243: Parent Conflict Over Discipline: How to Get on the Same Page

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Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today, we're tackling one of the most common challenges that I hear from parents who listen to the show and even from those who join the parenting membership, which is what to do when you and your partner are not on the same page about how to discipline your kids, and who even knew this was going to be a thing before we had kids, right? We just had no idea how coming from families with such different approaches and the trauma we've experienced, and what is considered the appropriate role for each person in a family unit, and who gets paid more and who ends up spending more time on child care, could all come together into these huge differences between us that can seem impossible to bridge, and so parents come to me asking, how can we get on the same page about this? It's a difficult question to answer, because ideally, we would have these conversations with our partners long before we have kids, and the ways that we think about that question should determine whether or not we go on to have kids together. But of course, the vast majority of us, me included, end up having no idea that one parent in the partnership is going to try to heal from the hurts that they've experienced and be with the kids in a way that doesn't just replicate those hurts. Well, maybe the other parent thinks that yelling at the kids until they do what they're told is fine, because that's what their parent did to them, and they turned out okay. Even just opening up a conversation on this topic can really get us in touch with some hurtful wounds, so we end up not saying anything, and things build and build until they become triggering issues themselves. And really, we can't know how we're going to be triggered by our kid’s behavior until it happens, we can go into therapy and we can work on ourselves, but it isn't always obvious what the thing is we're supposed to be working on until it is. So, if we aren't on the same page about how we discipline the kids, where do we go from here? Well, that's what we're going to explore today. If you've listened to some of the summary episodes I've been releasing recently. The first step will not come as a shock, because pretty much always the best place to start is with self-compassion, because this whole parenting thing is hard, and trying to navigate differences with your partner about how to raise your kids can seem almost impossible at times. And then we'll move into how to incorporate the tools that we learned in a couple of recent episodes, firstly, our conversation with Joelle Killian on the feedback process, and secondly, on validation with Dr. Caroline Fleck. So self-compassion is especially important if you're still trying to make the changes that you want to see in your relationship with your child and maybe your partner is using your imperfect performance as “evidence” that the tools don't work. So I'm going to think about a parent in the membership, let's call her Rosa, right? So Rosa had been working really hard on responding to her four year old's tantrums with empathy, rather than with punishment, but in the heat of the moment, after a particularly difficult day at work, she just snapped, and she yelled at her daughter to just stop it already, and her husband immediately said, see you do all this reading and telling me what to do and you can't even figure it out yourself. This gentle parenting stuff just doesn't work in real life. And of course, Rosa felt terrible, both about yelling at her daughter and about her husband using the moment when she was struggling against her and what helped her to move forward was not beating herself up or trying to be perfect. It was acknowledging that, yes, this is hard work. Yes, she's going to mess up sometimes, and that's okay. It's part of the process of growth. Dr Kristin Neff, who is one of the world's leading researchers on self-compassion, talks about how self-compassion has three main components. So, this self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation and mindfulness versus over identification. So, when we're struggling with parenting differences, we need all three. We need kindness towards ourselves. When we make mistakes, we need recognition that all parents struggle with these issues. It's not that we're uniquely flawed and we have to have the ability to hold our difficult emotions without being completely swept away by them. So, if you find yourself thinking, I should be better at this by now, or why can't I get my partner to understand or I'm failing my children with these constant disagreements between us in front of them, just take a moment to pause, take a breath and try to offer yourself the same kindness that you would offer a good friend in your situation.

