Here is something I have been noticing lately with the parents I coach, and I have been noticing it in myself when I look back at my own high-conflict years. We tell people we have switched to parallel parenting. We say it out loud to our therapist and to our sister and to the group chat. We mean it when we say it. And then a few months in we realize we are just as exhausted as we were before, and we cannot figure out why the shift did not take.
I think it is because the label is the easy part. The shift is behavioral, and it happens one small decision at a time, and most of those decisions look reasonable, or generous, or pro-kid, which is exactly what makes them so hard to catch. A parent who tells me she has switched to parallel parenting will often still ask her ex to split birthdays, still soften her written messages, still comment on bedtime at the other house when she thinks it is affecting her kid. Every one of those is a co-parenting move dressed up as something else. The parallel parenting label is not doing what she thinks it is doing, because the co-parenting behaviors are still running underneath it.
Solid Ground™ is a private membership and coaching community for parents practicing parallel parenting through high-conflict co-parenting. I've been building it for exactly this reason. Catching the reasonable-looking moves is a lot easier in a coach-monitored room where other parents will help you see the ones you are still doing without noticing, instead of nodding along about how impossible your ex is. This piece is a walk through the six most common ones I see.
I'm Michelle Mitchell, J.D. I am a California-licensed attorney with 20+ years of prior litigation experience, and I no longer practice law. My work today is coaching-only. I'm a Certified New Ways for Families® Instructor with the High Conflict Institute, a Certified HCDP™ Coach and Educator, and I'm on the court-approved provider list for the San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, and Marin Superior Courts. If you have been saying you switched to parallel parenting and are still bleeding energy into the co-parenting relationship, this piece is for you.
What is parallel parenting?
Parallel parenting is a structured co-parenting alternative for high-conflict situations, defined not by a label but by a specific set of behaviors that eliminate any contact between parents that is not legally required. Two homes, two sets of rules, two sets of routines, and no expectation that what happens in one house will be coordinated with what happens in the other.
The word co-parenting implies exactly what it says, two parents parenting together, and in a functional relationship that is a beautiful thing. Both parents are motivated by the child's wellbeing, both parents can reach agreement on the day-to-day questions, and conflict does not eat up the energy that should be going to raising the kid. That is what co-parenting is supposed to look like when it works.
In a high-conflict dynamic it does not work that way, and the shared parenting infrastructure that would help a low-conflict couple becomes the pipeline the conflict runs through. Every touchpoint is an opportunity for one parent to destabilize the other. Every negotiation is an opening for the pattern to run again. Every "hey can we talk about" text is a door.
Parallel parenting closes those doors. The mechanics of the child's life still get handled, but they get handled by each parent independently on their own time. Handoffs happen at neutral locations or through the school. Communication is limited to written channels and to the topics that are legally required, which is typically Health, Education, and Welfare only. Anything outside those topics does not get a response, and anything that could be handled by one parent alone gets handled by one parent alone.
The point is not hostility, and it is not punishment. The point is recognizing that in a high-conflict dynamic the shared parenting infrastructure is the substrate the conflict runs on. Remove the substrate and the conflict has nowhere to grow. That is what high-conflict parallel parenting is designed to do.
How is parallel parenting different from co-parenting?
The clearest way to see the difference is to look at what each one asks you to do at the small decision points.
Co-parenting asks you to solve the parenting problem together. If your kid is having trouble at school, both parents talk about it and agree on an approach. Both parents attend the parent-teacher conference. Both parents adjust bedtime at both houses to match. Both parents check in with each other about how it is going. There is coordination, and the coordination is the point.
Parallel parenting asks you to solve the parenting problem in your house without any expectation that the other house will match. If your kid is having trouble at school, you handle it your way on your parenting time, and you attend the parent-teacher conference separately, and you adjust the routine at your house to support the kid, and what the other house does is not your project. There is no coordination, and the lack of coordination is the point.
Co-parenting rewards flexibility, the swapping of weekends, the sharing of photos of milestones, the showing up together to school events, the splitting of birthday parties, the sending of updates about how the kid's week went. These are the things that make co-parenting work when it works.
