In today’s episode of the Children First Family Law podcast, Krista Nash welcomes Allen Levy, an Anchorage-based mental health professional and parenting educator, for a direct and thoughtful discussion on how to parent after divorce. Allen draws from over two decades of work with high-conflict families to explain why parenting after separation needs to be treated as a job share, not an emotional battleground.
He shares the framework behind his post-separation parenting curriculum, which was developed through years of real-world experience and is now utilized in workshops, therapy sessions, and court-ordered education. This approach teaches parents to focus on four core duties: communication, decision-making, problem-solving, and conflict resolution across key parenting domains like education, healthcare, and family routines.
Through structured rules, concrete strategies, and clear analogies, Allen reframes co-parenting as professional conduct, not emotional entanglement. The result? Less conflict, fewer court battles, and healthier kids.
You don’t need both parents to change. When one parent acts with professionalism, it can shift everything.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Parent-child relationships must come before parent-to-parent conflict
- Parenting is a job with duties, boundaries, and standards
- Effective communication focuses on children, not personal grievances
- Shift changes (custody exchanges) should feel routine and drama-free
- Parallel parenting can work even when co-parenting is unrealistic
- Focus on behaviors, not blame or psychological explanations
- Avoid the trap of sharing emotional information with your ex
- Protect kids from conflict by removing them from the middle
- Redefine success by how well parents manage the job, not how they feel
- One parent can shift the dynamic, even if the other won’t change
Resources from this Episode
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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Do Your Job!: How to Parent after Divorce, with Alaska’s Allen Levy MS LPC Podcast Transcript
Allen Levy 00:00
So I use very much a problem solving approach rather than a clinical approach. I’m not looking at what’s wrong with you or what’s wrong with the other person, but what’s right with you and and like it or not, you know that other parent is your children’s parent. So the curriculum involves four things that communication, decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution over four specific areas that are part of the job share, and those are education, health and wellness, optional enrichment activities and family. Those are the areas about which parents after separation need to communicate, make decisions, solve problems and resolve conflicts, and if they’re doing the first three really well, there’s generally not a lot of conflict resolution that needs to happen, because the conflicts don’t come up when The parents are effectively communicating, making decisions and solving problems.
Intro/Outro 01:04
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast. Our host, Krista Nash, is an attorney, mediator, a 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 01:55
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Children First Family Law Podcast where we explore how families and the professionals who support them can put kids at the center during and after divorce. Today’s episode is all about something that might just be the most important job. Two separated parents still share raising their children together to help us talk about what that actually looks like in real life. I’m thrilled to welcome Allen Levy to the podcast. Allen is a master’s level mental health professional based in Anchorage, Alaska, with a career that beautifully bridges the worlds of psychology and family law since 2001 he’s been working with families facing complex issues from high conflict dynamics to parenting after separation. He created a post separation parenting curriculum that teaches parents how to treat parenting as a shared job, offering rules, tools and strategies to reduce conflict and support children’s well being. But Allen’s impact doesn’t stop there. He also provides forensic services like custody evaluations and expert witness work, and he’s an adjunct professor in the Graduate Psychology program at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and from 2012 to 2021 served on Alaska’s licensing board for psychologists and psychological associates, including five years as board chair. Now here’s where things get even more interesting. Allen paid for his bachelor’s degree from the Evergreen State College by playing ferry boat music. That’s right, he’s an accomplished musician, and he even published a memoir about his time as an outlaw musician called Blue Water, Blue Grass, the ferry boat musicians. He plays the banjo, guitar, fiddle and ukulele, and he still performs music for young people of all ages, one of his most beloved acts, inviting children on stage to play rhythm instruments and even wash tub bass alongside him, born in Germany and raised in Alaska, Allen is a true Alaskan outdoorsman. He fishes, hikes, canoes, kayaks and forages wild mushrooms. He speaks Russian and Hebrew, loves to travel and brings a cross cultural lens to his work with families from all backgrounds. So now that you know some of the most interesting things about him, and whether you’re a parent struggling to co-parent in a high stress situation, or a professional looking for better tools to support families, Allen will bring wisdom, warmth and a bit of banjo spirit to the process. I’m excited to dive into this conversation with him today. Hi everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I am so happy today to have Allen Levy with us, who is coming to us from Alaska. If you listen to my introduction, you will know that he has a ferry boat background, which is why his background, if you’re watching on YouTube, has a very cool picture of him, and he’s such an interesting guy. I’m really happy to have you here, Allen.
Allen Levy 04:44
Well, thank you. I’m excited to be here myself. So
Krista Nash 04:47
Allen has a whole bunch of different things we could be talking about today, and I’m probably going to have to have him back again on the show to talk about other topics to help families. But for today, we are going to be talking about the job of raising children together and what that means. So tell us a little bit about how you started your work, a little background on you, and then let’s just dive right into this really important topic.
