The Framework of Trust: Why My Professional Boundaries Protect Your Family

Feb 20, 2026·By Cori McGuire

Why Boundaries are a Parent’s Best Friend

When parents enter Parenting Coordination, they are often exhausted. Many are looking for a referee, a tie‑breaker, or someone who can finally bring stability to ongoing conflict.

Parenting Coordination is designed to help parents implement existing court orders and agreements in a way that resolves day‑to‑day disputes without the delay and expense of repeated court applications. To do that effectively, Parenting Coordinators must work within clearly defined professional and legal boundaries.

At times, those boundaries can feel rigid. In practice, they are the PC’s most important tool for ensuring fairness, neutrality, and durability of outcomes.

Recent Court Guidance on the Parenting Coordinator Role

Courts in British Columbia have recently provided clearer guidance on the scope and limits of the Parenting Coordinator role. That guidance emphasizes that Parenting Coordination is a post‑order, implementation‑focused process, that a PC’s authority arises solely from the wording of the appointing order or agreement, including your service contract with the PC, and that PCs do not act as therapists, arbitrators, or enforcement authorities.

This article reflects that clarified role and explains why firm boundaries protect both parents and children.

1. Structural Neutrality and the Symmetry of Time

In high‑conflict families, interaction patterns often become asymmetrical. One parent may communicate intensively, strategically, or repeatedly; the other may react emotionally or defensively.

While a Parenting Coordinator may observe these patterns, the PC must remain neutral in how time, attention, and process are allocated. Significant imbalance in time spent with one parent can later be reframed as alignment or bias if the PC’s work is reviewed.

For this reason, Parenting Coordinators maintain structural neutrality—including careful time tracking and even‑handed process management. Where a parent requires extensive emotional regulation, insight‑based work, or skill‑building, that work must occur outside the Parenting Coordination process.

2. Why Counselling and Coaching Occur Outside the PC Process

Parenting Coordinators do not provide therapy or personal change work. Where family dynamics require therapeutic intervention, that work must be done with qualified outside professionals.

Where the appointing court order or agreements provide jurisdiction, a PC may direct participation in counselling or coaching as an implementation support, consistent with the limits recognized in cases such as Odgers v. Odgers, 2014 BCSC 717. Even then, the PC does not oversee treatment or evaluate therapeutic progress.

This separation protects the neutrality of the Parenting Coordination process and ensures that PCs do not assume roles reserved for clinicians or the court.

3. Review‑Ready Determinations

When a Parenting Coordinator makes a formal determination, the focus is on objective, verifiable facts: dates, times, actions taken, and the wording of the governing order or agreement.

Subjective characterizations or blame ideally are not in PC determinations under the contained role. The PC’s responsibility is to make clear, bounded implementation decisions that fall squarely within the authority granted and that can withstand judicial review for jurisdictional error.

Parenting Coordinators implement orders that were already made using the best interests of the child framework; they do not re‑apply or re‑decide that test.

4. Fees

Standard Parenting Coordination agreements require retainers to ensure continued service. If an account falls below the required threshold, a PC may suspend work until it is replenished.

Where permitted by the appointing order, a PC may proceed with a necessary determination funded by one parent and later reallocate fees as authorized. Persistent failure to fund the process, however, may render Parenting Coordination non‑viable.

These financial boundaries are not punitive. They protect the neutrality of the process and prevent the PC from becoming a creditor to one parent, which could create a perceived conflict of interest.

When funding failures persist, the appropriate next step is often a return to court for enforcement or further directions.

The Bottom Line

A Parenting Coordinator’s boundaries are not barriers. They are the framework that allows the process to function fairly, neutrally, and within legal authority.

By being firm about process, a PC can remain even‑handed with people.

Parenting Coordinators are not rescuers. They are guardians of the process. When the process is protected, children have the best chance of experiencing stability and reduced conflict.

Written by Cori McGuire, a Parenting Coordinator with 28 years of family law experience in British Columbia. Cori has many other articles on the parenting coordination processincluding: How PCs Manage Conflict, When Co-operation Stops: How PCs Manage Conflict , When a Co-parent Obstructs, and when the process is failing and is in need of support from the court: When PC Agreements are Ignored and Secret Recordings. Further reading by subject is found in our Resource Library.