One Saturday a month,
and no plan for what’s next.
Changing it means a fight about who is right.
There is a third option between hoping and hiring a lawyer: a written path both of you agree to in advance. Family court professionals have used it for years. Most parents have never been shown it.
Three parts and the hardest one happens before you meet
One session three hours, virtual, usually within a week
In writing yours to file if you choose to
$995 per person, flat. No hourly billing.
★★★★★ 4.9 · 283+ Google reviews
What it replaces
Deciding in the moment
How it works · the process
A neutral and a room will not break this.
A process built for this exact deadlock will.
Anyone can put two people in a room and ask them to be reasonable. That is not the part that is failing you. What is failing you is that this particular argument has no honest answer in the room where it keeps getting had — so the work is in the order things happen, and almost all of it happens before the session.
That is the difference between this and most mediation you could book for it. Not a different person in the chair. A different sequence.
Three parts, and the order is the whole trick.
I meet with each of you. Separately.
Not a formality and not an intake form. Two sets of questions. The first set is the one nobody asks you: what are you most afraid of here, what would you actually say yes to, what is this really about for you. The second set is the practical one, and both of you get it in the same words — what kind of accountability would be acceptable to you, and what kind would not be.
Why it is in this order
People say true things one-on-one that they will not say across a table from their co-parent. Finding both of your edges before anyone has to defend one out loud is most of why the joint session works.
Written homework, built from what each of you said.
After I have met with you both, you each get a written inventory — specific questions, written for your situation, that put the hard parts on paper before anybody is in a room together. It is where the first draft of the ladder actually comes from.
Why it is in this order
So that when the hardest question comes up in the session, neither of you is hearing it for the first time. I want you to have already thought about it, on your own time, without an audience.
One three-hour session. Virtual, usually within a week.
Two goals, in order. Build the ladder: the rungs, how long each one runs, what triggers a step up, what triggers a step down. Then put it in writing, in a form you can file with the court if you choose to. If it gets hot, we caucus — each of you in a separate room and I go back and forth.
Why it is in this order
The written document is the point. A verbal understanding between two people who disagree about substance use is not a plan, it is a rematch with a delay on it.
Want to see the ladder itself before you talk to anybody? The written guide is free — the five rungs, the relapse plan, and what a drug test can and cannot tell you.
The fight you are actually having
Stop negotiating the number. Negotiate the path.
One Saturday a month. Every other weekend. Fifty-fifty. That argument has no honest answer right now, and the reason is not that one of you is being unreasonable. It is that the right amount of time six months from now depends on things neither of you knows yet.
So you stop picking a number and pick a path instead: a series of steps, written down in advance, each one with a clear answer to what has to be true before we take the next one. Nobody has to be judged. Nobody has to be trusted on faith. The plan does the arguing you were going to have to do yourselves.
A step is not a reward, and a step back is not a punishment. It is not about what anyone has earned. It is about what your child can count on.
And the small start costs less than it looks like it does. A meta-analysis of 63 studies found that how often children saw a nonresident father did not predict how those children turned out. What predicted it was closeness and steady, engaged parenting. A schedule that actually happens is worth more to a child than a bigger one that doesn’t.
Where this always gets stuck
One of you wants a mechanism. The other wants an end date.
The parent asked to test hears
“If I have to prove myself every week forever, you have already decided who I am. And nobody has told me when it stops.”
The parent asking hears
“I am not trying to punish anyone. I need something other than my own guesswork standing between my kid and a bad day.”
Both of those are reasonable, which is exactly why arguing about it does not end it. It ends in one of two places. A court decides, on its own timeline, and hands down a version at least one of you was never going to accept. Or the two of you build the terms yourselves, in an order designed for this specific disagreement.
I do not decide who is right about testing. I do not have that power and would not want it. What I have is a process that gets it answered by the two of you, with the hardest part done before you are ever in the same room.
The three things that split the difference
- 01
Monitoring attaches to a rung, not to a person.
It has a start, a defined scope, and a written end date. It is not a standing judgment about anyone’s character — it is the specific cost of a specific step, and when that step is done being new, it comes off. That end date is written down on the same day as everything else.