Allen Levy 05:11
So I’ve been working with children and families for most of my working life, going all the way back to my teens. When I was a camp counselor, I worked for about 11 years in juvenile corrections in Alaska’s largest correctional juvenile correctional institution, and about the time my son was three, he said, “Papa, I need you to get a new job. I never get to see you”. So I put myself back into school and got my master’s degree in clinical psychology, got licensed as a master’s level clinical psychologist, and Alaska is exceptional in that area, that you can practice psychology with a master’s degree, and I can do everything a PhD or Psy D can do except call myself doctor or provide more than 20% of the supervision to somebody trying to get their license. And over the years, I have developed a general specialty of dealing with complex family issues that I often get calls from people I talked to three or four other therapists told them my problem, and they all said, I should talk to you al Levy, and within that, I do a lot of work with high-conflict families going through divorce or post divorce, still fighting over custody and other issues. When I set up my private practice, I tried co-parenting counseling and true confessions. I wasn’t really trained in it, but I thought, hey, it’s worth a try. And the co-parenting counseling with both parents in the same room at the same time looked like wrestling and MMA fight, you know, or the, you know, those World Wrestling Federation where it’s as much drama as it is competition. So long story short was that’s where this whole parenting education curriculum came from, and out of that, I developed a set of rules, tools and strategies for sharing this job with the goal being to empower the parents to to make decisions for themselves, to solve problems, to eliminate the need for lawyers and reduce stress. And I designed the curriculum so that I didn’t need both parents, and I did, especially didn’t need both parents in the same room at the same time. And what I would tell them is, if some kind of therapeutic process involving both of you in the same room at the same time was going to work, it would have worked already before you got a divorce, before you got to this, this state of things. So I’m not going to do that to you. So I use very much a problem-solving approach rather than a clinical approach. I’m not looking at what’s wrong with you or what’s wrong with the other person, but what’s right with you and and like it or not, you know that another parent is your children’s parent. So the curriculum involves four things that, communication, decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution over four specific areas that are part of the job share, and those are education, health and wellness, optional enrichment, activities and family. Those are the areas about which parents, after separation, need to communicate, make decisions, solve problems and resolve conflicts. And if they’re doing the first three really well, there’s generally not a lot of conflict resolution that needs to happen, because the conflicts don’t come up when the parents are effectively communicating, making decisions and solving problems. And the trick with solving problems is you attack problems, not people. So I don’t always get both parents involved. And over the years, I’ve refined this quite a bit. I’ve been doing offering this since about 2008 and so I’ve offered it in various forms, in weekend intensive workshops, where I would have all the moms and in one weekend, you know, be half a day, Saturday, moms, the other half dads, and then the same on Sunday, we try to get through the whole curriculum in eight hours. Or I would do it as an ongoing group class once a week for about eight to 10 weeks, and also offering it as an individual service, as an individual service, I can bill insurance for treatment of an identified mental health problem, which would be an adjustment disorder.
Krista Nash 14:37
It sounds like you thought and sort of had this maybe, like mini eureka moment, like, maybe I need something more scalable here. I need something where I can help more people. Maybe I should develop this into something that’s a little more formal and not just me. Is that fair to say? That’s, that’s
Allen Levy 15:00
That’s exactly right, because I started getting referrals. After that case, I got referrals for this, and I’d be working, you know, with these couples, individually. And as the work evolved, I began to see consistent principles and ideas. So what I did was I took a part of my vacation with my wife to Hawaii, where half a day we were there for two weeks. And I told her, you know, go shopping for the morning. I’m going to be in our hotel room working on this. And I developed the first edition of this that resulted in a parenting manual, PowerPoint presentations, the whole thing laid out. And that was back in 2013 and I’ve revised it and updated it pretty regularly ever since.
Krista Nash 15:48
And have you done this? Like, have you had any kind of help, like, with, I know, a lot of these projects start as, like, you know, like you said, like, in your hotel room. I got to get this stuff out of my head on paper, right? I got to create, like, I’m so excited about this, because it actually might solve problems for these people and have some scale to it. So I’m going to go brain dump it all right? So since then, has it morphed into something where it’s more than just you doing it, or are you still trying to, you know, create generations of this on your own?
Allen Levy 16:17
So far, I’m the only one doing it. I have been wanting to figure out how to turn this from something that I do myself to something that I could train other therapists in this as a model, yeah, and then also offer it as a kind of a self taught online thing that would offering parents. So I’ve got a sort of a piece of that up and available now on diffuse, divorce.com, it’s not the full curriculum, but it’s at least a start. I presented on this topic at the AFCC conference in New Orleans a couple months ago. The topic of the workshop was, parenting is a job. Parenting after separation is a job. Share did a 90 minute presentation, and Anne Ordway, who’s I guess, the head honcho for the AFCC conferences, asked me, actually, she sort of volun-told me. She said, could you expand that into a four hour presentation for our virtual conference in November. So I am going to be doing that. I was embarrassed to realize that, as people came up to me after my presentation, they’re like, I want these materials. Where’s your website? I don’t have one yet. I’m trying to build one.
Krista Nash 17:37
So I think it’s interesting, because we end up like, it’s a little like my podcast, right? It’s like, you see a perceived problem. You’re trying to help individual families and individual children, and you’re like, I just want to get more information out there. And it’s interesting that there is a lot of energy in an effort happening for people in thisbroad community of professionals working in family law who genuinely, really just want to make this better for families. And, you know, give their download, their intelligence on what they’ve experienced and their, you know, all of their, all of their vast experience that shows how to do this better. And a lot of it is siloed, you know, like, I have people on the show like, gosh, like, I mean, just to name a few, well, one, I’ll note that we have had Dr. Ben Garber on who is the Defusedivorceguy. So people can go back and listen to that episode. And there’s, if you go back to the Defusedivorce, it’s diffuse like defusing a bomb for those listening D, E, F, U, S, E, you can go back and look at that episode, and there’s links and resources. So you can find Mr. Levy’s stuff there. If you want to go look at that, to look at his actual curriculum, that’s up there. But the other, you know, I’ve had Premola Deck and Trina Knudson, and locally in Colorado, we have Jill Reiter and Shelly Bresnik and all these people have, like, I kind of siloed co-parenting programs they’ve created, and several of those are actually curriculum, you know. So I got to get you guys all together to do this, because it’s so needed, you know, it’s just, it’s so needed for parents to just get in front of this and figure out, and I do want to pivot a minute here to talk about, like, let’s talk about how it’s a job, and how you use those analogies, because I didn’t really that, and I think it’s super, super important. But why do you think it’s so siloed?
Allen Levy 19:17
First of all, well, because I’ll use myself as an example. First of all, I’m up in Anchorage, Alaska, the biggest city in the largest state in the Union, but that the population of that city would make it a tiny in just about any other state, right? We have maybe 350 400,000 people in Anchorage, the largest city in the state, and we’re not the capital. The capital is even smaller, and you can’t even drive to it. So we work up here. We work in isolation, and there’s not a lot of people who are even willing to touch a client that has a lawyer.
