Coparenting: Children

Between the time they are born and their entry into adulthood, nearly all children are parented, socialized, and acculturated by two or more different individuals who, as a collaborating unit, bear responsibility for the child's care and upbringing. Together, these accountable individuals serve as the child's coparents, that is, the collective of adults who guide the child to adulthood, shape the child's skills and sensibilities, and provide him or her with a sense of safety and security in the world. In the majority of families around the world, this coparental unit includes the child's biological mother, working in tandem with the child's father and/or with grandparents and other relative caregivers to provide the child's core family base. In cases where both biological mother and father are absent, coparenting of the child occurs within the substitute system that materializes to support the child. In these circumstances, the unit can come to involve blood and fictive kin and/or foster or adoptive parents who step forward to make a temporary [Page 242]or permanent commitment to the child. While a child's coparents are sometimes defined by legal arrangements, legal standing is not the principal consideration. Rather, the essential coparental unit for any child will include any and all of those individuals who collectively parent, provide for, and commit to ensuring the child's enduring safety and well-being.

Within the coparenting systems that develop within families, an important consideration for children is the extent to which the different coparenting adults are able to create a mutually supportive alliance with one another that facilitates shared and considered decision making about the child and his or her needs. Nearly all parenting adults maintain at least somewhat different notions about what is best for children, and their individual parenting practices are guided by these conscious or unconscious beliefs. When parents operate with very different ideas about what is in a child's best interests, as is not uncommon in many Western cultures, their propensity and inclination to talk together about the child and to consult and make important decisions together can be critically important. When parents understand and respect one another's perspectives and work together so as to provide a reasonably consistent and coordinated set of rules and standards for the child, they communicate solidarity to the child. This, in turn, helps the child feel safe and secure in a stable, predictable family climate. By contrast, when the adults work in opposition; ignore, disrespect, or dismiss the parenting decisions made by the child's other parenting figures; derogate or disparage one another to the child; or in other ways undermine joint parenting efforts, this confuses and sometimes disorganizes children and can lead, in more severe circumstances, to problems with behavioral adjustment.

In nuclear family systems, the dynamics of each family's coparenting system are influenced by a variety of factors, including the parents’ own psychodynamics and the nature of their relationship with one another. Adults with insecure states of mind with respect to attachment or with pessimistic attitudes about coparenting are at greater risk to develop problematic coparenting alliances during their child's infancy. Marital strain preceding the birth of a child also places the coparenting alliance at risk, and numerous studies have established linkages between marital distress and problems in coparenting during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Problems with coparenting also often continue post-divorce; ample evidence indicates that children whose parents continue high-conflict coparenting relationships after they have divorced show especially problematic adjustment, with problems of boys more pronounced early on and problems of girls surfacing later. By contrast, if parents are able to establish positive working alliances as coparents post-divorce, these same behavioral problems are seen much less frequently. Coparenting alliances also evolve in families where the parents never marry. Again, the main predictor of whether a positive coparenting alliance will materialize and be sustained through time in families where the child's mother and father never marry or live together is the nature of the relationship between them. Friendship and rapport increase the likelihood that there will be a sustained coparental alliance across developmental time. Less is currently known about factors that shape positive or negative coparenting alliances in extended kinship or multigenerational family systems, though the historical interpersonal relationship between the coparenting individuals predating the child's arrival likely plays a formative role.

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