Breaking up with someone you share children with is a fundamentally different task than an ordinary breakup, because the relationship doesn't end — it converts into something new that both people still have to actively manage, often for decades. The goal isn't closure in the usual sense. It's building a working relationship that can survive disagreement without dragging kids into the middle of it.
The most consistently cited factor in healthy co-parenting is separating the romantic relationship from the parenting partnership, at least in how you communicate. That often means treating co-parenting conversations more like a professional collaboration — focused, businesslike, kept to the topic at hand — than a continuation of the relationship's old emotional patterns, good or bad.
Kids do better when they're not used as messengers, when they don't hear either parent badmouth the other, and when the adults can at least maintain a baseline of civility at handoffs and shared events. That doesn't require pretending everything's fine; it requires keeping the adult conflict contained to adult conversations, away from the kids.
This is genuinely hard, especially in the early months, and it's reasonable to need outside support — a therapist, a co-parenting counselor, or a structured parenting plan — to build habits that don't come naturally right after a painful split. Getting it right matters less for you than it does for the kids watching how you handle it.