My instinct was always to be stricter than my wife. I wanted to tell the children they couldn’t have things when they behaved “badly”. I wanted sanctions, like no screen time if they didn’t put their shoes on quickly enough. This was the heyday of Supernanny, the naughty step and timeouts, which seemed soft compared with the punishments I grew up with. My wife thought they were pointless and just made the kids miserable. I thought making the kids a bit miserable in that moment was kind of the point.
This is a massive point of contention with the couples I coach. There’s usually one parent who favours boundaries and one who favours autonomy, and the arguments get vicious because each believes the other is in some way harming the child. The Autonomy Parent fears the other is traumatising them. The Boundaries Parent fears the other is raising an entitled snowflake who won’t be able to hack it in the real world. The result is terrible arguments in the middle of the morning rush, which leave both parents feeling undermined and the children fairly confused.
If this is your rut, here are four things I’ve learned that will get you out of it.
1. Drop the idea that you are right
Tough one, right? Once the argument becomes moralised, no one can move. If you tell your partner their parenting is wrong, they have to defend it, because what they hear is, “You are a bad parent”. Yes, you may have evidence that your way is right. But a quick delve into AI and your partner will be able to produce some of their own.
A much better question is: is this working? Is it giving us the relationship we want with our child?When I finally looked at the naughty step in terms of whether it worked, it clearly didn’t. One child treated it like he’d been fitted up for a crime he hadn’t committed and handed a life sentence. He found it so brutally unfair that there was obviously no learning going on. The other took it like a hardened old jailbird, sitting there staring at the wall, whistling. It wasn’t achieving anything.
2. Embrace the art of compromise
Compromise is great because you don’t have to commit to anything for ever. You get to suck it and see. Get curious about your partner’s values. What’s the dream they have for your child, and what’s the fear if that dream isn’t realised?
The interesting thing is that most parents actually agree on the destination. We both want to raise children who are kind, resilient, self-motivated, and capable of dealing with the world. The disagreement is often not about the child we want to raise, but how they become that person. And once we realise we’re aiming for the same destination, we can start to be more flexible about the route we take to get there.
Then look for that flexibility. Can we try it your way, or my way, for a while? You’re looking for a temporary plan: “For the next two weeks, when this happens, we will do that.”
Be honest, too, about who pays the price. Enforcing a boundary can cost each parent very different amounts. It’s much easier to insist a child can’t have something if you’re not the one who’ll spend the next hour dealing with the fallout. If one of you sets the rule and the other mops up the meltdown, that needs to be addressed.
And guess what? You’re not going to get it right the first time anyway. Part of the reason we hold on so tightly to our own way is that we think if we give ground, we’ll have a regime we hate imposed on us forever. It’s just not the case. The thing you try probably won’t work, and even if it does, it’ll work for a few months before the kids need something different. Get used to adjusting.
3. If you’re going to intervene, make sure it’s to de-escalate
If we work on the assumption that you both want what’s best for your relationship with your child, we have to accept that sometimes it’s going to go wrong, especially in those high-stress morning moments. So what do you do when your partner is getting louder and more frustrated and you can see it’s not going well?
If you’re more regulated than your partner in that moment, and you are confident you can step in kindly, and without judgement, tag-in, tag-out works really well. Say something like: “Hey, I can see you’re having a rough time of it. Let me take over.”
Where it fails is when your partner’s behaviour is dysregulating you. In that case, stay out of it. We understand that children can’t really hear us or learn anything when they’re dysregulated. It’s the same for adults. Wading in to angrily tell your partner they’re doing everything wrong will only make a bad situation worse. The moment has been lost. As long as no one is in actual danger, parenting coach Amiee Carlton recommends letting your partner run the course of their “not so great parenting”. These problems can’t be solved in the moment. It’s like trying to rebuild a house while the earthquake is still going on.
Part of why this feels so hard is that we’ve developed a misunderstanding about small-t trauma: the idea that every rupture will leave a scar. That isn’t what attachment research tells us. Studies of parents and babies suggest that even well-attuned pairs are only in sync around a third of the time. What matters is the repair. Children are more resilient than we think. Parents are far less resilient than we’d like to be. Come back to it when things are calm.
4. Have the follow-up conversation
You have to come back to it. I was recently on a group call with parents discussing exactly this, and we all agreed that not undermining your partner in the moment was a reasonable principle. The problem was that the follow-up conversation never happened. That’s the real discipline: finding time to talk about the thing that keeps going wrong.
Sure, we don’t have the conversation because we’re tired and barely have a minute to ourselves. Mainly we avoid it because we worry it’ll turn into a trial of our own parenting. Which takes me back to point one: this isn’t about right or wrong. It’s about whether or not the thing is working.
These conversations need honesty and openness. Did you actually shout because you thought it was functional or did you lose control and now you’re embarrassed?
One of the things that really got through to me, back when I was forever telling off one of my sons, was my wife saying, “Look, he thinks you don’t like him”. Oof. In that calm moment, I could see she was right. Was that what I wanted? No. Was what I was doing working? Absolutely not. Right. Let’s find the compromise. Let’s try something different.
What I know now
Looking back, the moments when I clung to my way of doing things weren’t really about some deep belief about what was right for my child. I became entrenched when I didn’t feel listened to, when I felt undermined, or when I felt I didn’t have a voice with my own children.
When we feel heard, we can be flexible. We can find compromise. We can be willing to try it another way. The trick, for parents, is making the other feel heard.