- 02
Every check has a payoff attached.
Meeting it does not merely avoid a step down. It triggers a step up, on a date, automatically, with nobody having to ask. Accountability with nothing on the other end of it is surveillance. Accountability wired to an automatic step up is a receipt — it is the mechanism that gives time back.
- 03
Both directions get written by both of you.
The trigger to step down and the trigger to step up live on the same page, agreed on the same day, by two people who each already said out loud — separately, to me, before this conversation — what they could and could not live with. Neither of you is handed someone else’s terms.
What is in the guide
Five steps, and the order is not arbitrary.
A step-up plan “is typically required” in cases like this one, according to the same guidebook — with advancement tied to objective criteria rather than the calendar, and overnights added last. Here is the shape of it. Your family’s version will differ in the details and not much in the sequence.
01
Where almost everyone starts
Short, same day, same time, in public
A couple of hours in a place your child already likes, at the identical hour every week, with the handoff at a neutral spot rather than your front door. Plus one scheduled call on a fixed day. The parent in recovery does not drive at this step. It looks small on paper. It is the step that produces the thing everything else is built on, which is a record of showing up.
02
After the first step holds
Longer, and the child sees where their parent lives
The visit stretches to a half day, and the child begins spending daytime hours in the other home — short, in daylight, with a second adult there. A first overnight in a room a child has never seen is asking a great deal of them. This step exists so that room stops being unfamiliar before anyone sleeps in it.
03
Mornings before evenings, deliberately
A full day, ending before bedtime
Morning through evening, home before bed. Family court guidance builds these plans so the earlier, lower-risk stretch of the day comes first and the late hours are the last thing added. Not because evenings are forbidden, but because they are the part of the day where a hard afternoon has had time to become something else.
04
The step people rush and shouldn't
First overnights, one at a time
One overnight a month before every other week. Same bed, same room, same bedtime routine, written down and matched to the other house as closely as you can manage. Every overnight on a calendar the child can see in advance, with no surprise additions — including good ones.
05
What you were arguing about at the start
A regular schedule
Every-other-week overnights, extending as it holds. Holidays, school breaks, and summer get decided here, at the point where both of you have real information instead of a forecast. This is the number you could not agree on in month one. By the time you arrive, it is usually not a fight anymore.
Going back a step is part of the ladder, not the end of it. If something is not working — for any reason, including your child struggling with it — you return to the last step that worked, hold there, and try again. Nobody has to prove anybody is a bad parent to do that. Writing it down now is the whole point.
The chapter nobody expects
A drug test cannot tell you whether Saturday is safe.
This is the thing both parents get wrong, in opposite directions. One of you thinks a test would finally settle it. The other is certain a test is a setup. The guidebook says it flatly: drug testing “often does not make sense for determining if a particular visit should occur.”
Cannabis makes it worse rather than better. It is fat-soluble, so chronic users can test positive for weeks — up to three months — after their last use, and the level in a sample cannot be worked backward to a dose. A positive result proves almost nothing about a specific Saturday morning.
There are tools that speak to a defined block of time, and the guide names them. But for the question the plan actually has to answer — is this parent okay today, right now, with this child — the honest answer is a sober adult present at the handoff, and a rule both of you agreed to in writing about what happens if the answer is no.
The most protective line in the whole plan
Make telling the truth the cheapest thing anyone can do.
“I shouldn’t be the responsible adult today.”
Said early — before a handoff, before anything has gone wrong — that sentence is the most useful thing either of you will hear all month. So the plan decides in advance what it costs. Not what I think it should cost. What the two of you agree it costs, written down on a day when nobody is frightened.
Whatever you land on, land on it together and land on it early. A price set on a calm day is the only version of this that either of you will still trust at ten at night.
Most people who work this through end up drawing some distinction between a lapse someone reports and a longer one they conceal. Whether you draw it, and where, is a conversation the two of you have. My job is to make sure it is a conversation and not a surprise.
What it buys each of you
The parent doing the worrying stops being the sole judge, in the moment, of whether something is wrong — and stops wondering whether raising it makes them the bad guy.
