The only thing harder than parenting a teenager, is agreeing with your spouse on how to parent your teenager.

If you agree most of the time about parenting your teen, feel 100% supported by your spouse in all parenting decisions, tend to discuss discipline issues with your spouse in advance of big decisions, all in best interest of your teens and tweens, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say you’re the exception.

There are so many factors that go into our parenting mindset: how we were raised, our worldview, media influences, peer influences, our attachment style, our emotions, mental health, substance use, how well we get along with our spouse, not to mention the specific behavior being exhibited by our teen.

Raising kids together just seems to emphasize all the differences between a couple. It would be close to a miracle if every married couple saw eye to eye on all parenting issues.

Of course, it’s even more difficult to agree on parenting issues if you’re divorced. And I’ll refer to a couple of other episodes about that in the show notes—but today, I want to talk to you about parenting disagreements between married parents, trying to do this together on a daily basis. Let’s do it.

PODCAST INTRO

The family is a complicated ecosystem in which the behavior of one person causes a ripple effect where every other member of the family thinks, feels, or behaves in response to that behavior.

In a perfect world, parents counterbalance. If one parent’s in a bad mood the other can step in and smooth things out or if the other parent hasn’t been getting along great with one of the teens, the other can step in to play “bad cop” so as not to make that relationship any worse. This is parents working together, intuitively, to try and keep the ecosystem running as smoothly as one can.

Problems arise when, instead of taking turns balancing each other out, parents get stuck in certain roles within the family—like one being the strict disciplinarian and the other being too lenient.

The process through which this happens is understandable and is so common. It happens in all different areas of life, not just parenting. When one person feels a certain way about an issue and are confronted with someone else’s opposite view, they tend to dig their heels in even more and become even more extreme or more rigid in their views. It’s called polarization.

Think politics, religion, education system—and of course, parenting.

One parent sees the other’s attitudes and parenting practices in one or more areas, as extremely negative for the kid and is constantly stepping in. But rather than trying to pull things into middle ground and work the problem, they go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.

After a few times a pattern starts to set in where the parents begin to take on these polar opposite roles in the family. Instead of balancing each other out or working together, they lock horns at the extremes. And once locked in this pattern, the entire family ecosystem is off-balance, kids feel the tension and are even likely to join in and take sides or play parents off each other.

I can tell you that this certainly happened in my family when my son was a teenager. I felt my husband was too lenient and that he wasn’t backing me up like he should. He felt I was too harsh and lacked empathy. Turns out, he was much more correct than I was, but he too was at the extreme of total non-confrontation. And in that span of time when things were spinning out of control, I became more firmly convinced that we had to control our son before he got hurt, and he became more withdrawn from any confrontation because he was afraid our son would hurt himself. And all that tension and arguing just added fuel to the fire and made the situation so much worse than if we’d both been able to see there was a middle ground.

When parents are polarized and actively disagreeing about how to parent a teen, it’s usually because there’s some behavior you’re trying to correct in your teen and much of the time these disagreements are happening in full view of them. Not only will the teen’s behavior worsen, but they will often begin mimicking the parent that benefits them the most and will gang up with them against the other parent. Again—fuel to the fire.

Laura Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt give other examples of polarizing parenting roles in their book, Getting to Calm:

The helicopter parent versus the laissez-faire parent. Let’s say your 12-year old’s been invited for a sleepover at someone’s house from school but you’ve never met the parents. You say, “no way” and the other parent says, “what’s the big deal?” You want to know the parents first, find out who else lives in the home, where they live, whether they own guns or do drugs, and what their attitude is about supervision and bedtime and phone in the room after bedtime, and on and on. Your spouse says you’re making a mountain out of a molehill and that you can meet them when you drop your kid off and to stop worrying about everything when there’s been no reason to worry.

Then there’s the slacker parent versus the designer parent. Perhaps your spouse is all about college resume-building, academics, and sports, and filling the entire summer with enrichment and volunteer work and gets anxious if your teen has a single B or an idle moment. You take the opposite view—that teen’s need their downtime and shouldn’t be forced to feel pressure to perform for parents academically or any other way and that college is not that important these days.

