Co-parenting with an ex. Yeah. This is one of the most emotionally complex situations I work with, because you are being asked to maintain a functional, cooperative relationship with someone you once loved, possibly someone who hurt you, or someone you hurt, or both. And you have to do it for years. Sometimes decades. For the sake of kids who are watching everything.
So let me give you what I know from sitting with people in exactly this spot.
The first thing I want you to understand is this: co-parenting is a business partnership, not a relationship.
I know that sounds cold. It is not meant to be. What I mean is that the emotional intimacy that used to exist between you two is no longer the operating system. The kids are the operating system now. And when you try to run the old emotional software on top of a co-parenting structure, things break down fast. Old wounds get activated. Old patterns kick in. Suddenly a conversation about pickup times becomes a fight about who was never there emotionally.
So the boundaries I talk about with my clients tend to fall into a few categories.
Functional boundaries. These are the practical ones. Stick to the logistics. Pickup and dropoff times, school stuff, medical decisions, schedules. Keep those conversations focused and brief. You are not obligated to process your shared history every time you need to talk about a dentist appointment.
Emotional boundaries. This is harder. Your ex is not your person anymore. That means they are no longer the right audience for your loneliness, your grief about the relationship, your frustration about life. Find a therapist. Find trusted friends. Find somewhere else to put that. When you bring that to your co-parenting relationship, it muddies the water and it puts your kids in the middle, even indirectly.
The kids are not messengers. This is a boundary violation I see constantly and it does real damage. Using your children to communicate with your ex, to gather information about your ex, or to express your feelings about your ex is something worth getting serious about stopping. Kids carry that weight in ways that show up years later.
Your new life is yours. You do not owe your ex details about your dating life, your finances beyond what is legally required, your social world. And the reverse is true too. Curiosity about their life is normal. Acting on it crosses a line.
Now here is the harder thing I want to say.
If there is still a lot of charge when you interact with your ex, a lot of anger or hurt or longing, that is important information. That charge usually means there is grief that has not been processed. And unprocessed grief has a way of turning every co-parenting conversation into a proxy war for the relationship that ended.
The goal, the thing I work toward with my clients, is what I would call a kind of functional neutrality. Not coldness. Not pretending nothing happened. But a place where you can show up for your kids together without it costing you everything emotionally every single time.
That takes time. It takes your own healing work, separate from anything your ex does or does not do.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Co-Parenting After Divorce: What to Expect from Counseling