Krista Nash 20:00
Meaning, I’m sorry, you’re saying like a therapist, yes, somebody in the mental health world. And again, we’ve covered this on a show where it’s a real problem, where people pick the wrong therapist for kids, they don’t want to be court involved.
Allen Levy 20:11
They’re really scared of me. So that’s exactly why I’m very much an out of the box thinker. My education at Evergreen taught me they teach interdisciplinary studies. So at Evergreen, you don’t take four or five or six separate classes for a major. What you do is you sign up for one named program that has multiple disciplines in it, that shows how these things connect and interact, that it’s a connective educational process and out of the box and integrative thinker. If you’ve read about like, for example, the ACEs study Adverse Childhood Experiences, it very much calls for an integrative rather than a categorical approach, that you have to organize things into categories, but you can’t keep them in their boxes. You have to connect all these pieces. If it’s too bad we’re not doing this from my professional office downtown, because I’ve got Legos all over the place. And so I turn the camera and show you, and I love playing with Legos. And Legos, to me, are a good metaphor. You have all these different pieces. You can organize them and categorize them to color, shape and everything else, and you’ll do nothing with them. You only get value out of it when you start putting things together. So I have an ability to really put a lot of things together that I guess other people don’t readily see the connection, right? So my curriculum is based on a lot of sources that include Adverse Childhood Experiences, a therapeutic program I used to be a part of it when I worked in juvenile corrections called Positive Peer Culture that very much focuses on problem solving. I’ve drawn on a lot of experts in the, you know, in the field of divorce and custody, in shaping all of this. So it’s not something I just pulled out of thin air, but it’s something I had to put together because we didn’t have anything. So I had to make it up as I went along. But making it up wasn’t just, you know, an act of imagination. It was an act of research and connecting the useful parts, and being in my background in law and psychology, and dealing with the way these two things come together, but they don’t necessarily line up perfectly. That’s always been an interest of mine as well. So I may have lost the thread of your question, but coming from a lot, it was about, why are we so siloed? Because a lot of times the most imaginative, creative people are responding to problems and needs that they see in their particular world, and at the moment, they’re focused on the problem itself, not on create, you know, build a better mousetrap in the world to build a beat of paths to your door. They just have a problem right in front of them. They’re imaginative, creative thinkers. They’ve got good skills. They come up with something and it works, but they’re so busy doing their day to day work, they’re not thinking beyond that.
Krista Nash 23:22
It’s also true that we’ve got all these you know, family law is a state matter, and properly, it’s a state matter. That’s how our US Constitution, our laws, are set up, that it’s not a federal matter. And that’s a whole separate topic, but it’s a good thing, because states should, you know, we don’t overdo the federal government. It is my personal view of that, but I will say that it does make for more siloing, because, you know, we end up getting kind of that brain energy. I mean, we’re all part of these conferences and larger groups and things like that, and we’re trying to bridge distances, you know, certainly technology, the internet, virtual all this has made it easier to do that, but we tend to all be licensed in a particular state, and our work is in a particular state, and that just increases the siloing, right? So it’s a little bit of a challenge.
Allen Levy 24:08
Plus another piece is, I’ve always been better at creating than marketing.
Krista Nash 24:14
Yes this is hard for everyone, because for lawyers like we don’t really know how to run businesses. I mean, man, it’s been a Herculean task for me, with a lot, a lot of executive coaching to, like, learn to do the business side of it, right? And, yeah, and I think that’s true for all of these kind of professionals, whether you’re a health professional, lawyer, like, we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t know how to market, we don’t know, you know, we got all these ideas, but, yeah, very, very difficult. Like, you’re a therapist, I’m a lawyer, you got to get people to help you with that kind of stuff, right?
Allen Levy 24:41
And up until last year, I was closing down my private practice that I operated as an S-corp. It was I, I operated from 2008 until last year as an S-corporation called Generations A Fan Place, Inc, and I was a one-man operation. I did everything, you know, billing, marketing, janitorial, everything. I didn’t want to be working for somebody else. I’d come out of a really dysfunctional therapy sweatshop clinic. So I was very successful at that to the point where I didn’t need to market. I stopped advertising, because in this little fish bowl of Anchorage, Alaska and the state of Alaska, I became known as that guy that will take on tough problems. And so I didn’t advertise that. I just built a good reputation. But the downside of that is I didn’t have time for product development. I’m inventing, creating all of these things that work, but I don’t have time to do much more with them. I didn’t even start presenting at AFCC until about three years ago, where I did one with Ben, and it didn’t I’m not sure that. It didn’t occur to me, but I didn’t know if what I had created would just, this may sound silly, but I didn’t know if it was good enough.
Krista Nash 26:09
You know, it’s kind of like, right?
Allen Levy 26:13
Or like, remember the first season of Saturday Night Live, not ready for prime time players. It’s like, I didn’t know, am I ready for prime time? This really does work for me. I don’t know if it is and plus, there’s so much emphasis in the field on, you know, the science, you know, Will it pass the Daubert standard, the Frye standard, and researchers back it up…
Krista Nash 26:37
Those Daubert and Frye are like ace names that are symbolized and are synergistic with evidence roles about experts. So just yeah, like, does it pass the Daubert test? Hmmm?
Allen Levy 26:48
Yeah, yeah. And then, and then they talk about, well, we want some evidence based practices. Well, I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, and all I have is my anecdotal data of what I’ve done, and it took some encouragement and pushing from other colleagues who’s like, you should be presenting this, and I finally did. And so now I’m at the point where I’m taking this particular model and developing it and putting it out there.
Krista Nash 27:16
Well, let’s pivot. Let’s talk about what it is, right? We’ve talked a lot about how we’ve gotten there, why it’s so important. But like, what is it and what especially speaking to parents and those in the family law world who might be able to leverage these ideas or even somehow use the curriculum, let’s walk through that. So you know, what does it actually look like? You talked a little bit about the pieces of it, but tell us about maybe start with the fact that you use this job analogy.
