Why the Coercive Co-Parent Tries to Exhaust You and What You Can Do About It

One of the most insidious tactics in coercive co-parenting isn't the yelling or the court threats, it’s exhaustion. Emotional, mental, and even physical fatigue become tools of manipulation. When you're worn down, it's harder to advocate for your kids, protect your peace, or even think clearly. That’s exactly how a coercive co-parent wants it. But once you understand the strategy, you can break the cycle.

Exhaustion as Control

Exhaustion is a subtle form of domination. Coercive co-parents aim to wear you down until you give in, not because you agree, but because you’re too depleted to argue. This helps them override your decisions, confuse the children, and manipulate outcomes that benefit them. When you’re in survival mode, it’s easier for them to spin reality, twist boundaries, and keep you reactive.

How they do it:

• Keep you engaged in constant conflict over small issues

• Demand responses at all hours or escalate if ignored

• Flip-flop on agreements, forcing you to re-negotiate what was already settled

• Emotionally flood you with long, blame-heavy texts or emails

• Create crises to disrupt your peace during your parenting time or workday

• Use legal or procedural overwhelm to keep you anxious and preoccupied

This is not about miscommunication. It’s about maintaining power by draining yours.

Tactics Used on the Co-Parent

The exhaustion aimed at the safe parent is often relentless and multi-pronged. It creates a chronic state of alertness where you feel like you can’t let your guard down, not even on your “off” days. You’re emotionally parentifying the other adult in the situation, constantly compensating for their instability or sabotage.

Tactics include:

• Sending dozens of messages a week, even when not urgent

• Weaponizing your emotional triggers to overwhelm you

• Deliberately misinterpreting or distorting your boundaries

• Showing up late, early, or unannounced to exchanges

• Expecting you to accommodate their extended family, holidays, or travel without notice

• Filing false reports, legal threats, or documentation to keep you in defense mode

• Demanding labor like extra pickups, help with their errands, or admin tasks for the kids that isn't mutual or fair

This isn’t disorganization, it’s destabilization. Their goal is to keep you too busy managing chaos to hold the line.

Tactics Used on the Children

Exhaustion isn’t limited to adults. Children are often emotionally and physically drained in ways they don’t yet have the language to describe. A coercive parent may deliberately overstimulate them, overload their schedules, or burden them with adult roles—all under the guise of being the “fun” or “caring” parent.

Tactics include:

• Signing kids up for excessive extracurriculars 

• Refusing downtime or rest, keeping them overstimulated or hypervigilant

• Enmeshing them in adult conversations or legal matters

• Having kids emotionally or physically caretake them or younger siblings 

• Using guilt to manipulate allegiance

• Undermining routines like bedtime, nutrition, or homework to keep kids dysregulatedSending them back exhausted, sleep-deprived, or emotionally escalated to sabotage transitions

These tactics wear kids down until they’re too tired to think clearly, push back, or even recognize the manipulation.

The Psychology Behind the Fatigue Strategy

At its root, this behavior often stems from deep-seated control issues, narcissistic wounding, or emotional immaturity. Coercive personalities can’t tolerate ambiguity or shared power. They need to be central, right, and in charge, even if it harms their own children in the process.

They use exhaustion as a shield. If they keep you and the children in survival mode, you won’t have the capacity to challenge their narrative, hold boundaries, or disrupt their illusion of superiority.

Psychological tactics may look like:

• Rewriting history or gaslighting events, forcing you to constantly defend your version of reality

• Playing victim to avoid accountability and keep the focus on their feelings

• Creating urgency where none exists to make you drop your boundaries

• Confusing the child with conflicting rules, roles, or loyalty binds

• Sabotaging your parenting consistency to portray you as unstable

This is chronic, not occasional. And it’s not about resolution. It’s about control through confusion and depletion.

Reclaiming Energy Through Boundaries

The solution isn’t to become more patient, more flexible, or more agreeable. The solution is to stop feeding the machine. Boundaries are how you protect your nervous system, your parenting, and your children’s emotional safety. You don’t need to win a power struggle. You just need to stop participating in the chaos.

Boundaries that restore your energy:

• Only respond to messages during set times unless it’s a true emergency

• Use parenting apps with limited interaction

• Grab our Coparenting Code Scripts with simple one-liners to shut down manipulation

• Refuse to absorb tasks that belong to them, even if they drop the ball

• Provide your children with consistent routines, decompression time, and permission to speak freely

• Normalize rest, quiet, and boundaries as a form of self-respect

By modeling emotional regulation and structure, you give your kids a template for resilience. You don’t have to match the chaos to stay strong, you just need to be solid and have self-trust.

If you’re chronically exhausted, you’re not weak. You’re being systematically depleted. 

Coercive co-parents don’t just want your time, they want your attention, your bandwidth, your peace. That ends when you stop supplying it.

Your energy is valuable.. Don’t give it away to prove you’re the better parent. Protect it so you can be the better parent for your kids and yourself.