COMMON GROUND
You will not agree about the marriage.
You can still agree about him.
Somewhere in the middle of everything you cannot resolve, there is a decision that has to be made about your child — whether he needs treatment, which therapist, whether the diagnosis is right, whether to send him somewhere. You each have an answer. You do not have the same one. And the longer it stays unresolved, the more the disagreement itself becomes the thing that is hurting him.
This is the work of getting two households to one decision — with someone in the room whose only loyalty is to your child.
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE — WHAT THIS IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT
I am not here to decide who is right. I am here so that your child stops paying for the fact that you cannot agree.
WHAT I DO
Sit in the third chair — the one that belongs to neither of you
Bring what your child actually needs, developmentally, into a conversation that has stopped being about him
Explain plainly what a treatment, a diagnosis, or a program would and would not do for a child like yours
Where you both agree in writing, hold the decisions you have chosen to hand me
WHAT I DO NOT DO
Conduct custody evaluations
Provide expert testimony
Write reports to a court, or to anyone’s attorney
Render an opinion about which of you is the better parent
I am not appointed by a judge and I do not report to one. Any authority I hold in your family comes from a written agreement the two of you signed — and either of you can end it.
WHICH ONE ARE YOU STUCK ON?
The decision you cannot make is rarely the real problem
EARLY CHILDHOOD
The preschool sent him home and used a word neither of you can repeat out loud. One of you heard a small boy who needs help. One of you heard a school building a file. He is four.
DIAGNOSIS
He was assessed at one house and not the other. One of you believes the diagnosis. One of you believes it was manufactured to win something.
PLACEMENT
A program has been recommended — wilderness, residential, a therapeutic boarding school. One of you has already toured it. One of you calls it abandonment.
A child who watches his parents fight about whether he is sick learns that he is a subject of dispute. That lesson does more damage than most of the decisions being argued over.
There is usually one question underneath all three: is he struggling, or is he being difficult — and whose fault is it? Two people who love the same child can look at identical behavior and see opposite things, because each of you is seeing him in a different house, under different conditions, through the history you carry. Neither of you is lying. That is what makes it unresolvable without help.
HOW THE WORK IS STRUCTURED
Three steps. You control every one of them.
Most families never go past the first. Some need the second. A few — usually the ones exhausted by relitigating the same small decisions month after month — choose the third.
STEP ONE
The Third Chair
A SINGLE JOINT CONSULTATION
One decision. Both parents in the room. I bring what your child needs developmentally, what the treatment or program in question actually does, and what the research says. Then the two of you decide.
Included: a private intake conversation with each of you separately, the joint session, and a written summary of the options we discussed — a shared reference that belongs to both of you.
Authority granted: none. The decision stays entirely yours.
STEP TWO
Decision Facilitation
AN ONGOING ENGAGEMENT
Most parents arrive with one decision and discover there are ten. This is a defined series of sessions across the decisions in front of you — school, providers, schedules, treatment — building a way of deciding together rather than settling one fight at a time.
Included: recurring joint sessions, and a running written record of what you agreed, so that agreements do not evaporate between sessions.
Authority granted: none. The decision still stays yours.
STEP THREE · THE CEILING
Parenting Coordination
BY WRITTEN AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU
If you reach the point where deciding together is costing more than it is worth, the two of you can sign an agreement giving me the authority to make a defined set of decisions — the recurring, day-to-day ones that generate a hundred messages and settle nothing.
Included: a written scope agreement, drafted alongside your attorneys, that names exactly which decisions I hold and which stay with you; decisions made within that scope; and a written record of each.
Authority granted: only what you both put in writing. Either of you can end it.
WHY IT WORKS IN THIS ORDER
No reasonable person hands decision-making authority over her child to a stranger. You would only ever consider Step Three because Steps One and Two showed you what it is like to have someone in the room who is not on anyone’s side but your child’s. That is why the steps run in this order, and why there is no way to buy the third without the first.