No Kids in the Middle: A Group-Based Interdisciplinary Protocol for High-Conflict Post-Divorce Families, from Legal and Psychiatric Perspectives

Abstract

Highly problematic post-divorce parental conflict represents a growing clinical challenge, with significant consequences for the child’s wellbeing. Conventional approaches, which includes individual child therapy, single-parent interventions, and legal proceedings, have shown limited efficacy, in part because they fail to address the systemic and neurobiological dimensions of the most problematic of conflicts. This paper presents the No Kids in the Middle (NKM) protocol - a structured, group-based interdisciplinary intervention developed in the Netherlands for families embedded in high-conflict post-divorce situations, from the complementary perspectives of a family lawyer and a child psychiatrist. The NKM protocol engages groups of six couples in parallel with a children's group, led by pairs of co-therapists, across a structured sequence of eight sessions. Key features include the simultaneous engagement of parents and children, dedicated sessions with each parent's wider social network, an explicitly experiential therapeutic approach, and a systemic reframing of parental conflict behaviour as a neurobiological response to chronic stress rather than a volitional character deficit. The NKM approach offers a coherent and clinically promising response to a population subgroup that consistently overwhelms conventional professional frameworks. Its interdisciplinary applicability spans psychiatry, social work, law, and education, and makes it particularly suited to the systemic nature of the problem it addresses.