Parallel parenting requires the opposite of flexibility. It requires you to hold the boundary of your own parenting time and your own house without inviting the negotiations that flexibility opens, because in a high-conflict dynamic every "generous" co-parenting move becomes a doorway for the pattern to run through.
That is the core mechanical difference. Co-parenting is a set of behaviors that add up to shared parenting. Parallel parenting is a set of behaviors that add up to two independent parenting operations. If you are doing the first set of behaviors while calling it the second, you have changed the label without changing the practice.
6 Parallel Parenting Behaviors That Are Actually Still Co-Parenting
These are the six most common parallel parenting behaviors I see in coaching where a parent tells me they have shifted, but the behavior itself is a co-parenting move. Every one of them looks reasonable, and every one of them looks considerate or pro-kid, and every one of them keeps the shared parenting infrastructure running.
1. Asking to split your kid's birthday
The impulse behind this one is generous. Both parents want to celebrate the kid, both parents want the day to feel special, and splitting the day feels like the fair, pro-kid solution. So one parent reaches out to the other to negotiate who gets morning, who gets evening, where the handoff will happen, and whether the birthday dinner will overlap.
Every one of those negotiations is a co-parenting move. Each one forces contact that is not legally required, and each one gives the other parent power over how your celebration goes and when it starts and when it ends. Each one creates a new opportunity for the pattern to run.
In parallel parenting the birthday happens on your parenting time on your terms, and it happens on the other parent's parenting time on their terms. Whichever house has the child on the calendar day celebrates on the calendar day, and the other house celebrates the weekend before or the weekend after. Nobody asks, nobody negotiates, and the kid gets two celebrations without the birthday becoming a coordination project between adults who cannot coordinate without conflict.
2. Asking for time on the other parent's schedule for a special event
I coached a mom a while back whose son's best friend was in a school play, and it fell on her ex's parenting weekend. She wanted to take her son. It seemed like a small ask. She sent a polite message asking if she could pick him up Saturday afternoon for a few hours to bring him to the play.
He said no. Then he said more than no. Then he sent three more messages about her request over the following days, and then a message to their attorneys, and then a message accusing her of trying to interfere with his parenting time. What followed was two weeks of hostile fallout for a two-hour ask about a school play she never got to bring her son to anyway.
That is the pattern. In a low-conflict dynamic "can I have a couple of hours for a special event" is a friendly negotiation, and in a high-conflict dynamic it is an opening. Every ask you make becomes an opportunity for a refusal, an escalation, or a mischaracterization in a future court filing. Every ask you make also normalizes the negotiation, and the next time you want something you have already trained yourself and your co-parent that asks are on the table.
In parallel parenting you do not ask for time on your co-parent's schedule, not for a play, not for a family wedding, not for a grandparent visit. The parenting time is the parenting time. If the child misses something that falls on the other parent's schedule, the child misses it, and you can explain that this is how the schedule works. That is easier for the child to metabolize than a two-week hostile fallout that they can feel even if they do not see.
3. Asking to swap weekends because you have plans
You booked a trip six months ago and it falls on your co-parent's weekend, or you got tickets to something on their weekend that your child would love and you want to swap so the child can go, or your parents are in town for one weekend only and it happens to be theirs. So you send a message asking if they will swap.
Every one of those swap requests is a co-parenting move. Even when the ask is granted, the ask itself is a negotiation, and the negotiation is the infrastructure. In a high-conflict dynamic most swap requests are either refused, granted with resentment that shows up later, or granted with a corresponding ask that puts you in a position you did not want to be in.
In parallel parenting you plan around the schedule you have. If a trip you want to take falls on your co-parent's weekend, you do not take that trip, or you take it another weekend, or you accept that the trip happens without your child. The schedule is the schedule, and every ask to modify it is a reopening of a door you closed when you decided to parallel parent.
There are a small set of legitimate exceptions, like a death in the family or a one-time medical situation, and those handoffs get made through your written channel with a factual message and a defined fallback. Everything short of that gets handled by planning around the calendar you have, not by trying to renegotiate it. If you are in an ongoing court dynamic and figuring out what qualifies as extraordinary keeps becoming another conflict, parent coordination is often the right container for that conversation.
