When Parents Are at War on How to Parent

Mom wants to let her teenage daughter stay at a party until 12; dad forbids it unless adults will be supervising. Mom pushes for educational testing when her son struggles to keep up with school work; dad is dismissive and says the kid just needs to work harder. Parenting, whether toddlers or teens, is challenging for two people to see eye to eye on.

When a kid has difficult behaviors, the parenting rift can grow even greater and cause tension in the household. In fact, it is usually the difficult behaviors that bring to light different parenting styles and approaches. With escalating conflict, we often resort to our primal brains, reacting out of instinct instead of intentional actions. This leads to more extremes in parenting than perhaps show up in other, more neutral situations. So how do warring parents come together in their efforts?

There are three things parents can do to break down the walls that get thrown up in the midst of family conflict. They can be done alone, or with your partner, and the first step starts by examining your own thoughts.

1) Identify your parenting “manual” Take some time to examine what your underlying beliefs are about parenting and your role as a parent. Do you see yourself as more of a police officer, social worker, guide, caretaker? What, in your mind, is a parent’s basic function? To teach morals? To teach manners? To create productive members of society? How does a parent go about doing this? How might your partner’s “manual” be different than yours?

2) Learn from the past Many of us are parenting based on what we saw growing up. We never received explicit parent training, and fell back on the things our parents said and did without questioning a lot of their methods. Family crisis often forces parents to rethink why they are doing what they are doing. Is it because they saw their mom or dad act that way? Is it a good model to follow? And does it align with their current goals as a parent? If we can write down all of the things we learned about parenting from our own parents, and then go through them one by one to decide if we want to keep them, we become much more intentional caregivers.

3) Set an easy common goal There are areas of overlap between any two people’s “manuals,” and in that overlap, you can devise an easily-attainable goal. One parent may want to instill structure, while the other wants the kids to feel loved. An easy goal that meets both of these manuals is a consistent family activity. It may be getting the kids together for a family walk each night or eating dinner as a family a few times a week. If parents can drop other higher-stakes parenting conflicts and work together on a simple task, they can begin to rebuild their parenting unity. Before moving forward with more nuanced problems, parents first need to feel like they are on the same team again.

Parenting is the hardest work most of us will ever do; doing it in conjunction with another human being complicates this work even further. But if we can begin to figure out why we parent the way we do, and if we actually want to parent that way, we can become more conscious of what we are doing. This, in turn, makes our communication with our partner (and our kids!) all the more fruitful.