The co-parenting experience in the dissociated space of children with separated parents

Abstract

Parental divorce is often a cause for mental disorders in children, by reason of the profound dislocation of the child’s mental coordinates. Results: Co-parenting relationships contain a set of involvement behaviours and the combined efforts of the two parents in the education, planning and life trajectory of the child. Hetherington and Kelly (apud. Luca, 2016) identify three types of co-parenting: conflicting co-parenting, which involves hostile interpersonal behaviours, cooperative co-parenting, in which parents prioritize the child’s needs and parallel co-parenting is the most common type and is the easiest to adopt by parents; it is characterized by the situation in which the two parents ignore each other, do not collaborate and do not coordinate their activities with the child. Both conflicting and parallel co-parenting prescribe poor models for developing the parent-child relationship and reflect low levels of parental competence. Prolonged conflictual co-parenting causes the emergence of emotional disorders in the child with dramatic long-term effects in terms of its developing personality.