The Eleventh Judicial Circuit’s Family Court Services unit lists co-parenting among its no-cost in-house services. Its own FAQ says the referral order specifies that all communications with the unit are not confidential, and that the unit reports to the Court on completion of the intervention. That is not a criticism of the unit. It is the unit’s job, and it is written down where anyone can read it.
Private co-parenting counseling runs on the opposite rule. What you say to a licensed psychotherapist is privileged under Fla. Stat. 90.503, and the privilege has three exceptions.
Pick the wrong room and you learn the difference from a transcript.
We are a Palm Beach County and Broward practice. Our closest office to Miami-Dade is Fort Lauderdale, on West Cypress Creek Road. Licensed therapists deliver the counseling. A licensed forensic psychologist reviews the clinical framing, because roughly three quarters of her practice is court work and she knows what a family law file does with a sentence.
Three Ways To Get Co-parenting Help In Miami-Dade, And What Each One Does With What You Say
The services look interchangeable from outside. The confidentiality rules are not.
| Family Court Services co-parenting | Parenting coordination, Fla. Stat. 61.125 | Private co-parenting counseling | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who provides it | Eleventh Circuit staff, in-house | A qualified coordinator from the circuit’s roster, or a private one | A licensed psychotherapist you choose |
| How you get in | Court order, then contact the unit | Court appointment on agreement, the court’s own motion, or a party’s motion | You call and book |
| Cost | No cost | Court decides how fees are split; available through Family Court Services without cost for indigent parents when available | Private fee |
| Confidential | No. The unit reports to the Court on completion, or as necessary | Yes, by statute. Subsection (8) makes sessions confidential, with a closed list of exceptions | Yes, privileged under Fla. Stat. 90.503, subject to three exceptions |
| Can the provider recommend to the judge | The unit reports | The coordinator may make recommendations, and limited decisions only with prior approval of both parents and the court | No. A treating therapist is not the court’s evaluator |
| Volume | Short term. The unit describes its own co-parenting service as short-term re-education, with referrals out to community providers for counseling | 6 meetings per order, as published for the indigent parenting coordination track | As clinically indicated |
| Domestic violence | Cases with an active injunction are not referred for joint counseling or co-parenting | The court may not refer where there is a history of domestic violence unless both parents consent, freely and voluntarily | Screened case by case; joint sessions are often contraindicated |
Read the confidentiality row twice. It is the row that decides which service you want.
If your goal is to stop a specific fight from recurring and you do not care who knows, the free court option is efficient and you should use it. If your goal is to work on your own contribution to the conflict without that work becoming an exhibit, you want privilege, and privilege is not what the court unit sells.
The two privilege exceptions court-involved parents walk into
Fla. Stat. 90.503(4) removes the psychotherapist-patient privilege in three situations. Two of them come up constantly in family court.
A court-ordered examination. The statute excepts “communications made in the course of a court-ordered examination of the mental or emotional condition of the patient.” If a judge orders an evaluation, that evaluation is not privileged. This is one reason the evaluator and the therapist should never be the same person.
Putting your own mental condition in issue. The privilege also does not cover “communications relevant to an issue of the mental or emotional condition of the patient in any proceeding in which the patient relies upon the condition as an element of his or her claim or defense.” Argue that your anxiety or your recovery explains your parenting, and you may have opened your own treatment records.
The third exception concerns communications relevant to compulsory hospitalization proceedings.
None of this means avoid therapy. It means know which conversations are protected before you have them, and tell your lawyer you are in counseling.
Use The Free Court Option First If It Fits, And Here Is When It Does Not
Family Court Services costs nothing and it works for a defined set of problems. We will tell you to call them.
Their in-house menu is specific: alienation, child and family assistance, co-parenting, crisis assistance, marital reconciliation, parenting coordination, reunification, time-sharing, and supervised visitation or monitored exchanges. The unit sits in the Lawson E. Thomas Courthouse Center at 175 N.W. 1st Avenue, Suite 1503, Miami, and its number is (305) 349-5508.
Read what the unit says its co-parenting service actually is, because the label is doing more work than the service. The circuit describes it as “short term parenting coordination and re-education that emphasizes improvement of joint parenting skills and communication,” and adds that “referrals to community agencies/professionals for counseling may be provided.” Short-term re-education, with a referral out if you need counseling.
