Parenting Together: A Parenting Intensive for Couples
Build a stronger parenting partnership—and a clearer path forward for your family.
Parenting asks couples to make hundreds of decisions together, often without ever having had the opportunity to step back and consider how they want to parent as a team.
Each partner brings different experiences, instincts, expectations, strengths, and concerns to parenting. Those differences aren't necessarily a problem. In fact, children can benefit from having parents who relate to them differently.
But when parents don't have a shared framework for navigating those differences, parenting can become a significant source of stress within the relationship.
Parenting Together is a focused, short-term intensive designed to help couples better understand their parenting dynamic, work through areas of disagreement, and develop a thoughtful and practical approach to parenting together.
This service is designed for couples who are raising children together and want dedicated time and professional guidance to strengthen the way they function as a parenting team.
Parenting changes as children change.
There isn't one stage of family life when couples need to figure out how to parent together.
For some couples, these conversations begin before their first child arrives. Becoming parents can fundamentally change a relationship—bringing new responsibilities, expectations, identities, and decisions that couples may never have needed to navigate before.
For others, the need emerges later.
A preschooler may require parents to think differently about limits and emotional regulation. School-age children introduce new questions about independence, responsibilities, activities, technology, and discipline. Adolescence brings another significant shift as parents balance connection and authority while allowing increasing autonomy.
Families may also encounter circumstances they hadn't anticipated: a child who struggles emotionally or behaviorally, differences in temperament, neurodivergence, school difficulties, sibling dynamics, changes in family circumstances, or simply the realization that strategies that once worked no longer do.
Parenting Together gives couples a place to step out of the day-to-day demands of family life and look intentionally at the larger parenting system they are creating.
You don't have to parent identically to parent well together.
The goal of this work isn't to determine which parent has the "right" approach.
One parent may naturally emphasize flexibility while another values structure. One may respond quickly to a child's distress while the other instinctively encourages independence. Partners may have very different beliefs about consequences, responsibilities, technology, academics, activities, or how much freedom is appropriate at a particular age.
Often, these differences make sense when we understand the experiences, values, fears, and hopes underneath them.
Rather than trying to eliminate those differences, we work to understand them—and to develop enough shared ground that parents can respond thoughtfully instead of repeatedly becoming stuck in the same disagreements.
That may include exploring:
differences in parenting styles and expectations
discipline, boundaries, and consequences
emotional regulation and challenging behavior
balancing connection, limits, and independence
differences rooted in each parent's own upbringing
division of parenting responsibilities and the mental load
screens, technology, school, activities, and routines
supporting children with different temperaments or needs
parenting through adolescence and increasing independence
disagreements about when to step in and when to step back
how parents communicate when they disagree
repairing after difficult parenting moments
creating greater consistency without requiring parents to be identical
The specific work is shaped around your children, your relationship, and the challenges your family is actually facing.
A focused alternative to open-ended therapy
Parenting Together is structured differently from traditional weekly couples therapy.
It is a defined process that allows us to take a concentrated look at your parenting partnership, understand the patterns contributing to difficulty, and translate that understanding into practical decisions for your family.
The process includes an initial assessment of your parenting concerns and goals, individual conversations with each partner, an extended Parenting Together working session, and the development of an individualized Parenting Together Framework.
We then meet to review and refine the framework together before you begin implementing it at home. A follow-up session allows us to evaluate what is working, address what isn't, and make adjustments as needed.
Additional sessions can be scheduled when helpful, particularly as children grow or families encounter new developmental stages and challenges.
Your Parenting Together Framework
Families rarely need another list of generic parenting advice.
The goal of this process is to develop a framework that makes sense for your family.
Your Parenting Together Framework brings together what we learn throughout the intensive and translates it into a practical guide for moving forward. Depending on your family's needs, it may address shared parenting priorities, recurring areas of disagreement, child-specific considerations, approaches to limits and discipline, communication between parents, family routines, or agreed-upon strategies for particularly challenging situations.
The framework isn't intended to dictate every parenting decision or eliminate the flexibility families need.
Instead, it gives you a shared foundation to return to when parenting becomes complicated.
Who is Parenting Together for?
Parenting Together is for couples who are currently raising—or preparing to raise—children together and want to strengthen their parenting partnership.
You do not need to be in crisis to benefit from this work.
Some couples come because parenting disagreements have begun affecting their relationship. Others are navigating a particularly challenging stage with one of their children. Some want support making several important parenting decisions. And some simply recognize that they have spent years responding to parenting demands as they arise without ever intentionally developing a shared approach.
The intensive can be useful for couples preparing for their first child, parents of young children, families navigating the school-age years, parents of adolescents and teens, and couples parenting children with different developmental, emotional, or behavioral needs.
This is not a custody evaluation, parenting coordination, or a process for determining which parent is "right." It is collaborative work for couples who want to function more effectively as partners in raising their children.
An approach grounded in relationships, development, and practical problem-solving
My work with parenting couples draws from nearly two decades of experience working with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families.
I am trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples and am a certified Gottman Bringing Baby Home provider. My background also includes extensive work with adolescents and teens, family relationships, restorative practices, conflict resolution, and supporting families through developmental and relational transitions.
That combination matters in parenting work.
A parenting disagreement is rarely only about the rule being discussed. It exists within a couple relationship, a child's developmental needs, each parent's history and values, and the larger family system.
Parenting Together allows us to consider all of those pieces while remaining focused on a practical question:
How do you want to parent these children, together?
Getting Started
Parenting Together begins with a brief consultation so we can talk about what is bringing you in, what you hope to accomplish, and whether this intensive is the right fit for your family.
Interested in Parenting Together?
Contact me to schedule a brief consultation and learn more about the intensive.