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No Kids in the Middle A Group-Based Interdisciplinary Protocol for High-Conflict Post-Divorce Families, from Legal and Psychiatric Perspectives-Video
Bogdan Pavlovici, Luminița Pavlovici ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This is a video presentation of the No Kids in the Middle (NKM) protocol, a group-based programme developed in the Netherlands for families in high-conflict post-divorce situations. It is described from the viewpoints of a family lawyer and a child psychiatrist. The programme runs eight sessions, with groups of six couples and a parallel children's group, each led by pairs of co-therapists. It also includes sessions with each parent's wider social network and treats parental conflict as a response to chronic stress rather than a character flaw. The document describes the approach and calls it clinically promising, but reports no evaluation results.
Key points
- Highly problematic post-divorce parental conflict is a growing clinical challenge with significant consequences for children's wellbeing.
- Conventional approaches such as individual child therapy, single-parent interventions and legal proceedings have shown limited efficacy.
- NKM engages groups of six couples in parallel with a children's group across eight sessions led by pairs of co-therapists.
- Parents and children are engaged at the same time, with dedicated sessions for each parent's wider social network.
- NKM reframes parental conflict behaviour as a neurobiological response to chronic stress rather than a volitional character deficit.
Limitations
The abstract describes the protocol but gives no outcome data, sample, or comparison group, so it cannot show whether the programme works. The claim that it is 'clinically promising' is not backed by evidence in the text provided.
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.