The no-cost part has a boundary too. The unit’s own answer on fees: “Although there are no fees for intervention provided directly by Family Court Services, there may be fees for services referred outside of the Unit.” In-house is free. What they refer you to is not necessarily.
Four constraints matter before you count on it.
You need a court order. The unit states that a court order is necessary to obtain its assistance. No order, no access. If nothing has been filed, this route is closed to you today.
You have five working days. In the unit’s words, “the parties are required to contact the Unit within 5 working days for the provision of initial data or the court will be noticed of non-compliance.” That notice lands in the same file the judge reads when deciding time-sharing.
An active domestic violence injunction closes the door. The unit’s own rule: cases with active domestic violence injunctions are not to be referred for joint counseling or co-parenting. Parallel to that, Fla. Stat. 61.125(4) bars the court from referring parties to parenting coordination where there has been a history of domestic violence unless both parents consent, and the court must give each party the chance to consult an attorney or advocate and satisfy itself that consent was freely and voluntarily given.
If an injunction is in place, joint co-parenting work is not the next step. Individual work, structured written communication, and a parallel parenting protocol are. We say so on the first call, and it occasionally ends the call.
How you co-parent is already evidence, and Florida names it factor by factor
Fla. Stat. 61.13(3) lists 20 lettered best-interest factors, from (a) to (t). At least six of them are measurements of co-parenting behavior rather than parenting quality.
Read them as a judge reads them:
(a) “The demonstrated capacity and disposition of each parent to facilitate and encourage a close and continuing parent-child relationship, to honor the time-sharing schedule, and to be reasonable when changes are required.”
(c) “The demonstrated capacity and disposition of each parent to determine, consider, and act upon the needs of the child as opposed to the needs or desires of the parent.”
(j) Knowing your child’s friends, teachers, medical care providers, daily activities and favorite things.
(k) Providing a consistent routine: discipline, homework, meals, bedtime.
(l) “The demonstrated capacity of each parent to communicate with and keep the other parent informed of issues and activities regarding the minor child, and the willingness of each parent to adopt a unified front on all major issues when dealing with the child.”
(r) Protecting the child from the litigation, “as demonstrated by not discussing the litigation with the child, not sharing documents or electronic media related to the litigation with the child, and refraining from disparaging comments about the other parent to the child.”
Notice the repeated word. Demonstrated. Six times across those factors the statute asks for evidence of conduct, not for a statement of intent.
That reframes what co-parenting counseling is for. It is skills work, and the skills happen to be the exact behaviors the statute measures: honoring the schedule, being reasonable when a change is needed, keeping the other parent informed, keeping the child out of it. Do the work and you improve your child’s life. You also build a record. Those are the same activity.
We are psychologists, not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice about your case. Your attorney decides what goes in front of the judge.
On 1 July 2023 Florida Made 50/50 The Starting Point And Lowered The Bar To Change It
Two things happened in one bill, and together they changed what co-parenting has to accomplish.
Chapter 2023-301, effective 1 July 2023, wrote a presumption into Fla. Stat. 61.13(2)(c)1.: “Unless otherwise provided in this section or agreed to by the parties, there is a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing of a minor child is in the best interests of the minor child. To rebut this presumption, a party must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that equal time-sharing is not in the best interests of the minor child.”
Preponderance. The lightest civil standard Florida uses.
The same law did something less discussed. Before July 2023, a parent seeking modification had to show a change in circumstances that was substantial, material and unanticipated. The Legislature’s own final analysis of CS/HB 1301 records that the bill removed the unanticipated requirement. Substantial and material survives. Unforeseeable does not.
Put those together. The default is equal time between two people whose relationship ended, and the door to changing that arrangement opens more easily than it did three years ago. Neither parent gets to opt out of the joint operation, and the operation’s performance is more usable in court on both sides.
The presumption does not reopen a plan you signed before it existed
A common misreading, and an expensive one.
The Florida Bar Journal’s analysis concludes the 2023 amendment should not apply retroactively to modification proceedings involving plans finalized before its effective date, reading Hahn v. Hahn (Fla. 4th DCA 2010), Bachman v. McLinn (Fla. 2d DCA 2011) and Malchiodi v. Malchiodi (Fla. 3d DCA 1983) together. It also notes that a change in the law alone is unlikely to satisfy the burden of showing a substantial change in circumstances.
