really cannot do this without more help, go get the help you need. Hopefully, you can turn in the future, maybe to one of my options that we’ll be launching, certainly by next year, maybe sooner, probably by next year, probably by early next year, but I’ll certainly promote it on the podcast when we do or one of these other resources that I’ve mentioned throughout the show and in many of my other podcasts. At the end of the day, your child really is not keeping score on which parent won each argument, and you shouldn’t either. They notice when they are safe and supported. Every calm, respectful exchange between you and your and your child’s co-parent tells your child they are loved and they come first. I care about more about you than I care about this war, and it is not all the research shows, and many researchers have come on to talk about the fact that it is not divorce that injures children the most, it is incredibly bad co-parenting. It’s the bad co-parenting dynamic that really, really causes the problems. So, I hope these stories and tips give you some encouragement and some real tools for making co-parenting communication smoother. If you found this episode helpful, I really hope you’ll share it with somebody who might be struggling with co-parenting challenges. Remember, divorce changes the structure of your family, but it doesn’t erase your family. With the right approach, you can build a new family dynamic that gives your children what they need and deserve the most, despite the family not working out as one unit, which is love, stability and peace. Thank you so much for listening today, and take care of yourselves. Take care of your kids, and let’s try to make the co-parenting communication much, much better.
Intro/Outro 44:56
Krista is licensed in Colorado and Wyoming. So if you are in those states and seek legal services, please feel free to reach out via ChildrenFirstFamilylaw.com that is our website where everyone can find additional resources to help navigate family law as always, be sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.