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Meeting places or neutral ground where children and parents can come together during a messy separation or divorce are intrinsically extremely sensitive to parenthood and how it evolves. This article investigates the work involved in “setting the scene” for professionals confronted by the tangled relations between parents and children. The author firstly shows how the pressure builds up on the child, more than ever “guilty of being” and responsible for its parents’ heartaches, as evinced in a number of literary examples. He then analyses clinical situations with family blending and homosexual parenthood. The diversity of forms of parenthood fails to afford shelter for the child, “the weak actor” in the rifts that emerge between adult couples. One needs constantly to offer the child a space for subjectivation not subservient to the suffering of one or other of the parents, all the more so in so far as he or she tends to become the object of “their project”.