Allen Levy 27:45
Well, actually, I don’t even want to call it an analogy. It’s a job. Okay, okay, parenting is a job, and there’s a job description. I can run through my job description real quickly. Here are the things that parents need to do in the job description: they need to provide a livable residence, provide adequate nourishment, provide clothing, provide is kind of a trick question. The parents job is to provide the opportunity to receive an education. So pop quiz. Whose job is it to actually educate the children? If it’s not the parents, what’s your first best guess? Krista Nash 28:23
I mean, the child, the person.
Allen Levy 28:29
Thank you. Yes, it’s the child’s job to get educated. When I’m working with you know, not in divorce situations, but parents and kids. I tell the kids, you have a job, and the job is to learn, obey and grow. Those are your three jobs. You need to learn. You were born not knowing anything. You need to obey because you don’t know enough to make good choices, and you need to grow. That’s your job. Do your job. It’s the parents job to provide an opportunity to get an education. But if the parents are doing their job, then they need to make it possible for the kids to do their job. And so, you know, parents that are doing the kids homework, they’re making their science fair project or all this stuff, you’re not helping your kids. You’re teaching them all the wrong things. Let the kids struggle and flounder. So moving on. So provide the opportunity to receive an education.
This parent’s job description, provide adequate medical care, provide adequate transportation in order to meet child’s needs, adequate transportation could be, you know, just a good pair of walking shoes, a scooter, a bike, a school bus. It doesn’t mean mom or dad has to be the one that physically drives them all over a carpool, just make sure they can get where they need to go. And then here are the ones that are little less concrete but so critical, provide attention, provide care, provide love, provide support to the child and meet developmental needs towards becoming a responsible, independent adult. Which I skipped something, I went right to the job description. Every job has a goal. It has a purpose. And the goal of parenting is to get children from conception to adulthood alive and capable of independent adult functioning. So basically, the bar is low. The bar is low if you’ve done any amount of child protective services work or been involved in a CPS type case, the bar is low, and that’s why all these standards here in the job description are minimal. Meet the minimum standard of a livable residence. It could be a trailer, an apartment, a condo, it could be a yurt or a teepee. Honestly, as long as it’s clean, dry, warm and free of vermin, bugs and germs, safe, adequate nourishment. It doesn’t need to be gourmet meals. Just, you know, you get all you’re hitting all the time, whether it’s the food groups or the food pyramid, the kids have enough food so that they’re not going to bed hungry, and they’ve got the fuel they need to do their job, learn, obey and grow. So that’s the job description, and then the last piece of it: fulfill all the duties, obligations and responsibilities normally assumed by a parent, which means planning, deciding, organizing and attending to all the needs of the child. So too often these custody cases, the focus shifts from the parents doing their job, and up until I started presenting on this, I’ve never seen a case that looked at it through this lens. And in my opinion, we need to be having a more practical approach to resolving custody disputes, because they get lost in the psychology. You know, what’s wrong with this parent? We need an MMPI or a full psych eval. Is mom alienating or dad alienating or not? Is dad estranged or not or flip the gender. It doesn’t matter, you know. But we get caught up in defining and arguing about things and looking at what’s wrong, and we lose sight of just the very simple fact that no matter what this parent is always going to be, that child’s parent, that you cannot eliminate that and and so we have to accept reality. And what I am pushing for in a lot of cases, and it seems to resonate, at least with the judges that I’ve been in front of up here is here’s the job, and it doesn’t matter why parents are behaving this way. It doesn’t change the fact that these behaviors are not part of the job, and they’re not doing their job. And so we have to hold parents to a set of professional standards. Now, after separation, it’s a job share. And the job share involves four, four specific areas of activity that are communicate, make decisions, solve problems, resolve conflicts. Those four things are what job share parenting requires, and the subject matter on which they need to communicate. So make decisions, solve problems and resolve conflicts are directly related to the well being of the children, and that is education, health and wellness, optional enrichment activities and family and the parents need to, at least in the first three they need to make, ideally, make joint decisions about this, they need to communicate freely and openly about this, and they need to jointly solve problems together, keep their feelings out of it and keep the focus on kids need an education. They need health care. What optional enrichment activity should we sign them up for? And with an emphasis on optional subjects like soccer, ballet, lessons, bike, whatever you want your kids to be doing that might enrich their lives a little bit. But are you doing this for your kids, or are you filling up your kids schedule to minimize the amount of time they have with the other parent?
Krista Nash 33:57
What do you think about this? Are some of the common traps that you’ve seen like or missteps that parents often fall into when it comes to co parenting. Or maybe, I mean, I can maybe get, I’m kind of maybe getting reputation for being hard on lawyers, but being a family law attorney, I think I have a right to comment that I think that oftentimes Parents are encouraged by their attorneys to, you know, kind of act in a weaponized way and so doing this well, so what are your comments on that?