There's actually a lot more about self-compassion in our dedicated podcast episode on that topic, so I'll link to that in the show notes if you want to dive deeper. But for now, let's move on to the next step. Once we're able to treat ourselves with compassion. Most parents want to know, what should I do in the moment when my partner is yelling at our kids? Should I intervene or not? And this is such a tough situation, you're watching an interaction that does not align with your values, your heart's probably racing, and you're feeling pulled to protect your child at the same time you don't want to undermine your partner or escalate the conflict. So, what do you do? Well, first, I want to acknowledge there's no perfect solution here. Every family is different, and context matters enormously. So, if there's emotional and physical abuse happening, absolutely priority is protecting your child full stop. But in many cases, what we're talking about is a partner who's using a harsher approach than you prefer. They might be raising their voice or using threats or punishments, maybe speaking in ways that feel disrespectful to you in those situations, jumping in to defend the kids often doesn't help. In fact, it frequently makes things worse. I remember working with a family where whenever the father would raise his voice at their son, the mother would immediately jump in with don't talk to him like that, or he's just tired, leave him alone. So, her intention was to protect her son, but what actually happened was that her husband felt annoyed and frustrated that she'd undermined him, which only made him angrier, and their son ended up witnessing not just one upset parent, but two parents in conflict, which can be more stressful for children than the original discipline interaction. So instead of direct intervention in these heated moments, you might try a de-escalation approach. So first try to help everyone regulate. You might gently place your hand on your partner's shoulder if you think that would be well received, or just move closer, using your calm presence, hopefully, to try to regulate everyone. You could gently say something like you can see we're having a hard time right now, and that avoids blaming anyone for what's happening. Secondly, validate feelings all around so to your partner, you could say, it sounds like you're really frustrated that the toys aren't being picked up, and it makes sense you'd want some cooperation after a long day, and then you could say to your child, and it seems like you were in the middle of your game and you weren't ready to stop. Validation doesn't mean that you agree with how anyone is behaving. It simply acknowledges the legitimate feelings underneath. Ultimately, we all want to be understood by others, so the other person will usually be receptive to this. Next offer a simple, immediate solution for the specific situation. So, what if we set a timer for five minutes to finish the game and then clean up together, and that gives everyone an out that preserves dignity, and then later, when adults are calm and the kids aren't around, that's the time to have a conversation with our partner about what happened. And we might say something like, I noticed things got pretty heated earlier with the cleanup situation. Can we talk about how we want to handle that kind of moment in the future? This approach avoids creating a situation where your kids learn that they can triangulate between parents, or where one parent becomes the bad guy and the other parent becomes the rescuer, which is a dynamic that can make co-parenting more difficult, then it's later and you're ready to have the conversation with your partner. So how do you approach it? Because we were raised with judgment, it's very common for us to go into these kinds of situations with something like, why did you threaten the kids again? We might know that we wouldn't want someone to approach us like this, but we don't know how else to approach our partner about this topic. When we think we're being judged, we tend to get defensive.

Our brains actually perceive judgment as a threat, and when we're in threat mode, the parts of our brain involved in rational thinking and empathy become less accessible. So, if your goal is to have a productive conversation with your partner about discipline approaches, starting from a place of judgment is going to shut down the possibility of real connection before you even begin. So instead of saying something like, can we talk about how you're always really harsh with the kids when you're telling them what to do, we can try something like, can we talk about what we want to do when the kids don't do what we ask? Do you see how that first approach contains an embedded judgment that your partner is harsh, while the second approach doesn't make it about them specifically, it also includes when the kids don't do what we ask, which makes it a problem that you share, rather than one that only your partner owns. I remember working with a couple, I'm going to call them Alex and Jordan, and they were constantly butting heads over how to respond when their six-year-old wouldn't clean up his toys and Alex would immediately move into consequences if you don't clean up now there's no screen time tomorrow. Jordan preferred to understand why their son was resistant and work with him to find a solution. And their conversations about this had gotten nowhere, because they started with statements like, you’re too soft on him, or you're turning him into a little dictator when they shifted instead to asking, what are we hoping to teach him about responsibility and what approaches might help with that, the conversation transformed. They were able to get curious together, rather than defensive against each other. And this non-judgmental stance is not about pretending that you don't have strong feelings or preferences. It's about creating a space where both of you can express those feelings and preferences without the conversation immediately becoming adversarial. So, Joelle Killian, who developed the feedback process that we looked at in a recent episode, reminds us that “traditional feedback is transactional. It's something that's handed over to someone else, almost without consideration of who that person is, how that person intends to use the information, or even if the person will use the information”. I interviewed Joellen along with a parent, Anne, who's in the parenting membership. Anne had heard Joellen speak at a conference, and immediately saw how the ideas which were supposed to be for colleagues, right of giving feedback between colleagues and how these were applicable to her relationship with her husband and her son and together, Anne and I realized that traditional feedback is kind of like a holiday gift that's really nicely wrapped and it has a pretty bow on top, but you suspect that underneath that beautiful paper is a gift that you don't really want yet somehow you're supposed to peel that paper back and express surprise and gratitude to the gift giver. And this is exactly what we don't want when discussing parenting approaches with our partner, where one person gives the feedback and the other person receives it. In contrast, the feedback process is about learning together. So Joellen explains that the feedback process is a process of learning where a learner constructs their own understanding of the information to be able to make it their own. The learner here is the person who wants things to be different, and the ideal feedback process ends with the learner constructing their own feedback. In this model, the feedback giver becomes the learning partner who supports the learner in constructing their new knowledge. When we apply this to parenting conversations, especially around discipline, we shift from telling our partner what they're doing wrong to helping them reflect on what's happening and draw their own conclusions. This is powerful, because, as Joellen says, when a learner constructs that learning, it's immediately relevant, immediately applicable, and it will be more lasting. So after your partner has agreed to talk, the first step in the process is to make what you want to learn explicit. It's clear that you're learning together, rather than one of you critiquing the other one's parenting. So you might stay we want to figure out what to do when our child talks back to us, and then you determine success criteria together. So going into this, one of you might have the criteria that the talking back stops completely, while the other might be okay with it if it's delivered in a different tone or with different words, you might be okay with hearing I don't like this dinner, but not you're a butt head.