They also describe the unfiltered expresser and the stonewaller. This is generally where one parent is outwardly emotional, unable to regulate their emotions and the other parent is almost afraid to make things worse and just keeps quite, not even acknowledging the other’s emotions or trying to avoid them altogether.

And then there’s the martyr and the Disneyland parent. Now, the book says it’s martyr mom and Disneyland dad, but that doesn’t have to be the case at all—I’ve definitely seen it the other way around. It’s just where the martyr parent feels they do all the heavy lifting (the detail work) in the family and the other parent doesn’t really see all the details and would rather do the enjoyable things, when it comes to kids, and doesn’t want to disappoint or discipline.

Now, in every situation where there’s polarization, what’s the underlying issue? What causes these behaviors in each parent?

Have you heard me mention the cognitive triangle before? Thoughts, Feelings and Behavior on the 3 points of the triangle. If you change any one of those 3 elements, the other 2 also change.

Normally I talk about how thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to Behavior. If you can change your thoughts, you can change your feelings or emotions, which will change your behavior.

For example, let’s say you think the only way for your teen to live a happy and successful life is to make straight A’s, ace the SATs, and fill their college resume with lots of sports and community service, so they can get into the best college and pursue a STEM career so they can earn within the top 1% in the nation.

Those thoughts are going to cause certain emotions or feelings in you if your teen brings home a C- on a final exam, right? Anger, frustration, fear and anxiety even sadness. What do those feelings lead to? Doling out consequences, lectures, yelling maybe, restrictions on the phone so they can study harder.

And if you’re the other parent, you may see them as being overbearing, materialistic, superficial, overreactive, authoritarian. You’ll also be angry—but with your spouse. You’ll likely feel protective for your teen and defensive. So, you retreat to the exact opposite corner, defending your kid, saying it’s no big deal, to leave them alone, etc. There may be arguing, the teen may get involved, and from there, it spirals out of control as each of you dig in even further.

Our thoughts and emotions play a primary role in our parenting. Not only regarding this polarization effect but in every aspect.

For example, if you only see the other spouse in this scenario as materialistic and overbearing, and don’t dig further to have empathy for why they’re behaving this way, it’s even more likely that you’ll never be able to negotiate with them and discuss these parenting issues.

Think about why they’re this way—why they think and feel the way they do about college and success.

How did their parents raise them? What were their attitudes and behaviors towards you spouse about this issue? Were they punished severely if they didn’t make an A? Were their parents more concerned with grades and appearances than your spouse’s feelings? Did they insist on an elite college and a certain major?

Or maybe your spouse regrets they didn’t go to an elite college or didn’t go to college at all, or they hate their job and want a better life for their kids. There are many reasons we think and feel the way we do about parenting issues (about all issues) but often even we don’t realize it.

Discussing the origin of some of these thoughts and ideas can shed a lot of light on the subject and potentially help you and your spouse reach a middle ground.

But even if you don’t get that far, if nothing else, perhaps their story can give you some insight and empathy about why they parent the way they do, which can help you  regulate your emotions about it and help manage your behavioral approach with them about this issue.

Again, that’s how this works. Thoughts, emotions, and behavior are interrelated and if we don’t pause to consider why we or our spouse thinks and feels about things, we’ll never be able to respond the way we’d like to.

But it’s not just polarization where this is necessary. You don’t have to be at polar opposite ends of the spectrum on an issue to disagree and have problems parenting your teen.

Perhaps you feel your spouse is too lenient and you just want to take a slightly different approach, or you feel they’re too authoritarian (too focused on outward behavior and too harsh in their discipline) and you’d like to take a middle of the road, warmer, kinder more authoritative approach. These differences can still cause arguments and make parenting your teen much more difficult.

In any case where there’s disagreement, you need to examine thoughts and feelings, you still need to try to understand and empathize with your spouse, you need to discuss these things in a calm and neutral setting and not in the heat of the moment. You need to come to an overall agreement on your parenting.

Let me give you some tips for having such a conversation:

• Make an appointment with them to go somewhere outside the house. It could be as simple as a walk around the block or as formal as a dinner out.