Allen Levy 34:25
So for the parents, they need to be grounded and realistic, and they need to accept the fact that their child is to parent and that, in general, children love both parents equally. And when divorce is not toxic to children. Divorce is a stressful and all too common life change that happens. I grew up in a military family. Every two years, we packed up and moved somewhere else. I’d leave behind school, friends, home and start over again. Divorce is another one of those life changes. You deal with it, you adapt to it. It’s a change. Challenge, but you learn from it. So the divorce itself is not the problem. It’s not harmful or toxic. The thing that is toxic and harmful to children is conflict between the parents. I like to simplify things but not make them dumb. So in a child’s mind, especially younger children, I’m the child. I love Mom, I love Dad, mom and dad, they know everything. Mom and Dad hate each other, therefore there must be something wrong with me. If I love mom and I love dad, and mom and dad hate each other, and they know everything, there must be something wrong with me. That is a real problem. It’s an irreconcilable conflict in the minds of the children. And so using this parenting as a Job and Job share model, instead of indulging the parents and all the reasons why they are justified in in their hostility towards the other parent, it’s like, do your job. You don’t act this way at work. If you did, you wouldn’t have a job very long. And so to hold up Standards of Professional Conduct that you’re entitled to your feelings, but your feelings do not entitle you to act in ways that will hurt your child, and your feelings do not justify behaviors that are toxic and harmful. Here’s something I’ve been adding to it recently: one of the cruelest things you can do to a human being is not to deny them love, but to deny them the freedom to love. And when a parent is engaged in conflict with the other parent, they get the child involved in it. They’re committing an act of cruelty because they’re forcing the child to choose. They’re in a loyalty bind, and that’s bad enough, and they’re forcing the child to choose between one parent and the other, and at the same time, what they’re saying to that child is, it is not okay for you to love the other parent. That is an act of cruelty that you know, there are things we do to people you know, in corrections, you know, we put them in jail. Okay? We deprive them of freedom. The harshest punishment is to put somebody into solitary, where you not only do not have attention or connection with other people, but you have no place to no way love, nothing to love. You’re cut off and isolated and high conflict cases where children are put in the middle. They’re in a weird kind of solitary confinement, and they’re forbidden to do the most human thing we do, which is love. So these are part of the problems.
Krista Nash 37:50
I had kids say this to me at a home visit, lots of conflict between the parents, kids having a really hard time, lots of anger, mental health challenges, and the kid knows what’s going on in court. One parent’s talking about the bit to the kid, the other’s not. And the kid said, it might look like my parent is okay on the parent’s face, but I know that what is in that parent’s heart is wanting victory and hate over the other parent. It’s just like it stabs you in the heart. As a child advocate sitting there. It’s like, you want the parents sitting there with you to do this stuff, because it’s a pretty little kid saying that. And, you know, I mean, they just, they out of the mouths of babes, right? I mean, it’s like, so it sounds like that a common trap or misstep you see separated parents falling into is to, like, take their emotion and not just do your job, right? I mean, it’s like they can’t get out of their own way, right? Because of their own emotion.
Allen Levy 38:46
Yeah, exactly right. And so the curriculum I designed calls on the parents to act as professionals. I grew up in the military, but I never served, but I have a lot of respect for the way the military does business. One of the examples I use in my curriculum is, imagine, you know, one of the United States Navy super carriers that has a crew of 5000 people. It has enough destructive capacity toend all life on the planet if it was fully unleashed. But in this huge, massive warship, way up on the bridge, there is one person with their hands on the wheel steering the ship across the ocean. Now they’re not necessarily, they’re not the captain of the ship, but they have the responsibility. Their hands are on the wheel, and they cannot walk away from that position until they’re proper, relieved that it’s not a union job, where, when the whistle blows, drop it, leave, go home. I don’t care who comes to relieve them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a total stranger, best friend, worst enemy, as long as they are the person who is there to relieve them and they follow the correct protocol, then you turn over the work to that person and. You leave your feelings out of it. And so when you know we talked about this in our conversation, before we started about I refer to what other people call custody exchanges. I call it a shift change in this job, share parenting, whichever parent has the children with them. That parent is the on duty parent, and when this parenting plan calls for the children to go to the other parent, that’s a shift change. And shift changes need to be routine, standard and boring and forgettable. That’s the goal, that every shift change needs to be boring and forgettable. All too often, the shift changes are approached with dread anxiety. They result in conflict. That even have parents who have to do exchanges in public or somehow supervised, they’re doing it wrong. And another piece of it is that the parents exchange courtesies and necessary information at the moment, but they do not conduct business. They don’t have conversations about child support, vacation, school, or anything else. The business at hand is the shift change. Here’s what you need to know to be able to carry on the job now that you’re on duty and I’m not, and that’s it. And for the children, it needs to be no different than going to school, not big, dramatic partings, not oh my god, I’m gonna miss you. I’ll be thinking about you every minute. I just know that’s wrong, because it just creates too much emotion. It’s not professional.
Krista Nash 41:32
Let me challenge you on something though, because I’m thinking through this and I’m like, thinking about this analogy, and I’m like, okay, the naval ship idea relies on that somebody knows where they’re going right, and then there’s sort of consensus on where they’re going right, that the shift change is going to have the same, you know, they’re already, they’re already on a course. And I think one of the things I see with parents is, I mean, they just turn the whole ship around and be like, go do their own thing, right? So, like, doesn’t this sort of isn’t the precursor to this, that we got to have some consensus on what we’re doing, on, like, what the goals are.
Allen Levy 42:08
So there are a couple of assumptions built into this. One is that, well, actually, before there’s assumptions… requirement, the first priority is the safety of the children, right? That supersedes everything safety first, even over parental parental rights. The children have a fundamental right to be safe in their person, in their emotions, in their integrity. That comes first. So there needs to be you know. The other assumption is that the parents are operating with some form of parenting plan in place already, that either there’s a custody order in place or an interim order of some kind, that there needs to be some structure. The ship we’re steering is the children. The destination is adulthood so that is what we’re doing. We are steering the ship of this. These children are independent adults functioning on or about the time that they are 18 years old. Because once they’re 18, they’re adults. The only things they can’t do or buy. You know, at 18 in most jurisdictions, is by alcohol or marijuana or tobacco products, everything else. They vote. They can sign contracts, they can own property, and the court no longer has jurisdiction over them. That’s one of the trick questions I ask. At what age will the courts consider the children’s preference above all other factors? 18? Yeah. So that’s the course we’re steering, is getting the kids towards independent, adult functioning, all the other stuff, you know, who’s a better parent, whatever. Again, it’s like this is a job. You need to behave professionally. Now, the feelings matter, and so one of the things I teach is the difference between an intimate and a professional relationship. For most people, the relationship that created the children was an intimate relationship. It depended on the exchange of emotional energy and emotional information to keep the relationship growing, thriving, and at some point that intimacy broke down, and it’s no longer working. When that intimate relationship has ended, there’s still a relationship there, but it needs to become a professional one in life and in therapy, you never take something away unless you have something better to replace it with. So exchanging emotional information, showing or telling another person how you feel is an act of intimacy, and it’s actually just about the most intimate thing we can do if we think of sexual intimacy. But I’ve known plenty of people who have completely non intimate sex, but the most intimate thing we do. Do is show another human being what we’re feeling inside, and we need to exercise judgment and how and with whom we show those feelings. Generally, don’t show those feelings to somebody who harbors a lot of hostility towards you.