And when we talked with Joellen, it was clear that agreeing on the success criteria is a critical step. So where one parent has a goal of supporting their kids and feeling their feelings, the other has a goal of making crying stop before it even starts, it's going to be hard to move forward once we've walked through the steps of the feedback process, I'm going to return to this topic with some ideas to help on this specific section of it. So continuing of the feedback process, next, we're going to look at the data right, which is examining exactly what has happened when your different approaches are used. So data, in this case, might include the words that were said, the look on someone's face that demonstrated what they're thinking or feeling, as well as how they responded when you ask them what they're thinking or feeling if they responded at all, which is data as well. And then you analyze the situation. So rather than jumping to conclusions, you can ask questions like, what happened in the situation? How did we feel? How did our child react? What were our behaviors? What was the response? The next to last step is constructing new understanding. Where you ask, if we could create the ideal situation, what would it look like? What would each of us do? What should we prepare to make it easier for us to do in that difficult moment that might involve things like setting up a code word to remind you that you're on the same team instead of undermining each other. You don't necessarily have to do the last step in the feedback process in your first go around, but when you get there, that last step is deconstructing when needed, and that means asking when might that not work. This helps you to prepare for exceptions and challenges. So perhaps you'll plan to be a bit more tolerant of back talk when your child has had a really rough day or is feeling sick. And of course, this kind of feedback approach isn't only applicable to disciplining children. You can use it in any area of your life where things aren't going the way you want, but I can imagine many parents listening to this and thinking that's all well and good, but I got stuck on determining this success criteria step my partner and I don't use the same criteria. I believe children should be allowed to express their feelings, but they think our kids are growing up soft and they have to learn to deal with the real world. You may have to spend some time on that step with your partner before you can move forward with the rest of the process. One approach that I find particularly helpful here is to use indirect questions that help you to understand the deeper values and experiences that are informing your partner's choices. So here are just 10 questions that you might consider asking your partner to help you get a better understanding of how each of you think of these issues. Were there parts of what your parents did that you really appreciate and would like to replicate in our family? Were there parts of your childhood that you want to make sure our kids don't experience? When you imagine our kids as adults, what qualities do you hope they'll have developed? What does being a good parent mean to you?

What's your biggest worry about being too strict and linked to that, what's your biggest worry about being too lenient? When you were a child, how did you wish your parents had responded when you messed up or broke a rule? What do you think our kids are trying to communicate through challenging behaviors? How were emotions handled in your family growing up, were certain emotions discouraged or punished? What strengths do you see in our different approaches to parenting, if we could create an ideal approach to discipline that takes the best from both of our perspectives, what might that look like? When you ask these kinds of questions, you're going to get the most out of the answers if you listen to understand rather than to gather ammunition for why your approach is better, you might be surprised by what you learn about your partner's deeper motivations and concerns. I worked with a parent, we'll call him David, who was adamant about strict bedtimes and consequences when his children didn't comply, and through conversations with his partner, using questions like these, it emerged, David had grown up in a chaotic household where nothing was predictable, and he had felt chronically anxious as a result. His insistence on structure wasn't about controlling the children, it was about creating the sense of safety and predictability he had desperately needed as a child. Understanding this completely shifted how his partner viewed their disagreements about discipline. It wasn't just about being strict versus lenient. It was about different core needs that they reached, trying to meet. What we're alluding to here is the idea of validating your partner's experience. When we talked with Dr. Caroline Fleck recently about her book Validation, we learned that validation means communicating that you're mindful, that you understand and you empathize with some part of a person's experience, thereby accepting it as valid, or putting that same thing more simply, validation shows you're there you get it and you care. Dr. Fleck believes that validation is perhaps the most important quality in our relationships. It's difficult to have authentic relationships in the absence of validation because when we don't feel seen who is the other person really having a relationship with. When we feel truly validated, we feel seen for who we are, and this allows us to feel loved for who we are, which is really all any of us wants in the world. And this aligns with what Joellen Killion describes in the feedback process, she explains, I must be willing to understand what they want, encourage them to listen to my perspective and then find a place where we can agree in a positive way. We're working towards a place where neither of us is the expert who says how things must be done, but that both of our ideas are considered and respected. Dr. Fleck shared the steps of the validation ladder, which offers different levels of validation that you can use when responding to what your partner shares. In the first level, we're focused on being present, and that means giving our full attention. We can put away our phone, turn off the TV, and really listen. This is very different from waiting for someone to stop talking so that you can say what's on your mind. In level two, we're working on accurate reflection, and that means summarizing what you heard to make sure you understood correctly. So you might say what I'm hearing is that you feel overwhelmed when our son has a meltdown in the grocery store and you want to respond quickly to end the situation so people won't think that you're a bad parent. Is that right? And then you pause and you see if you did get that right, and you allow your partner to correct you if you didn't. You can't use questions to criticize your partner, so you can't say, why would you think that? It's a question, but it's a criticism, as well. As Joellen points out, when we ask why questions, people often get defensive. If we're even slightly dysregulated that question is likely to come out in a way that strongly implies a better option was available and that your partner should have seen it and taken it, in other words, a criticism. Whenever we compare anyone, ourselves, our partners, our children, anyone to someone else, to a person who should have been able to do things differently and better, we're likely to create shame. If you're completely calm, you might be able to pull it off, but if you're even slightly dysregulated, your tone is going to indicate that you are making that comparison. If your partner feels shame, bad things are going to happen in that conversation, and it will probably be one or more of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So criticism is that first horse, the remaining three are defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. We can usually avoid all of those three by cutting out the criticism in the first place. So instead of asking, why did you yell at our child? You might say, I thought we had an agreement about how we wanted to respond when our child gets upset. What happened in that situation? And this approach invites reflection rather than defensiveness. So I'm not saying you should never ask questions, but going back to Dr. Fleck’s work, they can only be used to clarify things you don't understand. If you're using a question to make a point, it doesn't have a place in this conversation.

