Single parenting is already a challenge. Coordinated Co-Parenting and conscious co parenting help both the parents to sort out the parenthood demands. However, things become much tougher when any of the co partners harass or disturb the natural momentum.

Harassment involves any intentional effort to cause emotional distress.

Harassment, in any form, not only disturbs the Co partner, but kids as well. Before understanding the effects of harassment, it’s necessary to understand what is actually considered harassment by a co parent?

It can be of two types:

•Harassing your kid

•Harassing your Co-Partner

Harassing your kid:

Co partners can harass their kids too. It’s usually associated with conflicted Co-parenting or when parents are not satisfied with their child’s decisions.

When parents consider their child a compulsion to meet their ex-partner as a co-parent, they blame the kid for that. This frustration is released on kids by either of the parents.

Harassment by a Co Parent (Mothers harassing Kid):

Usually when parents are divorced or separated, children choose their mothers. Mothers are more attached to kids emotionally. Mothers want to stay with kids as kids are brought up by them from birth to feeding and raising up. 

Chaos is created when kids choose father over mother for any unexpressed reason, usually when mother is narcissist or ignorant towards her kid. Such circumstances disturb mothers a lot. Mothers emotionally bomb the kid for not choosing her. 

It can be in several ways:

1. Mothers blackmailing and gas lighting kids is a type of emotional harassment. Such kids remain in guilt and can’t live peacefully with their father.

2. Mothers try to poke their nose in kid’s personal lives. Such gestures disturb children’s normal functioning.

3. Stalking a kid to where he/she goes. Usually trying to meet a kid secretly at school hours or creating awkward situations in public by crying, sobbing, screaming or blaming the kid.

4. Texting or calling excessively, mentally torturing the kid is also a form of harassment.

Harassment by a Co Parent (Harassment by Father):

 1. Co-parenting where fathers take charge of a kid’s financial necessities, such harassment is common. Such fathers scream and shout at the kids for their low grades, malfunctioning at school etc.

2. The common harassment by fathers is when children don’t come up to their expectations in academic or social life. 

3. Harassment involves bullying, physical abuse, emotional-abuse, mental torture by stalking, texting and calling. Kids who grow up in harassing environments lose self-worth and cannot cope up with the environment.

Harassing your Co-Partner:

Co-parent harassment is among the most common types of harassment associated with Co-Parenting.

When both of the parents are already going through the difficult decision of divorce or separation, child custody and disputed parenting opens the door for co-parenting harassments.

Co-parent harassment is any pressure or emotional distress, intentionally created by repetitive bullying to depress the other co-parent.

It’s of two types:

Harassment by male Co-Partner 

Harassment by narcissistic female Co-Partner 

Harassment by narcissistic female Co-Partner:

It’s when narcissistic female Co-Partners cannot accept the love of a child for his/her father. It includes:

1. Aggressive reaction each time the father wants to meet the child. 

2. Threatening Co-Partner unnecessarily. 

3. Texting/calling for financial support even when the financial responsibilities are fulfilled.

4. Creating mayhem in public.

5. Using abusive language in front of kids to humiliate your ex-partner.

6. Unlawfully concealing your kid from the other partner.

7. Raising criticism for inability to be a good father.

Harassment by Male Co-Partner:

Harassment by Male parents is usually common in Asian countries, where patriarchy is common. Fathers who can’t move on from their broken marriage are unable to figure out how to play an effective role in conscious Co-Parenting. Such parents use physical force, power of dominance and the social card of being the eldest one to humiliate their female co-parent.

Usually it is in the form of:

1. Physical abuse even after divorce.

2. Constantly threatening charges.

3. Threatening to kidnap a child from school.

4. Constantly calling at their workplace and sending unpleasant messages.

5. Humiliating in public.

6. Threatening to stop financial aid.

7. Criticism on motherhood.

8. Blaming female co-Parent for the past.

9. Speaking ill to the kid about mother.

10. Stalking. 

11. Trying to take control of a kid’s life. 

7 Effects of Co-Parenting Harassment:

In the personal differences of co-parents, the main sufferer is the kid.  Kids of broken marriages or single parenting are usually suffering behavioural problems. Harassment promotes such effects.

Following are 7 effects of Co-Parenting Harassment:

1. Kids become what they learn from parents. When a co-parent is harassing the family, kids adopt being either of the parents. Usually kids go for the toxic partner in power.

2. Such kids cannot maintain Healthy relationships for their life. Psychological malfunction is a common trauma response in terms of new relationship management.

3. Children going through disputed parenting are the major survivors of Bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, Borderline personality disorder, anxiety and depression.

4. Co-parenting harassment causes Parental Alienation syndrome: syndrome where a child completely hates the other parent due to constant brainwashing of the dominant parent. 

5. Low self-esteem and self-hate is common among such children. 

6. The harassed parents cannot make life decisions and don’t have the liberty to live life after divorce. 

7. New relationships are difficult for both parents and kids.