Krista Nash 45:15
And would you say that like one of the problems in a lot of co parenting efforts is that we’re trying too hard to still force something that’s too intimate. Yes, yes, exactly, right? Like, let’s go around and talk about our feelings, and you’re like, that’s just never going to work.
Allen Levy 45:29
And it’s a waste of time. You don’t need to do that, right?
Krista Nash 45:33
Like, you guys get the paradigm in your head, like, we’re doing business here, right?
Allen Levy 45:37
Exactly, that people have a right to their feelings, but the feelings don’t give them the right to do stupid, bad, hurtful things, and when we indulge those feelings, all we’re doing is we become complicit in the chaos those unregulated emotions create. So what we do is we take, take away the intimacy, and substitute, courtesy in my curriculum, I show a little clip from the mini series Band of Brothers, in which major winters reminds Captain Sobel of a simple fact that in the in the army, we salute the rank, not the man. Sobel was really, you know, really strongly disliked major winters, and he tried to walk by him without a salute, and major winters called him up on it and said, We salute the rank, not the man. And I teach this to the parents that you need to respect the office of parent as a dad. You need to respect the office of mother as a mom. You need to respect the office of father, regardless of who wears that uniform or holds that position, or regardless of how well they are doing it. So you treat them with courtesy. A salute is a courtesy. We use courteous language in state craft, in diplomacy that we don’t tell others, you know, people, how we feel, we use courteous language, and that those courtesies are the thing that reduces friction. You’re entitled to your feelings, but please keep them to yourself. And the mistake, what I would call so called co-parenting counseling is we’re trying to tell people how they should feel. You shouldn’t feel that way. You shouldn’t feel so angry, so frustrated, so hostile, you shouldn’t feel that way. Well, that’s another act of cruelty that you don’t tell people what to feel, but we still expect adults and children to manage their emotions, and emotions are to be felt and expressed appropriately, but not acted on. And so then I teach a set of here’s professional behaviors, professional conduct and as a custody evaluator, rather than getting into the weeds of, why are they behaving this way, and what’s wrong with them? It’s much simpler and cleaner to say, here’s the job. Are they doing that job?
Krista Nash 48:07
It’s really interesting to say that because, like, I’ve done custody evaluations, and I try to not do them anymore, because it’s, you know, for a lot of reasons…
Allen Levy 48:15
But your reasons overlap with mine.
Krista Nash 48:19
I mean, you know, the problem is it’s so adversarial, like it’s really not that problem solving, and I think we all do as custody evaluators, get into the trap of fueling the drama, because the you know, the parents are giving you this whole narrative of how bad it’s been and why, and how terrible the other person is. And you know, all their family gets on board and wants to be interviewed and sends letters, and you’re getting videos and audio recordings and all these different things to that are very highly weaponized and emotional, and I think we do sometimes fall into, like, I don’t know, allowing that narrative to be the narrative.
Allen Levy 48:49
Yeah, well, part of the problem is that people are asking the wrong questions. And I deal with this in my therapy work, and it’s become just a part of the my discipline of mind is that I tell people, and I practice this, that why is the most interesting question, it’s the least useful and oftentimes the most dangerous, that the questions that need to be asked are, instead of why is this happening, or why is he or she doing, that is, what is the problem? You need to start asking what questions we need, we need to be doing more observation and less explanation. Why questions are explanatory tools and their storytelling tools, and they’re part of what I call the order of operations of human problem solving, but the why questions only come at the end, after the problem is solved, and then you tell a story about what the problem was, how it came to be, and how you solved it. But when you inject a why question into the middle of an unsolved problem, all you do is end up telling a story about a problem that never gets solved and only gets worse. So there’s a discipline of mind here. Where you ask the what questions and you conduct observations, and you limit your interpretation and your explanation. And so this job description provides a lens, a way to observe that gives you very concrete things to observe for, without regard to why are they doing it or not doing it?
Krista Nash 50:24
Let’s talk a little bit about how the actual curriculum works. So you said, you mentioned before that you’re, you’ll sometimes do a session with, you know, you got a variety of things, like all moms, you know, for a day, or you’ll do different groups, or whatever. So is it always in person. Is it? Can it be virtual? Is it with the parents together? I mean, probably not. It sounds like it could be in rooms, right?
Allen Levy 50:49
So I teach the curriculum to moms and dads separately, and I let them know that sometimes they’ll get couples that are either recommended, referred or even ordered to take this curriculum, and I make it clear that I’m not going to put mom and dad together in the same room at the same time until they have shown me that they are capable of being in the same room at the same time, that there is a clearly identified purpose for putting them in the same room at the same time, and there is the likelihood of a good outcome for doing that otherwise, Mom and Dad, I deal with them separately. Also, I designed the curriculum in such a way that it works if only one parent is doing it, it doesn’t require the other parent necessarily to participate, because if one parent changes their behaviors and starts acting more professionally and starts setting clear boundaries and are acting assertively instead of engaging in needless conflict and combat, If one person changes their behaviors, it changes the dynamic, and that’s what’s the most useful thing is not what’s going on inside of these people, but what’s going on between them. And if I can get one person to change their behaviors, then the other parent has to change what they do in response to that change in behaviors. And if I can get one parent to recognize the invitations to combat the the bait that’s being dangled in front of them, or the little red dot laser pointer that’s being flashed on them as if they were a cat, you know, to chase it, and I get that parent to stop reacting and instead find their feet under them, stand their ground and respond rather than react, then we’ve changed it. And even if the other parent still is hostile, dysfunctional and trying to still create conflict, what the other parent is able to create is a safe haven for the child. At least the child is one place in which the parent is not thrusting them into the middle. The parent is not actively involving or engaging them in this conflict, and is acting in a protective way, and not protecting them from the other parent, but protecting them from the conflict. That is what is toxic. So I only need one parent willing…
Krista Nash 53:23
Interesting. I mean, it is really interesting. It could really change at all. So if your parents are interested, or professionals are interested, is it something that is transferable, like, is it in a written material? Is it something they could contact you about? Like, how do people get their hands on these solutions?