The next step on the feedback ladder is to either contextualize or equalize. So we can contextualize when there's something particular about the person's circumstances that explains their actions. So in this case, you might share, given what you've told me about how your parents would have hit you if you'd misbehaved in a public place, it makes sense that you would want to make our kids misbehavior in the grocery store stop as fast as possible. Or we can equalize with a statement like, parenting in front of an audience is so hard, most parents in that situation would have a hard time, including me. And Dr. Fleck agreed that generally, one or the other of these two is enough, both would kind of be overkill. We might then consider making a proposal, which is something between a question and a statement, where you try to cut right to the heart of what's going on for the person. The more certain you are, the more you can phrase it as a statement. If you aren't sure, it's better to go with a question. So in this example, if we weren't sure what was going on, we might ask something like, I'm wondering if when the kids started acting up in the grocery store, you felt that kind of mix of internal panic, like embarrassment and pressure and to just get them under control quickly before everyone starts staring, almost like you suddenly became hyper aware of every eye on you as a parent, or if you're more certain about the person's experience, you might say something like, it seems like you were concerned that if you didn't address their behavior quickly, it would escalate and make it impossible to get through the grocery store, and we didn't have anything else in the fridge for dinner tonight. So that's proposing, after we've done proposing, then we can look at how we want to express true empathy. We can share our genuine thoughts and reactions to what they're saying. So if they're clearly feeling hurt by their childhood memories, we can show that we share that hurt. We can relate the hurt to something that we experience as a child, if we do this carefully to make sure the focus stays on our partner and we don't hijack the conversation. The only purpose in sharing is to demonstrate that we've experienced something similar that can help us to understand their experience, not to get their support for us in that moment that would come in another conversation, and we should decide what action we want to take with our partner or for our partner. So they might want us to look out for signals that they're getting dysregulated, and then use a mutually agreed code word to have your partner tag out and you tag in, or vice versa. Or in the example of the grocery store, we might agree not to pile too many errands into one trip, or to go shopping more often, so the list to get through each time is shorter.

When your partner feels truly heard and understood, defense is lower, and that creates space for a more meaningful connection and problem solving. Validation is a really important part of this process, but it isn't the end of the process. When we validate the other person's feelings, we make it much more likely they're going to want to keep in the conversation and share their needs with us, which is why they're doing the things that they're doing. Once validation has opened the door to real, genuine communication, we can move to the next critical step, which is understanding the underlying needs driving our different parenting approaches. Discipline strategies are not arbitrary choices they're attempts to meet fundamental needs. So maybe your partner's needs include things like competence, which is the need to feel capable and effective as a parent. Ease, which is the desire for parenting to not be constantly exhausting and overwhelming. Respect, wanting to feel respected in their role as a parent, both by the children and by you. Order, a need for predictability and structure. Peace, the desire for a harmonious home without constant conflict. Connection, wanting to maintain a close bond with the children and maybe recognition, having their efforts and intentions as a parent acknowledged. And understanding these needs, which are going to be different for each person, can completely transform how you view disagreements. What initially looked like your partner being too harsh might actually be them trying to meet their need for competence to feel like they're doing a good job as a parent by raising children who listen and who respect boundaries. And similarly, what your partner sees as you being too soft might be you trying to meet your need for connection to ensure that discipline approaches don't damage the trust and openness between you and your child.