4. Commenting on bedtime or screen time at the other home
Your kid comes home Sunday night exhausted, and you know they were up late the entire weekend, and you send a message suggesting an earlier bedtime at the other house so the kid does not come to school tired on Monday. Or your kid mentions they watched a movie you consider inappropriate for their age at the other house, and you send a message about screen limits.
Every one of those messages is a co-parenting move. You have no jurisdiction at the other house. You cannot enforce bedtime there and you cannot enforce screen limits there, and every comment you make about what happens at the other house is an attempt to synchronize the two homes. Synchronization is co-parenting.
In parallel parenting, what happens at the other home is not your project. Your project is bedtime at your house and screen time at your house. Your kid comes home Sunday tired, you have a lower-key Sunday evening and get them to bed early. Your kid mentions a movie you would not have shown them, you note it privately for context on what your kid is exposed to, and you do not send the message.
This one is one of the hardest ones, because it feels irresponsible to say nothing. Two things are true at the same time. You cannot control what happens at the other house, and your commentary on it does not change what happens at the other house either. What your commentary does is give the pattern a new opening.
5. Attending your kid's birthday parties together
This one comes up all the time, and I want to slow down on it because the story I am about to tell is the reason I no longer recommend this to any parent in a high-conflict dynamic, even when the child asks for it.
A mom I'll call Melissa hosted her son Henry's 8th birthday party at a public park. Henry had been asking for his dad to come, and Melissa thought this was the pro-kid decision. They had never done parties together before because the conflict had always been too high, but she wanted to give it a try.
Her ex showed up with his best friend, his best friend's wife, and their three kids, one of whom was a school friend of Henry's. That part was fine. What was not fine was what he did once he got there. Instead of spending the party with his son, he circulated. He went around the park having conversations with the other parents, some of whom were Melissa's close friends who knew the situation and others who were school parents with no context at all. He was talking about their court case. He was talking about how Melissa was keeping their son from him. He was pulling parents into conversations they had not signed up for, asking them to weigh in on the family dynamic, saying things like "can you believe this" and "we are spending all this time and money in court."
Melissa was on the other side of the park running the games she had planned, trying to keep Henry's party feeling like a party. Parents kept walking up to her to tell her what her ex had just said to them. She kept putting a happy face on for their son.
She does not know for sure whether Henry actually heard the specific comments his dad was making about her, or whether he just picked up the energy in the park. What she saw was her son, who had been having a great time, become suddenly and severely dysregulated in a way she had never seen him before, shortly after his dad arrived. He turned all of that dysregulation on a family friend we will call Paul, a dad Henry had known and liked for years. Henry started saying Paul was mean, that Paul was trying to hurt him. He would not calm down. He ended up in Melissa's car for the last part of his own birthday party, and she sat with him there and could not piece together what had just happened.
It hit her afterward. Paul was a safe male figure. Henry could not rage at the parent whose behavior was actually distressing him, so his nervous system found a stand-in. All of the confusion and grief and anger about what was happening with his dad got transferred onto the man who was safe enough to receive it.
Melissa never did it again. From that day forward she stuck with separate parties. That day taught her that a pro-kid-looking move can still be a co-parenting move, and it is the child who pays the price.
The move that looked the most generous and the most pro-kid and the most "we can be adults about this" was the move that cost her son the most. This is what parallel parenting protects against. In parallel parenting the birthday party happens on your parenting weekend with your side of the family and your child's friends, and the other parent hosts their own party on their weekend if they want to. The kid gets two celebrations without being asked to be in the same room with both parents while one of them behaves badly.
If your child asks you to invite the other parent, the answer is a version of "you will get to celebrate with Dad on his weekend, this party is with our side." You do not have to explain the mechanics. What kids can metabolize is a steady calm structure. What they cannot metabolize is watching one parent behave badly at the party the other parent hosted and then being asked to make sense of it later.
6. Softening messages or apologizing to smooth things over
Your co-parent sent an angry message, and you draft a response, and before you send it you soften it. You add a "sorry if I was unclear earlier." You add an "I know this has been hard for both of us." You end with something warm to defuse the temperature.