Allen Levy 53:41
So at the moment, I’m in the process of trying to expand beyond the borders of Alaska. So I have a limited form of my curriculum available now on Ben Garber’s DEFUSEdivorce. It would be like an intro. I am in the process of building a website and putting this material out.
Krista Nash 54:04
Let me just pause and tell people so the DEFUSEdivorce classes, I think they’re like $97 or something, and you get access for a year to it, so that that is one immediate place to go find this. And I just looked at it earlier as I was preparing for this. So all you have to do is just search for Al and on this, and you’ll find it. But he maybe has, I don’t know, Ben has, what, maybe 10 classes or something like that up there. So it’s not hard to just skim through them. There’s a lot of other good resources up there too, but that would be one way. How many hours is that? The course, is it like an hour, or?
Allen Levy 54:36
Let’s say, you know, the Reader’s Digest, condensed version of DEFUSEdivorce is about an hour.
Krista Nash 54:46
Yeah, so I thought, okay, but that’s a really good place to start. And I encourage parents, you know, this is the kind of thing that you can share with your co parent, you could share with a therapist. You could really like, again, that kind of power I keep sending. People like to split films now, you know, Ellen Bruno does, I’m like, you have to go watch these. You know, you’re you. You got to put this stuff in front of the other parents. So that would be one way to at least start to move these ideas in that direction in your family. But go ahead.
Allen Levy 55:13
y the end of the year, I expect to have my website up with the curriculum available in the future over the next year and a half. One of the ideas like developing is actually a game, sort of like a simulation game for parents to play the I’m getting divorced game, am I killing my children?
Krista Nash 55:39
And so the the game would run them through. I mean, that would be very poignant.
Allen Levy 55:43
it would simulate the kind of scenarios parents commonly encounter, and how they respond to it.
Krista Nash 55:50
It’s kind of like I’m thinking about the game of Life, you know, like, or like Shoots and Ladders, you know what I mean? Likeyou did really great co-parenting. Go up this ladder, your kid’s doing great. Or, like, you did this terrible thing, and now we have a kid that you know needs this other kind of intervention.
Allen Levy 56:06
Now your kid needs five years of therapy.
Krista Nash 56:08
Or, is, much higher risk. You could take all that ACS studies and say, much more risk of disease, much risk of I mean, it’s interesting, because parents would probably criticize saying, Oh, it’s not our fault that happened, but you could even prevent it at all. You know, prevent those outcomes at all. Why wouldn’t you?
Allen Levy 56:26
So part of my whole approach to this is no fault. We got away from finding fault in divorce a long time ago, and it was really necessary. And I have a no fault philosophy. I’m not interested in whose fault it is. What I’m interested in is who’s willing to do something to fix it. Because you can, you can fix blame, or you can fix the problem, but you can’t do both, and I prefer to fix the problem. Earlier. You’d asked me about other common pitfalls, and you’d asked about what are pitfalls for lawyers. And here’s, if you don’t mind me going back to that, lawyers contribute to the conflict if they are what I call magic door attorneys. A magic door attorney is someone who thinks they have a magic door in their office through which only the righteous pass, and because they have this magic door, whatever their righteous client tells them they can accept, at face value, as if it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And these attorneys who don’t question what their clients bring to them don’t do a little bit of fact checking or perspective taking on it, they needlessly inflame these conflicts and increase the costs of coming to solutions here.
Krista Nash 57:48hey increase the chances of injury to the kids, and they decrease the chances of healthy co parenting by an exponential amount. I mean, I see this very frequently in my practice. I also call it the echo chamber. It’s like, it’s just you and me getting this echo chamber together, and don’t even listen to any outside input, because, you know, it can’t be right, because we are the only ones right, teah?
Allen Levy 58:11
And that’s, that’s what I call magic door, yeah, the magic tells me you’re right. I don’t have to question anything. The other thing that’s hard for people to realize, and I think sometimes even attorneys to accept, is that courts do not solve problems. Yeah, exactly. Court is not a problem solving body, and especially in family law, court is a decision making body, and they only make two decisions in contemporary American divorce. There’s only two things that need to be decided, what do we do with the stuff, and what do we do with the kids? And that’s it. And the decisions that the court makes don’t solve a problem, and often they create further problems and sow the seeds for future conflict. Some of my best cases have been where I get parent, where I get both parents involved, and they’re following the curriculum and doing this, and they stop going to court, and they stop talking to their lawyers, and they’re just communicating, solving problems, making decisions, and at the earliest sign of a conflict, they reach out for a little help from somebody who’s actually a problem solver and not a decision maker, and they never go back to court again.
Krista Nash 59:28
Yeah, I have that too. I mean, I end up moving from the child’s legal representative to a parenting coordination role a lot of times, and the parents are just so grateful, even if they’ve been in toxic relationships with everybody for years there, they look at me with this sense of like, like, relief, like, let’s get some sanity here. Like, I’m so tired of this being our story. You know, is there any way to do it differently? And, I mean, that’s really the whole reason I’m even doing the podcast is because it’s like, yes, there is a way to do it differently. Please do it differently, right?