The beauty of identifying needs is that while strategies for meeting needs can conflict like a strict consequence system versus a more collaborative approach, the underlying needs rarely do. Both of you probably want your children to grow into responsible, kind, emotionally healthy adults. You just have different ideas about how to get there. I worked with a couple Aisha and Devon, who frequently clashed over their three-year-old son's picky eating habits. Aisha insisted that their son should clean his plate at each meal and try everything served using a three more bites rule before he could leave the table. Devon thought this approach was too rigid and would create negative associations with food, preferring to offer multiple healthy options and let their son decide what and how much to eat, and their dinner times had become battlegrounds until they explored what was really driving each of their approaches. Aisha grew up in a family they sometimes struggled with food insecurity, and was motivated by a need to ensure their son received adequate nutrition and didn't waste food. Devon had been forced to eat everything as a child and later developed unhealthy eating patterns, and was motivated by a need to foster their son's body autonomy and create positive meal time experiences. When they recognized these valid underlying needs, they were able to create a hybrid approach. They agreed to always include at least one food item their son reliably enjoyed alongside new foods, encourage but not force trying new foods and involve him in meal preparation to increase interest and try to make mealtimes pleasant rather than confrontational. This honored Aishas needs for ensuring proper nutrition while respecting Devon's desire to build healthy food relationships. Just as important as understanding your partner's needs and values is gaining clarity about your own needs and values. What needs are you trying to meet on a regular basis? What are your core values when it comes to parenting? What kind of relationship do you want with your children, both now and as they grow older? What principles are non-negotiable for you? And where do you have flexibility if you're not sure how you want to parent, or if you need more tools for translating your values into practical strategies that are actually useful when your kid is refusing to brush their teeth. I'd encourage you to join the Setting Loving (&Effective!) Limits Workshop. It's usually available on a self-guided basis, but starting Wednesday, May 7, I will guide you through it personally over eight days. You'll get support from me in our private community as you go. So if you have any questions about the module content, you'll get the answers you need so you don't get stuck and you can keep making progress. In the Setting Loving (&Effective!) Limits Workshop, you will learn how to confidently manage tantrums, misbehavior, back talk, hitting, sibling, fighting, any behavior that you don't want to see, we will work on it. We will replace ineffective disciplinary methods like timeouts, like saying the same thing over and over again. With tools that actually work, you'll learn how to set calm, confident limits that your kids will respect, and you will cut the number of limits you set by at least half without becoming a permissive parent. Parents who have participated in the workshop report significant improvements in their children's cooperation with parent’s requests. One participant, Amy, shared, our kids have been so much more helpful, and we've all been so much happier without all the power struggles. What a change. You're welcome to join the Setting Loving (&Effective!) Limits workshop by yourself, and if you want to make even more progress, you could sign up with your parenting partner, so you can both get the emails and you can practice the ideas you'll learn. We've reorganized the workshop this year to make it even easier.

You'll get all of the information in the daily emails instead of having to log into a separate platform. That makes it even more ideal for time strapped parents, it'll only take you five minutes to read each email, and we'll have a video that goes a bit deeper if you want to see it, but you don't have to watch it if you don't want to. If you'd like, you can join the full experience, which gets you forever access to all the content in one place, so you don't have to search your email for it if you decide you want to come back to the ideas in the future. In the past, parents have told me that they've taken the workshop multiple times because they see how much it helps, but they forget the ideas over time, so they come back year after year to remind themselves. With the full experience, you'll have all of that content in one place, so you can come back to it whenever you like plus you can join me for five group coaching calls over the 10 days we're together, those calls will be at 11am and 5pm Pacific, so you can join whichever one fits your schedule better. I don't hold anything back in the free workshop, but very often on the group coaching calls, we're able to go much deeper than we can when we're just typing back and forth. We can quickly get to the heart of why a specific thing your child does is hard for you, and uncover new ways to handle it that meets your needs and your child's needs. Many people find that being on a group coaching call helps them to unlock insights they couldn't have realized by themselves. Because even though the specific circumstances of our situations are different, the underlying struggles are often universal. We all have needs to be seen, to be known, to be understood, to be loved for who we really are. Parents do, children do? I haven't met a parent yet who's participated in the free workshop and has not been able to make some kind of progress, and it's pretty common for parents to say, I can't believe we're getting all of this support for free. So if you want to join me for the coaching calls as well, plus a bonus module that folks in the free workshop won't get, which is an introduction to having real conversations with your partner about discipline and other topics that can be hard to talk about, you will see a real couple learn how to use new communication skills building on the ideas we've learned in this episode so that you can use them with your partner as well. So all of that is involved in the full experience, and that's just $37, or you can get just the emails and our community as well for completely free. So all those details about the free workshop are at yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits once you're signed up, if you want to join the full experience after that, you can do that too. So once you've developed a better understanding of both your and your partner's needs and values, then you can start exploring potential paths forward. This is not about one person winning and the other losing, or one of you finally realizing that the other one's methods are superior. It's about working as a team to parent in a way that honors what's most important to both of you and I want to acknowledge that having these kinds of conversations with our partners can be really, really hard. When we talk about how to raise our children, we're not just talking about theoretical concepts. We're touching on our deepest values, our own childhood wounds, our identities as parents, our hopes and our fears for the people that we love most in the world. It's deeply personal, and the stakes feel incredibly high. One parent recently told me I'd rather just handle discipline my way when the kids are with me and let my partner do their thing when I'm not around, at least then we're not fighting. And this avoidance often comes from a really deep fear of vulnerability. For many of us, especially those of us who are socialized female, our identities are deeply tied to being good parents. So when we broach these sensitive topics, it can seem like we're inviting judgment on our worth as a parent, and because our culture says that for women, our value as a parent is the same as our value as a person.