The parent in recovery stops fearing that one bad week erases everything. There is a written way back, agreed to before anyone needed it.
The price
$995
Per person. Flat. All three parts.
Your individual meeting, your written inventory, and the three-hour session together. Each of you pays your own half, which is deliberate — a neutral paid by one parent is not a neutral. No hourly billing, no retainer, no invoice you did not see coming.
What this is not
- Not legal advice. I am a mediator and I represent neither of you. I do not give legal advice and I do not draft or file court documents. What we make is yours to take to an attorney.
- Not treatment. No diagnosis, no clinical opinion, and no substitute for a treatment team. Recovery decisions belong to the people providing care.
- Not a safety plan. If there is active untreated use, coercion, or danger to a child, this is not the document you need first.
- Not a verdict on anyone. The structure exists precisely so that neither parent has to be declared good or bad for it to work.
Need something sooner?
Reach out anytime by text.
It comes to me, not to a front desk. Plenty of people start with one question they did not want to put in a form, and a fair number of those questions get answered without booking anything.
Text (763) 316-8323Still working out the agreement itself? Post-decree mediation or co-parenting mediation.
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“Ryan's calmness, casual approach, insights, and cohesiveness throughout the session helped us get through very difficult topics. I was relieved to find someone who spoke to us and for us.”
— David H.
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Fair questions
The ones people actually ask.
I am the one being asked to test. Why would I agree to this?
Because the alternative on offer is usually worse for you. A court can impose monitoring with no end date and no step-up attached, and often does. In this process you say what is and is not acceptable to you before anyone is in a room together, anything agreed to has a written end, and every check is wired to a step up rather than only to a step down. You are not being asked to submit to something. You are being asked to help write it.
I am the one asking. Why would I settle for less than a court order?
You would not be settling for less. A court order gives you enforcement and takes about a year to modify. What you build here is more specific than a court usually gets — an actual schedule with named triggers in both directions — and you can take the written agreement to your attorney and have it filed. The tradeoff is real and it runs the other way: this is faster, cheaper, and it produces terms the other parent helped write, which is the single best predictor of whether they get followed.
What does it cost?
$995 per person, flat, for the whole process — the individual meetings, the written inventory, and the three-hour session. No hourly billing and no retainer. The 15-minute consultation is free and nothing gets signed on it.
One of us is still using. Is it too early for this?
Possibly. If there is active untreated use, coercion, or a safety concern, mediation is not the first call and I will tell you that on the free call rather than taking your money. This process assumes both people can participate voluntarily and that recovery supports are in place or being put in place.
Is this legal advice? Can we file what we make?
It is not legal advice. I am a mediator — I do not represent either of you, I do not give legal advice, and I do not draft or file court documents. What comes out of the session is a written agreement between the two of you. Most people take it to an attorney to review and file, and they walk in far more organized than they started.
What if we get stuck in the session?
Then we caucus. Each of you goes to a separate room and I move between them, which is often where the actual movement happens. Most people finish both goals — the ladder and the written version of it — inside the three hours. If you do not, you will still leave with far more settled than you walked in with.
Where does the structure come from?
The step-up framework follows Substance Use and Parenting: Best Practices for Family Court Practitioners, published by AFCC Massachusetts in 2021 and edited by Stephanie Tabashneck, Psy.D., Esq. It is the guidebook written for the professionals who handle these cases, it names the underlying studies, and it is free to read.
One more thing worth knowing
About one in eight children lives with a parent who has a substance use disorder. Kids in this situation almost universally believe they caused it and that they are the only one it is happening to. Neither is true, and the guide includes the four sentences they most need to hear.
Almost nobody buys something like this because of a statistic. They buy it because of a specific morning they can already picture and have not said out loud to anyone.
A parking lot at nine on a Saturday. Two engines running. One of you is walking over, the other is watching them come, and there is a kid in the back seat reading both of your faces at once.
Whatever happens next, neither of you agreed to it beforehand.
Neither of you has to go first.
Fifteen minutes, no card, and you can be on the call by yourself. If this is not the right process for your family, you will hear that from me on the call.
Book a Free 15-Minute CallNot ready to talk? Text (763) 316-8323 instead.