Allen Levy 1:00:00
And that’s where I have a problem solving approach to this, that another one of the principles I teach is that taking it out of the language of diagnosis and symptoms and what’s wrong with you is I, first of all, I want to focus on what’s right with people, to bring forward their best qualities and teach them how to how to do that and that, I stopped talking even to my just therapy patients about their symptoms and diagnosis because they can’t do anything with that. It puts them in a helpless position. But human beings, by nature, are problem solvers, so a problem is defined as anything that hurts you or somebody else. Somebody’s getting hurt. It’s a problem. We don’t have to find someone to blame, someone’s getting hurt. Also, every problem is an opportunity, and look for the opportunity in the problem, an opportunity to learn, to grow, to make things better, to bring a positive change about so there’s nothing to there’s no need for shame or blame, if all you’re doing is searching for opportunities. And then the problem solving process it’s very simple. It’s a three legged stool that is, like, you know, a tripod. It’ll stand very stably with three legs. And the legs don’t even have to be the same size, as long as they’re there. And the three legs are the person with the problem admits the problem, the person with the problem commits to working on the problem, and the person with the problem accepts help for the problem. If you have all three of those legs, you have a stable problem solving tripod, and I can guarantee you that problem will get solved. Absolutely guarantee it, as long as all three are in place. Here’s the trick to it, though, I cannot tell you when and when doesn’t matter as much as people think it does, as long as they’re on the journey towards a solution and they’re practicing the skills they need, and they’re focused on the solution instead of blame or shame or getting hooked inside their emotions and being, you know, isolated by That as long as they’re on that task, if they’re committed, if they accept the problem, committed to working on it, accept help for the problem, they’re they’re going to be on a path towards steady improvement. They’ll be on an upward trend. Those are the things that are also embedded in this curriculum.
Krista Nash 1:02:17
Once you get it onto your website. Certainly let me know, and I will tell listeners that, since it’s not up yet, you won’t be able to find that. You can go check out the piece of it on diffuse divorce, but check out the show notes out later, because we will definitely have that linked later, and we potentially could have you back on once you get that all up and running. To do that. I know we are out of time, but before we wrap up, is there a piece of encouragement or insight that you want to offer to parents who feel like they’re never going to be able to co-parent peacefully?
Allen Levy 1:02:50
First, I use different words. I’ll see if I can shorten this. When I’m teaching parents, I make it very clear I’m not teaching co-parenting because that includes some assumptions of lots of what I call co-cooperation and communication and all kinds of good co things like that, and we’ll get cozy and life will be rosy. And no, no stop. We’re not doing that. There are five levels of shared parenting. This is laid out by Peter Jaffe in a paper many years ago, that the first level is co-parenting, where there is a lot of co-cooperation, trust, respect, common parenting practices. Not everybody can do that. The next level is parallel parenting, where parents don’t like each other, they don’t trust each other, but they at least are willing to put the children’s well-being ahead of their own feelings. So we create good boundaries that what happens at mom’s house stays in mom’s house. What happens at dad’s house stays at dad’s house. And we even will delegate different areas of responsibility. Bob, you handle this and this and this, and Dad, you handle that. It’s parallel. It’s a a peace treaty, and we’re close and continuing friends together. We are committed to mutual coexistence. That’s the second level, and those are the two levels that my parenting education focuses on. So the first advice to parents is just accept whatever level you’re at, and don’t force yourself to do something you can’t do. And if you’re not going to be in a co-parenting relationship, then accept that and you focus on output rather than outcome. What you bring to the situation is you’re under your control and your responsibility. What happens after that? You have no control over it, so don’t get hung up on whether or not the other parent behaves better. Suddenly starts acting nice. Just do the right thing for the right reasons, for your sake and for your children’s sake, not to change the other parent. If that parent was going to change, they would have changed before you got divorced. So you don’t need them to change because. As long as you change for the better. Yeah, those are some of the basic principles there.
Krista Nash 1:05:05
I love just the message of hope. I mean, there is hope. There are ways to do it better.
Allen Levy 1:05:09
And here’s one more on the problem solving model for every problem, there is at least one elegant solution. Look for the solution, and don’t worry about whose fault it is, or who started it, or what happened in the past, because you past this past, and we’re moving in a certain direction towards the future. So let’s look forward and look for the elegant solution. And until that elegant solution appears, then whatever, whatever you can do that works without hurting you or somebody else is going to be good enough, and at any given moment, good enough is good enough. Perfection is not an option.
Krista Nash 1:05:49
I love that. Well, I could talk with you all day, and we’re going to probably have to just set another time, because I will get yelled at by the podcast is ours, who bossed me around and tell me not to make it too long, even though I could talk all day about this, but thanks for being with me today and doing this. I am so grateful for the work you’re doing, and it gives me an infusion of help, of hope. That’s one of the things that I love about doing the podcast, is it’s an antidote to the hard work that we all do in this realm, because there really is a lot of hope, and I’m always so refreshed by professionals like you who believe that, that that there’s hope in this, right? Because, I mean,people say, Oh, you do divorce. No, no, no, I do family defense right? It’s like, that is, I’m a family defense attorney, right? And that’s a very different thing than just like, I’m a divorce I’m just trying to blow it up like a divorce lawyer. That’s not what we do. And I know that. I know you share that. So I am excited to hear more about this. When you get more up online, I will myself go look at that diffuse divorce link, and I hope you write me that jingle you told me you’d write, because I will be working on that. Yeah, and I would love that. So send that. Would you go listen to my intro outro and tell me what you think from your musical background or whether I’m hitting the right tone. I was telling Mr. Levy that I tried to do this intro out from music with like, just the right blend ofnot too happy, but also kind of optimistic, not too somber, but appropriate. You know, when you’re picking a jingle for a podcast, it’s an interesting exercise. So any musical tips you got for me, I would love!
Allen Levy 1:07:23
You’re welcome. Thanks for inviting me. This was a lot of fun!
Krista Nash 1:07:27
Absolutely. Let’s do it again.
Intro/Outro 1:07:31
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.