Every one of those softening moves is a co-parenting move. Softening invites reply, apologizing signals that a relationship-repair transaction is on the table, and both are attempts to reset the emotional register of the exchange. The emotional register is the co-parenting infrastructure.
In parallel parenting, the written channel is factual. The message states the necessary information, the next step, and the deadline. It does not manage the other parent's feelings, and it does not manage your own feelings on the page. It does what it needs to do and it ends.
This one is hard because most of us were raised to smooth things over, and it feels wrong not to. Smoothing things over with a high-conflict co-parent does not smooth anything over though. It signals that you are still available for emotional negotiation, and the negotiation is the pattern. Our SAFE™ Ghostwriting service exists in part because the softening impulse is so hard to shake without a communication partner in your corner. The underlying skill is one you can build though. Every message you send in your co-parenting app is a chance to practice the register.
Why These Co-Parenting Behaviors Feel Considerate But Keep You Stuck
Every one of those six behaviors comes from a real place. The impulse behind each one is a good one: fairness, generosity, making the day nice for the kid, being the reasonable adult, keeping the temperature low. Those impulses served you in most of your other relationships, and they served you when you were still trying to co-parent. They are the impulses of a considerate person, and considerate people tend to keep reaching for them out of habit long after the relationship has stopped rewarding consideration.
In a high-conflict dynamic every one of those impulses becomes the pipeline for the pattern. The considerate move is the doorway, and because the impulse is a good one, the doorway looks perfectly reasonable every time. You do not notice you are opening it. You just find yourself six months later, still exhausted, wondering why the parallel parenting label has not made anything easier.
The label has not made anything easier because you are still doing the co-parenting behaviors under a different name.
What Real Parallel Parenting Looks Like as an Ongoing Practice
Parallel parenting is not a decision you make once and then you are done. It is a practice you do every week, because new reasonable-looking moves show up all the time. A school event you want to invite the other parent to. A schedule change that feels harmless. A concern about something at the other house that feels irresponsible not to raise. A message you want to soften. A birthday you want to split.
The skill is catching them. Every week a few of these moves will present themselves in language that sounds reasonable, and the parallel parenting practice is noticing the reasonableness, recognizing the move, and choosing not to make it. Over time the reasonable-looking moves stop feeling as urgent, and the pattern of catching them becomes automatic, and your energy stops leaking into the co-parenting relationship, and you get more of yourself back.
The other thing that helps is being in a room with other parents who are practicing the same thing. Not because you need to vent, and not because you need someone to validate that your ex is impossible, but because you need people who can help you see the reasonable-looking moves you are not catching on your own. When another parent describes a message they almost sent or a schedule swap they almost asked for, you recognize your own patterns in the mirror, and that is where the practice sharpens.
If you want structured skill-building with a full course, that is the 6-Week High Conflict Co-Parenting Skills Intensive™. If you want private, one-on-one work on your specific dynamic, that is 1-to-1 Coaching. And if you want the ongoing room of parents practicing this together, that is Solid Ground. Doors open Thursday, October 1. The first 100 members lock in the founding rate for as long as they stay.
Frequently Asked About Parallel Parenting
What is parallel parenting?
How is parallel parenting different from co-parenting?
Can I ever swap weekends in parallel parenting?
What if my kid asks me to invite their other parent to a birthday party?
How do I actually shift from co-parenting to parallel parenting?
Not legal advice. This article is general educational content for parents navigating high-conflict co-parenting dynamics and parallel parenting. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship or any attorney-client privilege. Michelle Mitchell, J.D., is a California-licensed attorney with 20+ years of prior litigation experience and no longer practices law; her work is coaching-only. For legal advice specific to your situation, consult a licensed family law attorney in your jurisdiction. Individual results vary.
Michelle Mitchell, J.D.
California-licensed attorney (no longer practicing law), 20+ years prior litigation experience. Founder of High Conflict Resolutions, LLC. Certified New Ways for Families® Instructor (High Conflict Institute), Certified HCDP™ Coach and Educator, AFCC-trained Parent Coordinator, trained in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing®. Court-approved provider for the San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, and Marin Superior Courts.