Therefore, if we are not parenting, well, we don't have value as a person either. If criticism has been a common pattern in our relationship, the prospect of facing more criticism can feel overwhelming, and it often seems easier to retreat into silence and handle things separately than to open ourselves up to the possibility of feeling more pain. I remember working with one mother who would literally feel her heart racing and her palms sweating at the thought of bringing up disciplined differences with her husband. She told me every time I try to talk about how he speaks to her son, he tells me I'm too soft and that I'm raising a weak child. It hurts so much I've just stopped trying. And this fear is especially powerful if you've experienced invalidation in your past, perhaps your own parents dismissed your feelings, or previous partners belittled your concerns. These experiences create a template that tells us speaking up leads to pain, so stay quiet to stay safe. The irony is that by avoiding these conversations, we often create exactly what we fear. The differences in our approaches grow wider, resentment builds, we feel increasingly disconnected from our partners. And our children experience the confusion of inconsistent expectations and witnessing tension between the adults that they love the most. Sometimes parents will tell me, I do have a hard time with my kids, but my biggest challenges by far are with my partner, and I don't think you can help me with that, but actually we can. In your first month in the Parenting Membership, which opens for enrollment in May, we lay the groundwork for everything to follow by introducing the problem-solving conversations as a tool that can help in any difficult situation you're having with any other person in your life. For some parents, it's easier to start using these tools with their kids, because they don't have decades of difficult interactions with their kids in the same way that they do with their partner. And then in our second and third modules, we introduce tools for working with our partners on the issues we disagree about. I've done training in the Gottman method, which is one of the very few evidence-based approaches to working with couples. The Gottman’s have done extensive research on what makes relationships succeed or fail, and many of their tools are valuable for navigating co-parenting differences. That said, I also see some aspects of the Gottman approach that can make it harder to use effectively. So for instance, if you've done Gottman therapy and found that you still felt frustrated, angry, resentful and hurt when your partner shared what was going on for them, it was likely because the Gottman’s don't distinguish clearly between judgments and feelings. So a Gottman therapist will think it's perfectly fine for your partner to say, I feel criticized to you, but criticized isn't actually a feeling, it's a judgment about what you said or did. Their true feelings might be that they were sad or hurt or discouraged or insecure. When we say that we're sharing our feelings, but actually we're expressing judgments is much harder for our partner to empathize. The Gottman’s also sometimes confuse needs with strategies to meet needs. In one of the training videos that I watched during my Gottman training, the wife said to the husband, I don't care what kind of a day you've had, I need you to come in the door with a smile on your face. And this is, this is a video that Gottman’s are having us watch to be trained in their method while they are sitting in the room, holding this conversation, and the wife is expressing this need that is not actually a need. This is a strategy to meet the wife's need for emotional safety or for connection. And there are so many other things the husband could have done to meet that need that did not involve him pretending to be happy when he wasn't. So just some random examples, right? He could have texted before coming home to let her know he had a rough day. He could have asked for 10 minutes to decompress before engaging with the family. He could have greeted her with a hug and an honest acknowledgement. Today was tough, but I'm so glad to be home with you right now. He could have created a ritual for transitioning from work to home. Maybe they could have together made agreements about how they'll communicate when one of them is struggling. They could have planned regular check ins about their emotional needs so issues don't build up. They could have developed a signal for when he needs some space before being fully present. Perhaps expressed appreciation for her even while acknowledging his difficult mood. He could have taken responsibility for his emotions while still being authentic. He could have asked directly for what would help him to shift his mood more naturally.

