Episode Details

Mediation keeps getting written into parenting plans as the step you take before going back to court, and it keeps getting dismissed by people whose ex has never cooperated with anything. Barb Hughson's position is that a signed agreement is not the only useful outcome. Sometimes the conversation itself, and the more specific language that comes out of it, is what changes the next two years.

Barb Hughson is a family mediator based in Colorado. Before that she spent more than twenty-five years as a family and child therapist, in both Colorado and New York, working with kids whose parents were separating. For close to two decades she has taught Colorado's mandatory parenting classes for judicial districts around the state, and she also does parent coaching, including one-on-one work with a single parent when the other one refuses to mediate at all. She is a returning guest on the show and a colleague Chris and Lisa knew before Been There Got Out existed.

Barb and Lisa work through the terms that reduce contact rather than manufacture more of it: a fixed monthly figure for extracurriculars so nobody has to ask permission or chase receipts, handoffs at school so the two parents never stand in the same place, and a written split of who attends which event. Barb explains why she keeps attorneys out of mediation, and why shuttle mediation, with each party in a separate room, tends to widen the divide it is supposed to manage. She works in two-hour blocks and describes what people come back with after a week to think, compared with what they sign at hour seven of a marathon session.

The other half of the episode is about children being heard. Barb describes meeting each child in a family separately before a summer schedule was set, and the parents agreeing in advance to go with what the kids told her. She talks about a sixteen-year-old who wanted to read his own letter to a judge, and the questions she asked him instead of editing it. Lisa raises what happens when someone has already signed an agreement under pressure, and Barb answers with the thing you can actually say in the moment. The last stretch is about your own regulation, including Dan Siegel's flipped-lid model, and why decisions made while you are flooded tend to be the ones you live with for years.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why mediation can still be worth it when your ex has no interest in cooperating
• Terms that reduce contact instead of creating it: fixed monthly amounts, school exchanges, split events
• Why a day-long mediation backfires, and what two hours plus a week to think produces
• How a child's own preferences can reach a parenting plan without a custody evaluator
• What makes an agreement durable, and why the schedule can differ child by child
• What to do when you signed under pressure, and how to ask the court for more time
• The Froot Loops question: running your own house instead of policing theirs
• What a memorandum of understanding does, and how it can keep you out of court

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Barb's background: child therapist turned family mediator
3:00 Why mediation still works when your ex won't cooperate
7:00 What you can control, and clauses that limit engagement
15:00 Mediating without attorneys, and why old plans stop working
23:00 Bringing the children's voices into the schedule
33:00 A teenager writes his own letter to the judge
35:00 When your ex takes back what they already agreed to
37:00 Preparing for mediation, and having skin in the game
47:00 Froot Loops: running your house, not theirs
51:00 Signing under pressure, and calming your own nervous system

Keep going 💜
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