A very good friend of mine has a sociopath for an ex. She made certain the children were available to him when he was supposed to take visitation and she kept contact with him to a bare minimum. She gave him information about how to talk to the teachers, the doctors, the extracurricular people, and told him that it was his responsibility to get information from them, that she was not going to make a report to him daily on what was the news of the moment in the kids' lives.

When he found out that he couldn't mess with her, couldn't make her uncomfortable, couldn't turn her into his servant by this parenting thing, he started skipping time with the kids and eventually gave up altogether. They call him about once a month to tell him that it's time he take them out to dinner, and they catch him up on their grades and health and interests during that time. Their son is in college now and he regularly says that these dinners are highly uncomfortable. This young man is quite articulate, and even gets a little annoyed at his mother for refusing to say bad stuff about his Dad. He thinks she is naive and is not yet old enough to understand that she's just doing right by the kids to not trash thier father.

To answer your comment... yes, it's impossible to effectively co-parent. Your best bet is to minimize the impact on YOU, to make certain the kids spend as much time with you as possible while not letting him think htat you're trying to cut him out of thier lives. Because the minute he thinks you're trying to cut them out, then it becomes a game for him to try to figure out how to hurt you with the kids.

Be scrupulous about giving him the time he should hav ewith them, and about maintaining "no contact" about everything except scheduling matters. Over time, it will get better if you become less fun for him as a target, less fun as a person to play with for a sociological experiment.

Sociopaths with other people are like cats playing with mice.... or like sick sociologists doing experimentation on humans. ... They enjoy the game of setting you up... they create situations just to see your reaction... they don't have any empathy or concern about using or hurting others in the process... and that includes using or hurting their own children.

We exist simply as a way to entertain them, feed them, supply them with financing or a lifesytle. Empathy does not exist within them so they don't see or care that their manipulations hurt anyone else.

The smarter of them (not my friends' ex) will do enough social experimentation to figure out that when ... oh, for example, when people's mothers pass away, that it's considered a very sad thing. And they will watch the reaction of others to the news that someone's mother has passed away and will learn to mimic BOTH the behaviros of the bereaved AND the behaviros of the sympathetic. They can go through the motions, but if you know them, you realize there is an emptiness to it. they'll have just as much ACTUAL sympathy to thier spouse when their spouse's mother passes away as the funeral director who never met either the spouse or the mother and is only looking to where the fees for the funeral will come from ... it's a smarmy kind of sympathy, if they're good enough to learn how to mimic it. The purpose of a spouse to them is to provide sex, maybe to provide money to live off of, and certainly to provide housework to maintain the lifestyle so that they will be able to do as little as necessary to maintain their own lives (they have this in common with narcissists, who also believe others exist to supply them with STUFF and who feel that they are entitled to the STUFF just by thier existence... that the meaning of life is derived from figuring how how to spend as little time in work or chores to get maximum benefit in STUFF from others).

The REALLY good ones will learn to play on the sympathy of others, having figured out that they can GET stuff from others if the others feel sorry for them.

The best bet at removing yourself from being a subject of thier ongoing experimentation, amusement, or potential source of funding or work to maintain their lifestyles.

My friend stumbled onto the solution... which was to get herself out of his sights, make HERSELF as invisible as possible, to make it so that he couldnt' get satisfaction at seeing her frustrated over anything he did to the kids. And over time, it stopped being fun for him to mess with the kids because he got no reaction from her, so he dropped them.

We have no idea who he's targetted at this point, and it really doesn't matter, as long as his ex and his kids are no longer a target of his manipulation.

It was REALLY hard for her to totally remove herself like that. But it worked. Maybe you could figure out how to do it in your situation?