Cori L. McGuire Parenting Coordinator

Making Space for Magic: How Parenting Coordination Helps Children Keep Being Children

Cori McGuire
May 06, 2026By Cori McGuire

After almost 30 years working with parents caught in prolonged family litigation, I have come to recognize patterns that are rarely spoken about openly. Not because anyone is hiding them, but because when people are living inside long‑term conflict, it becomes difficult to see what the conflict itself is doing to them.

Years of litigation do not simply resolve disputes. They reshape lives. They reshape how people think, how they relate, how their bodies respond to stress, and how much internal space remains for anything other than survival. Over time, conflict stops being something parents are dealing with and starts becoming the environment they live inside.

When parents remain in an adversarial system for extended periods of time, their nervous systems are under continuous strain. The body adapts to this kind of pressure, because it must. But the adaptation comes at a cost. Chronic stress changes how threat is perceived, how quickly emotions activate, and how difficult it becomes to return to a regulated state once triggered.

Over time, parents often become more reactive, more vigilant, and more depleted. This is not a failure of character or resilience. It is the predictable effect of living for years inside unresolved threat. Even people who were once flexible, reflective, and generous with benefit of the doubt can become rigid, defensive, or exhausted. This is not who they are. It is what the conditions have required of them.

I see parents whose friendships quietly fall away or change beyond recognition. Relationships that once felt easy become complicated, draining, or unsafe. Some parents withdraw socially altogether because they no longer have the bandwidth to manage one more interpersonal demand. Others find themselves surrounded by people who need something from them but offer little in return. The loss of connection is rarely intentional, yet it is one of the most consistent consequences of prolonged conflict.

At the same time, attention fragments. Parents describe being physically present at work or with their children while mentally elsewhere—tracking emails, legal deadlines, past arguments, or anticipating the next dispute. Even highly capable, thoughtful people begin to struggle with focus, creativity, and emotional availability. The longer the conflict continues, the narrower life can feel, as if everything outside the dispute has slowly faded into the background.

Something almost always gives.

Often, what gives are the very things parents care about most: ease, connection, meaningful work, and time with their children. Not because those things matter less, but because the nervous system can only carry so much threat for so long. When survival takes priority, joy and imagination are often the first casualties.

And this is where the idea of “magic” matters.

For children, magic does not mean fantasy in the abstract. It means the freedom to play, to imagine, to trust that the world is stable enough to explore. It means having adults around them who are present enough to notice, respond, and delight. When adult conflict consumes too much emotional oxygen, that magic quietly shrinks—not because parents don’t love their children, but because the system they are trapped in leaves too little room for anything else.

This is the context in which parenting coordination enters. And it is important to be clear about what parenting coordination is not.

Parenting coordination is not therapy. It does not resolve trauma histories, heal past relationships, or fix people. Parents do not come to parenting coordination to be repaired. They come because the conflict has become unmanageable and unsustainable, and because continuing as they have been is costing too much.

What parenting coordination does offer is containment.

It reduces the number of decisions that must be fought over. It narrows the scope of conflict. It creates structure, predictability, and boundaries around issues that have been consuming disproportionate amounts of energy. Instead of every interaction becoming a potential flashpoint, there is a framework that limits how, when, and about what parents must engage.

When parents are no longer required to renegotiate every detail of their children’s lives, justify every decision, or brace themselves for every interaction, the nervous system begins to settle. Not because anyone has changed who they are, but because the conditions that required constant vigilance have been reduced.

In that regulated space, something important happens. Parents often begin to see things differently. They start to recognize how much energy has been spent on battles that did not meaningfully serve their children. They notice how little time actually remains in childhood, particularly after years have already been lost to conflict. Grief often surfaces here—for what was missed, for how hard things became—but so does clarity.

Parenting coordination does not ask parents to give up caring. It asks them to become more selective about what they care about.

Many parents reach a point where they understand that the only behaviour they truly control is their own. This is not resignation. It is agency. Letting go of arguments that do not protect children is not weakness. It is an act of preservation—for themselves and for their children.

For parents who have lived in litigation for years, the most profound shift is often not behavioural but internal. They stop measuring success by winning, proving, or being right, and begin measuring it by stability, predictability, and presence. The goal becomes not perfection, but sustainability.

And when sustainability becomes the goal, something else becomes possible.

When conflict quiets, even imperfectly, parents often find they have the capacity to turn back toward their children with more steadiness and less reactivity. They can notice play again. They can tolerate mess, imagination, silliness, and emotion without immediately scanning for danger. They can support their children’s inner world instead of constantly managing external threats.

Childhood is finite. Parenting coordination cannot give parents back the years already spent in conflict. What it can do is help stop the loss from continuing. It can protect what remains.

You do not need to be fixed to parent well. You need space to breathe, fewer fires to fight, and the opportunity to choose differently going forward.

That space is where the magic lives.

That is what parenting coordination is designed to support.

Is this research‑based? Is it therapy?

Parenting coordination itself is not therapy, and it does not claim to be. It is a dispute‑resolution and implementation process, typically court‑connected, designed to reduce ongoing conflict and decision‑making chaos in high‑conflict parenting situations.

That said, the observations underlying this work are strongly supported by research across multiple disciplines, including:

  • Neuroscience and psychophysiology on chronic stress, threat response, and nervous system regulation
  • Developmental psychology on the impact of parental conflict on children’s emotional security and play
  • Attachment research on predictability, caregiver availability, and co‑regulation
  • Family systems research on how conflict patterns become self‑perpetuating without external structur

Parenting coordination does not treat trauma, but it often creates the conditions under which regulation becomes possible—for parents and, indirectly, for children.

How to read more

For parents and professionals who want to go deeper, useful areas of reading include:

Written by Cori McGuire, a Parenting Coordinator since 2008 and a  family law lawyer since 1998 in British Columbia. 

© 2026 Cori McGuire. All Rights Reserved. Proprietary Workflow.