Translated: “the law changed” is not your substantial change. A documented pattern in how the two of you have actually operated might be.
What did not change in 2026, despite what you have read
CS/SB 1128 would have required a motion to enforce an existing time-sharing order to be heard within five business days, by the assigned judge or a duty judge, with hearings permitted at night and on weekends.
It died in the Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice on 13 March 2026, with no floor vote in either chamber. A similar House bill, H 971, died in the Civil Justice and Claims Subcommittee the same day. The 1 July 2026 effective date printed in the bill analysis never took effect.
Several “Florida family law changes in 2026” articles circulating now describe that faster enforcement track as if it exists. It does not. Enforcement still moves at ordinary family docket speed, which is the practical argument for fixing a recurring handoff problem in a counseling room rather than by motion.
When co-parenting counseling is the wrong tool
Joint sessions need two people who can be in a room without escalating. Some pairs cannot, and putting them in one anyway makes things worse.
Here is the position, stated plainly because most pages in this market will not state it: a high-conflict pair should not start with joint co-parenting counseling. They should start with a parallel parenting structure, and joint work becomes possible later or not at all.
Parallel parenting cuts the number of decisions that require agreement. Fixed handoff locations and times. Written communication through one channel. Each household running its own routine inside agreed boundaries on schooling, medical care and religion. No renegotiation at the door. It looks like a lower ambition than cooperative co-parenting, and for a subset of families it is the arrangement that actually protects the child.
We decline joint work in four situations, and we say so on the first call rather than after payment clears:
An active domestic violence injunction. Joint sessions are contraindicated, and the court’s own unit will not take these referrals for joint work either.
One parent wants a report, not counseling. If you need an opinion for the court, that is an evaluation, a different engagement with a different provider.
We already evaluated your family, or we might. The APA’s Guidelines for Child Custody Evaluations in Family Law Proceedings, adopted 21 February 2009, name both directions as multiple relationships at Guideline 7: conducting a custody evaluation with a current or prior psychotherapy client, and conducting psychotherapy with a current or prior custody examinee. Those guidelines carried a stated ten-year expiry, so treat them as the profession’s clearest published statement on the point rather than as a live rule. We keep the roles separate either way. If you need both, you need two providers.
Untreated substance dependence or acute psychiatric instability in one parent. Co-parenting skills work does not land on top of an untreated condition. That parent needs individual treatment first, and we will say which kind.
What The Sessions Actually Cover
Six work areas. Which ones you get depends on what is breaking.
The handoff. Most recurring conflict in separated families is not about values. It is about a specific twenty-minute window on a specific day. We map the actual failures, then rebuild the transition with fixed times, fixed locations, and no renegotiation in front of the child.
One channel, in writing. Verbal agreements between co-parents in conflict produce two sincere versions of the same conversation. Scheduling and logistics move into a single written channel with response times both parents can meet.
Decision categories. Three buckets: what each household decides alone, what requires notice, what requires agreement. Most parents fight because the buckets were never drawn.
Keeping the child out of the middle. Message-carrying, information-gathering, disparagement, letting a child overhear the case. Factor (r) is the statute’s version. The clinical version is that children who carry messages between parents show it.
Consistency where it counts. Bedtime, homework, screens, discipline. Symmetry between two households is neither achievable nor necessary. Agreement on a short list is.
Your own contribution. The part nobody books counseling for. Each parent has a pattern that reliably escalates the other. Naming yours is the work that changes the system, and it is the work privilege exists to protect.
Three things this is not
Not the parenting class the court requires. Fla. Stat. 61.21 requires the four-hour Parent Education and Family Stabilization Course before final judgment. Counseling does not satisfy it. Details in the FAQ.
Not a social investigation. Under Fla. Stat. 61.20 an impartial mental health professional conducts a home study and writes a report on the children’s best interests. In Miami-Dade that report goes through Family Court Services to the judge, the parties, their attorneys, and any guardian ad litem. That is an evaluation with an audience. Counseling is treatment.
Not a custody evaluation, and not parenting coordination. Different question, different method, different provider. Per the APA guideline discussed above, it should not be the same person.
Talk To Someone About Your Co-parenting Situation
Tell us three things: whether a case is filed, whether an order sends you to counseling, and which specific handoff or decision keeps failing. We will tell you which of the three services fits, including when the free court option fits better than ours.