 

• Let them know the reason you want to talk is because you realize you two haven’t been agreeing on everything about parenting your teen and that you’d like to talk about it without distractions so you can get on the same page going forward. Make sure you say it in a way that let’s them know you’re not blaming and this isn’t going to be a lecture—it’s about understanding each other and being better for your teen.

 

• So, instead of talking about specific issues, I suggest starting out with a more generalized discussion about how you were both parented. It’s so important to talk this through because this is where most of our parenting comes from whether we like to admit it or not. And if you’ve gotten this far together and haven’t have a deep discussion about this, it’s not too late.

 

It’s critical to face the thoughts and emotions about your upbringing. Dig deep. Each of you should talk about it, explore how you were disciplined, what you think your parents were focused on, how they spoke to you and treated you on a daily basis – everything.

 

This may be as far as you get in this first discussion—that’s fine because it’s so important. In the next conversations, you’ll both be able to see it from a more empathetic headspace—understanding this background about each other. So, make anotherr appointment and keep talking.

 

• The next conversation can be about your overall parenting goals—the family values you want to instill in your kids. Again, just because you’ve made it to the teen years without having this discussion is not unusual and it’s perfectly okay to do it now. Having a set of values that you can always hold up as a compass for your parenting can help so much with individual issues and your overall parenting style.

 

For example, do your values include generosity, work ethic, education, loyalty, kindness? Agreeing on these values is also crucial because if you feel kindness is at the top of the list and your spouse feels financial success is at the top, you’re going to have many more arguments down the road and much more polarization. Often, all it takes is actually thinking and talking about these values to realize perhaps you’ve been focused on the wrong things.

 

• Discussing your values can then steer the conversation into the overall parenting style you two would like to incorporate. Again, it’s not too late to do this. Most of us never, ever have this discussion and it’s why we can’t seem to agree on many things.

 

But now that you have more awareness about your own and the other person’s childhood and you’ve agreed on the values you want to instill in your kids, the next logical point in the conversation is how are you going to manage the emotions your childhood brings up and instill the values you want in your family—by what means are you going to get there?

 

• If you can come to an agreement about your overall parenting style then each issues that arises with your teen will simply be an examination of how to address it according to your parenting style and family value system.

 

I’ve talked on the podcast before about the authoritative parenting style being the best for kids according to mountains of scientific evidence (because it’s focused on warmth and kindness while also having rules, firm boundaries, and discipline.) I’ll link to some other episodes in the show notes that you can either share with your spouse or listen to together as you’re working though this part. This may take several conversations.

Now, I’ll go ahead and say that going through Parent Camp together will help you tremendously in getting on the same page with your parenting style and knowing generally how you’ll address every issue with your teen before it comes up. There’s a link at the bottom of the episode description where you can check it out.

Now, here are a few tips for having these or any other conversations with your spouse:

Always use “I statements” rather than “you statements”. In other words, you want to talk to them without blaming, shaming or pointing the finger.

This is much less likely to elicit a defensive come-back than saying something like, “If you keep doing XYZ, this is going to happen”.  So, try to us “I feel”, “I think” “I wonder if…” rather than finger-pointing.

Make sure you’re also listening really well when they’re talking. Be extremely conscientious about listening to every word without interrupting or arguing.

When they finish, acknowledge any feelings they’ve expressed and summarize what they said and ask them if you got it right. This is to make sure they know you’ve listened fully and understand where they’re coming from and how they feel about it (you always want to do this in any serious conversation – including those with your teen.)

Be willing to have these conversations. Do whatever you can to get your spouse alone and talk it out. If you’ve become polarized or don’t seem to be focused on the same values, or aren’t on the same page regarding parenting style, it’s not too late for these conversations. You can’t avoid it anymore. Your teen and your other kids need you to be as united as possible when it comes to parenting. You need to at least give it your best shot.

 

Alright, that’s it for Speaking of Teens today. I’m glad you were here with me and made it to the end. If you’re new here, I hope you’ll come back. And if you’re an OG listener, thank you so much for sticking around. I appreciate you either way.

And if you’ve gotten any value out of today’s show please consider sharing it with someone else.

Until next time, remember, try to connect in at least some small way with your teen each and every day.