What Is Considered Harassment by a Co-Parent?
Harassment by a co-parent usually means one of two different things, and knowing which one you are dealing with changes what you should do next. Under criminal law it is a specific offence with a specific test. In family court it is a question about whether the behaviour is getting in the way of parenting. Most people bring the first meaning into the second room. That is where it goes wrong.
This is not legal advice. It is a description of how the two systems look at the same messages.
What counts as harassment in the legal sense?
In Colorado, harassment is a criminal offence and the test is about intent.
The statute is C.R.S. section 18-9-111. It begins: a person commits harassment if, with intent to harass, annoy, or alarm another person, they do one of the things listed. The list covers four kinds of conduct:
Unwanted physical contact
Obscene language or gestures in public
Following someone in a public place
Messages by phone, text or computer sent to harass, or to threaten injury or damage
Read the first part again. The conduct has to be done with the intent to harass. That is the whole hinge.
A co-parent who sends forty messages in a day about pickup times is exhausting. Whether it is criminal harassment depends on why they sent them, not on how many there were. This is why parents are so often surprised. They take a thick folder of messages to a lawyer. They are told it does not meet the standard.
Other states word it differently. The idea of an intent test is common, but the exact wording is not. Ask a lawyer in your own state what applies to you.
What does family court look at instead?
Family court is not asking whether a crime happened. It is asking whether your children are alright.
That is a different question and it has a lower bar. A judge does not need to find criminal intent to decide that one parent is making the arrangement unworkable. Colorado has a specific route for this. Under C.R.S. section 14-10-129.5, a parent can file a verified motion saying the other parent is not following the parenting time order. The court has 35 days to deny it, set a hearing, or send both parents to mediation.
If the court finds a problem, it can order any of these:
Makeup parenting time
A parenting class, paid for by the other parent
Family counselling
A bond to secure future compliance
A civil fine for each denied visit
Attorney fees and court costs
A finding of contempt
A hearing to change custody
Notice what that list is about. It is about the arrangement working. It is not about punishing someone for being unpleasant.
So what actually counts as harassment by a co-parent?
Here is the practical split.
Behaviour that tends to matter in family court:
Messages that arrive so often they stop you functioning
Contact at hours designed to disturb you
Using the children to carry messages
Turning up where you are, outside the arrangement
Threats to take the children, or to make trouble at your work
Repeated demands to renegotiate things already decided
Blocking your time with the children, or returning them late again and again
Behaviour that upsets you but usually goes nowhere:
Rudeness
Being blamed for the divorce
Criticism of your parenting, sent to you
Messages that are annoying but genuinely about logistics
One bad week
The difference is not how it feels. It is whether the behaviour is interfering with the children's arrangement, and whether it forms a pattern.
What is reasonable phone contact for a non-custodial parent?
Most parenting plans do not say, which is exactly why this becomes a fight.
If your order sets contact times, that is your answer. If it does not, the standard that works is contact that suits the child's routine and does not run through you. A short call at a set time, a few times a week, is normal for a school-age child. Trouble starts elsewhere. Calls at bedtime every night. Calls that are really a way of checking on you. Calls that land in the other parent's time with no warning.
If this is your fight, get a time written into the plan. A number in the order ends the argument. An argument about what is reasonable never ends. Our parallel parenting guide covers how to build a plan detailed enough that very little is left to be agreed in the moment.
What happens when someone reads your log?
This is the part nobody tells you, and it is the part that matters most.
In a contested case the messages are usually read first by a court-appointed professional. In Colorado that is a Child and Family Investigator. That person reads your log, reads the other parent's version, then checks both against a third source. They write a report. The judge reads it.
So the useful question is not whether you have kept records. Most parents have. It is what those records show to someone reading them cold.
A record of behaviour lets a professional reach their own conclusion. A record of your conclusions invites them to discount the whole document.
This is the most common mistake in these files. A parent brings a log full of labels: "manipulative", "another attack", "classic narcissist". The reader cannot check any of that. What they can check is a plain line. The message came at 11.40pm. It was the fourth that evening. It was about something already settled in March.
One is evidence. The other is a diary of how you feel, and the person reading it may start wondering about you instead.
Volume alone is also weaker than people expect. Forty messages about a genuine problem is a busy week. Forty messages after you asked, in writing, for contact to go through one channel is a pattern. The boundary is what makes the volume mean something. Our post on what can be used against you in a custody battle goes further into what an investigator actually examines.