Welcoming a child to your family through foster care or helping raise a relative’s child is a significant change for all involved. You are giving this child a safe space to land when their parents need time to get back on their feet and hopefully resume parenting from a position of strength and healing. Co-parenting while all that is going on can feel daunting, especially if the relationship between you and this child’s parents is fraught. However, developing a healthy functional relationship with the child’s parents is good for the child, parents, and caregivers.

Five Benefits of Co-Parenting

Understandably, when a child has suffered impacts from neglect, abuse, or substance abuse disorders, it’s tempting to draw rigid boundaries or cut off contact to protect this child from further trauma. However, everyone can benefit when all the child’s adults can come to a place of shared care and nurture while keeping the child’s best interests at the center of the relationship.

Parenting a Child Exposed to Trauma

When co-parenting with kindness, respect, and intention, the connections for all parties can be supported and prioritized. With their adults experiencing calmer, connected relationships, the child may struggle less and exhibit fewer behavior issues. Here are some additional benefits of co-parenting in foster or kinship care.

1. Reduced Sense of Divided Loyalties

In a functional co-parenting relationship, your foster child or grandchild (or niece or nephew) is less likely to feel as if they must choose between their biological parent(s), foster parents, or kinship caregivers (grandparents, aunts, etc.).

2. Decreased Stress

When you can partner with the child’s biological parents in parenting decisions and planning, you can all experience less conflict and stress about contact, visits, legal proceedings, school events, and so on. Less drama will reduce stress for everyone.

3. Smoother Transitions

Regardless of the changes this child will experience (moving to permanency in your home, reunification with biological family, changing schools, etc.), co-parenting with intention can pave the way for smoother transitions.

4. Increased Collaboration

When this child’s birth parents know that you are not “out to get their child,” they are likely to be more willing to work with you over things like helping their child accept your authority or communicating that they are safe in your care. Their willingness to work together increases the likelihood that this child will work with you on behavior, healing, etc.

5. Opportunities to Model Adult Relationships

Co-parenting with respect, kindness, and consideration for all parties means you get plenty of opportunities to model healthy adult relationships for the children in your lives. And when dynamics are challenging, you can show your grandchild or foster child how to navigate difficult circumstances.

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Co-Parenting is Worth the Effort!

While you and this child’s parents figure out how to come to productive co-parenting, it can feel awkward, frustrating, and even triggering – especially if you have a significant history with the parents. But hang in there and keep trying to move forward with your efforts, even if sometimes you must drop back and regroup to find a new way to approach this relationship. Your foster or kinship child deserves to have all the adults in their life on the same page, co-parenting to support them toward healing and stability.

Image Credits: olia danilevich; Mikhail Nilov; cottonbro studio