The conduct of everyday life in cooperative co-parenting: Reconfigurations after divorce

This article explores cooperative co-parenting in the wake of divorce, focusing on how parents experience and negotiate everyday family life across two households. While much research on divorce has concentrated on children’s outcomes or on measuring parental conflict, less attention has been given to parents’ first-person perspectives on what it means to co-parent in practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 14 Danish parents from eight dual-residence families, the article examines how parents organize routines, responsibilities, and relationships after divorce. The analysis is guided by the critical psychological concept of the conduct of everyday life and Axel’s notion of conflictual cooperation (2009, 2020), highlighting how cooperation and conflict are inseparably intertwined in co-parenting practices. Through three case narratives, the study shows how parents navigate dilemmas of continuity, difference, and recognition, and how emotions such as frustration, grief, or pride function as evaluative tools in this process. Cooperative co-parenting emerges not as a conflict-free condition, but as an ongoing, contested, and emotionally charged accomplishment. The article contributes to divorce and family research by foregrounding parents’ own perspectives on shared parenting, offering a practice- and subject-oriented understanding of how cooperative co-parenting is lived, struggled with, and sustained in everyday life.