When we identify our needs, we open up so many more possibilities for strategies that work for both of us. Rather than getting stuck on this one strategy, I need you to walk in the door with a smile on your face that we've decided will work for us and our partner getting stuck on the one strategy they've decided will work for them. When we first start having these kinds of conversations with our partners, it's so easy for the conversation to go off the rails, even if we start out with good intentions. We have so many years of habits built up between us that we can get sucked into the same old communication patterns that have gotten us into trouble so many times before. So as we mentioned briefly earlier, the first horseman of the four horsemen of the apocalypse is criticism in its most explicit forum. It can involve attacking the person's character instead of their behavior. So this might be super explicit, like You're so selfish you don't care about anyone but yourself. But criticism can be much more subtle than this, as we've mentioned, related to questions that compare our partner with ourselves, and we would have handled it better or with a theoretical parent who's more competent than our partner, which can arouse the same shame as a criticism of the person's character. The second horseman is defensiveness, and that's when we respond to perceived criticism by either counter attacking or playing the victim. So a counter attack might sound like, Well, I wouldn't have to yell, if you would just enforce the rules consistently, and playing the victim would be I've worked 80 hours this week, and now you want me to teach you how to be with the kids as well. Defensiveness prevents us from taking responsibility for our part in the dynamic. The third Horseman is contempt. This is the most destructive of the four, and involves treating your partner with disrespect, mockery, sarcasm, name calling or hostile humor. So if we're in the middle of a conversation and our partner thinks we're criticizing them or feels shame, they might come back with, oh, right, because you're such a perfect parent with all of your psychology books, contempt conveys disgust, and it's really toxic to relationships. The fourth horseman is stonewalling. This happens when one partner withdraws from the interaction, shutting down instead of engaging, and the person might physically leave the room or mentally check out, refusing to respond or engage with the conversation. It's popular in our culture to see men's normal role in relationships as stonewalling, but this is actually a response to overstimulation. When we can't cope with what our partner is saying, it can feel safer to just not be there anymore. And if we can't leave physically, then we can leave mentally and emotionally. And these patterns can become particularly intense when discussing parenting, because the emotional stakes are so high, awareness is the first step to change if you notice these patterns emerging in your conversations about discipline, that's your cue to pause and reset. And there are specific antidotes to these patterns, so using I statements instead of criticism. So and it has to be a feeling, right? So, if you're saying, I feel criticized, still in judgment, so I feel overwhelmed when bedtime takes two hours, right? And if you're not sure, how to decide whether a feeling is a feeling or a criticism, use the feelings list at yourparentingmojo.com/feelings. And if you, especially if you find yourself saying things like, I feel like the next thing coming out of your mouth is probably going to be a criticism, the antidote to defensiveness is taking responsibility for some part of the situation that's happening, even if it's only a very tiny part.

So if you're talking about how your partner shouted at your kids, you might acknowledge something you said or did that didn't help or that escalated the situation. The antidote to contempt is building a culture of appreciation, so finding things that each of you do that make valuable contributions to the family, like I admire how patient you are when you're explaining things to the kids. Finally, if you notice your partner stonewalling, or if you're checked out and you're not you realize you're not listening anymore, you can take a break from the conversation to help you re-regulate. You can't find a path that works for both of you, if only one of you is participating in the conversation when you're discussing different approaches to discipline, watch for these patterns. Watch for the horsemen, be willing to name them gently when they appear. Criticism is the most helpful one to stop, because that starts the cascade of all the other horsemen. So if you realize you've said something your partner is perceived as critical, you can say, Oh, I'm wondering if that landed in a way that I didn't intend, can I try and say that again? Or if you heard some criticism from your partner, you could say, I notice I'm getting defensive right now, can we take a quick break and come back in 10 minutes? When we use these kinds of guardrails, we're able to have a much deeper conversation than we would be able to have when we criticize each other and end up getting defensive and expressing contempt and stonewalling in the Parenting Membership, there are demo videos that I've recorded with couples so you can see them arguing, as they usually do, about an issue, and then how quickly they're able to have real conversations once they learn these tools. For each new cohort of the membership, I do group coaching calls where I coach a couple in front of other members, and then we talk about what we've seen. In one session last year, I coached two parents on what they should do about getting their five-year-old to stop sucking his thumb. I'm not going to play you any of the coaching session itself, because it was very emotional for the participants, as the wife expressed the pain that she felt over how they were handling the situation, the parents watching the session immediately saw how they could use these tools themselves in the situations they were in that had nothing to do with thumb sucking, and they shared how they wished they could engage in the same kind of deep listening with their own partners, and how easy it is to get caught in the pain of our interactions and the fact tennis where you just argue back and forth over what happened, instead of working to understand how you feel about the situation and what your needs are. Parent Jono specifically called out how having the defined process to follow helped the couple that we were coaching to go so much deeper than the surface level problems they'd been arguing about, to truly understand what are the challenges that they're having in their relationship.

It's pretty amazing. I was getting a bit emotional listening to you, and I didn't want to say a lot of what you just said. Then with Jen around, it was just so obvious how the guardrails prevented you getting off track, and how you were able to get into that, really able to listen to each other, and even seeing how hard it was. I think the bit where Jen stepped in, it was around that, saying, I feel hurt. And so how hard it is to say some of those things in your relationship, but if you don't say them, then you never address that. So you know, in half an hour or 45 minutes, we've got to something really significant that you may not have otherwise got to so I think that's really powerful to take away and know that. You know we can do that with those pretty simple guidelines to work towards. So, yeah, I just wanted to thank you both, because that's pretty amazing to be part of.

