Coparenting

Coparenting Between Children’s Biological Mothers and Fathers

The birth of the field of coparenting can be traced to the 1950s, when the family therapy movement emerged as a new paradigm in the field of psychology. Clinicians such as Theodore Lidz began theorizing about the problems introduced by fathers and mothers in conflict who failed to establish reciprocal, cooperative roles as parents for their children. The importance of solidarity in the alliance between the family’s coparenting adults was further illuminated by the clinical work and writings of Salvador Minuchin in the 1970s, who outlined adults’ pivotal roles working collaboratively and cooperatively from hierarchical positions of authority as the family’s “executive subsystem” and detailed effects of functional and dysfunctional parent–parent–child family triangles.

The term coparenting itself initially gained widespread usage in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as American families began en masse rearing their children in postdivorce family systems and concerns developed about the sometimes severe behavior problems exhibited by children of divorce. Mavis Hetherington, Judith Wallerstein, and Constance Ahrons were among the first to focus on the impact of the continuing coparental relationship following divorce.

Beyond these seminal contributions that shed light on clinical concerns of problematic mother–father coparenting relationships, Sidney Weissman and Rebecca Cohen in the mid-1980s introduced the term parental alliance, which refers to the part of a spousal relationship that is separate from meeting each other’s libidinal needs. This turned out to be a historically catalyzing view, both introducing an enduring and important distinction between marital and coparenting systems within the family and at the same time activating an unnecessarily restricting perspective of coparenting chiefly as a component of spousal unions.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Philip and Carolyn Cowan elucidated a growth in the “traditionality” of the division of household and child care labor along gender lines in nonclinical two-parent heterosexual families following the birth of a first child, and Charlotte Patterson began examining the division of labor characteristic of two-parent lesbian families rearing children. Also during the 1990s, investigations conducted by [Page 466]several family scientists, including James McHale, Jay Belsky, Elisabeth Fivaz-Depeursinge, and Gene Brody, began systematically describing individual differences in the dynamics of coparenting as observed during triangular (mother–father–child) interactions.

The late 1990s also saw the introduction of parent-report measures designed to assess overt and covert coparenting processes in the family. Both contemporaneous and longitudinal studies demonstrated for the first time that problematic coparenting dynamics (poor cooperation, communication, and collaboration; overt or covert oppositionality, exclusion or disengagement by one coparental partner, or a combination of these factors) placed children at greater risk for developing problems with behavioral and socioemotional adjustment. Concurrently, provocative studies led by Susan Dickstein and Ronald Seifer, by Lynn Fainsilber Katz, and by other family clinicians and scientists demonstrated that collaborative and supportive coparenting processes appeared to serve as a protective factor even—and sometimes especially—in families in which parents struggled with mental illness or issues of domestic violence.

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