Have you ever had to share a car with someone, maybe a sibling? Or perhaps, like me as a teenager, you shared a car with a parent, picking it up as soon as they were done with it.

Anyone who has shared a car knows the drill. It rarely comes back with as much gas as you left it. The seat is in the wrong position. The mirrors are all off. Before you can even drive, you have to reset everything back to how you like it.

It’s annoying. It’s frustrating. But there’s not much to be done about it, because the other person has just as much right to that car as you do.

That is co-parenting. The kids are the car.

Every time you send your children off with the other parent, whether for a few hours, a weekend, or a full week, they come back different from how you sent them. Routines are off. Habits have shifted. And you spend time resetting things back to how they were before the exchange.

Part of you may wish you didn’t have to share at all. But the truth is, it is just as much their car as it is yours.

What makes this analogy work is not the surface-level annoyance of gas tanks and mirrors. It’s the deeper point: these are not “your kids.” They are your kids and also the other parent’s kids. You both own them. You both have access to them. But not at the same time.

You need the car when you need it, for the things you need to do. The other parent needs the car for their own time and their own purposes. You are not both driving at once, because that is not how it works. Children work the same way. Custody and parenting time are, by design, not simultaneous.

Sharing is inconvenient. Sharing means giving up full control. But in co-parenting, as with the car, the other person’s ownership is real, and the goal is not to eliminate the inconvenience. It’s to manage it well.