Parent Sally was on this call. She's divorced now you can hear me read a comment that she typed in the chat as the conversation was happening, and then we talk about it together for a bit.

Valley saying, I can see you watching this why I had so many issues in my relationship, specifically why these techniques were so problematic for me in our relationship, and how both my exes and my neurodivergences got in the way of practicing good communication. We tried Gottman and couldn't do. It watching it made it clear as to why. Sally, would you like to say any more about that, about why, why it was hard. You don't have to, if you don't want to.

Yeah, I think, for numerous reasons, just understanding, I guess, like so we were at a point where there was a lot of emotional sort of background sort of stuff going on, and there was just too much dysregulation, I think, and we weren't able to, and we're still not able to. We're still trying to do these methods separated, and we're making more progress with them separated, and at the moment, we're doing them through writing, because we because it's just slowing it down. So I'm a really fast speaker, and my husband is a really slow auditory processor. And so the combination of those two things together was just toxic, like it just didn't work, like it was it. And also, I think, we actually tried counseling with it and too, and we just got stuck on the same thing. It was a communication issue, and we tried the Gottman method, and it we just, we couldn't get past the criticism, like, and I think we've actually needed someone to sit there and just literally do what you just did, and actually just seeing it, seeing what it's supposed to look like, that's what the like, the words, and getting stuck on the semantics it will, like, it was just so messy, and we just couldn't, we just, and it was, like, I would go back over the conversations and go, what like, what happened like, what, where, like, how do we start here? And this was my intention. This was your intention. And we ended up here again. Like, just, we just couldn't stay on track, like it was quite as really interesting to see it from a I mean, I wish I'd known it at the beginning of our relationship, like 15 years ago. That would have really helped, but I don't think I've ever actually seen a really good problem-solving conversation ever between two people. So seeing it the first time, like even in therapy, like you didn't, we didn't see it

There's a lot more to having a great relationship than being able to disagree effectively. But this topic is where our relationships most clearly intersect with parenting. When you can talk about your disagreements in parenting in a way that doesn't create huge ruptures between you and actually brings you closer, then you can talk about your values and what's important to you without going into a tailspin. You can observe what's happening with your kids and use Joelle Killion’s feedback process to bring your parenting into alignment with your values without having a big blow up over it. Many parents come to the Parenting Membership thinking they need disciplinary tools for their kids, but what they really need is a framework for understanding their child's behavior, their own reactions, and how to bridge different parenting approaches in a way that strengthens rather than damages their family relationships. Parents in the membership often share that the most transformative aspect is not learning specific techniques, although we certainly provide those, but gaining insight into the why behind their parenting challenges. When you see that your partner is disciplining your kids out of fear that they won't succeed in life, and you want to move away from punitive discipline because you can see that it's damaging your relationship with your child, you can find a path forward with our help. Once you understand why you and your partner approach discipline so differently, we can help you to work together much more effectively. And the beautiful thing is that these conversations don't have to devolve into arguments every time.

They can become connecting experiences that actually strengthen your relationship. When you move beyond power struggles about who's right and instead focus on understanding each other's deeper concerns and values, you create a foundation for true partnership in parenting. We'll give you a sneak peek into the kind of coaching that you can get in the Parenting Membership as part of the Setting Loving(&effective!) Limits Workshop. When you join that full experience, you'll get the five group coaching sessions with me as part of the workshop, and as that bonus, you will get special access to one of the demo videos that are normally inside the parenting membership, so you can see how to use these tools with your own partner as well. If you're struggling with different discipline approaches in your family, I want you to know it's not just you and your partner who haven't figured this out. This is one of the most common challenges parents faces, and there's no quick fix or one size fits all solution. The path forward involves self-compassion, non-judgmental, curiosity about your partner's perspective, validation of each other's experiences, understanding the needs behind different approaches, clarity about your own values and a commitment to finding solutions that honor what matters best to both of you, this work is not easy, but it's profoundly worthwhile, not just for creating more harmony in your home, but for modeling healthy conflict resolution and relationship skills for your children. When they see you working through differences with respect and care, they learn powerful lessons about how to navigate their own relationships in the future. If you'd like support on this journey, consider joining us in the Setting Loving (&effective!) Limits Workshop starting May 7. You can sign up for that at yourparentingmojo.com/settinglimits. You can also explore the resources available in the parenting membership when enrollment opens for that on May 18, at yourparentingmojo.com/parentingmembership. You don't have to figure all this out on your own. You can get support every step of the way. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. If you found it helpful, I'd really appreciate it. If you would consider sharing it with friends who might be facing similar challenges as well.

Hi, this is Jess from rural East Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned, and don't forget to head to your parenting mojo.com to record your own message for the show you.