When Your Partner Parents Differently
How bad is it — and what should you do — if you and your partner are not on the same page when it comes to how to raise your kids?
Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.
Welcome to today’s Dear Melinda column, in which I answer a broad array of parenting questions with science. Today’s question came in a few months ago from a parent who took my subscriber survey:
Dear Melinda,
Is it bad if my partner and I have different disciplinary styles and approaches to parenting? I hear that consistency is important, so is it hurting my kids that he and I don’t always handle things the same way?
I suspect, whenever multiple people are working together to raise children, that stylistic differences are almost always going to arise. We all come to child-rearing with different histories, ideologies and goals. But how do these differences affect our kids?
To find out, I called two researchers who have studied this very question: Psychologist Marsha Kline Pruett, the Maconda Brown O’Connor Chair at the Smith College School for Social Work, who is the co-author (with her husband) of the book Partnership Parenting: How Men and Women Parent Differently -- Why It Helps Your Kids and Can Strengthen Your Marriage, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a psychologist who runs the Children and Parents Lab at Ohio State, whose research focuses on co-parenting relationships and how they affect kids.
What these psychologists told me was largely reassuring. “Children actually thrive from having parents with different styles — if the parents respect each other's differences, and back each other up and support each other, as opposed to undermine them or compete about their differences,” Pruett said.
Children, she explained, are adept at discerning how rules and expectations change based on the situation they’re in. They know, for instance, to be a bit more polite at Grandma’s house than they are at home, and they know that they can say certain words in front of friends but not in front of teachers. So they can also adapt to parents who have different expectations or different ways of handling things, Pruett said. And sometimes these differences are useful. They can, for instance, promote different skill sets. And it can be helpful for kids to hear parents’ expectations or values conveyed in varied ways.
Schoppe-Sullivan agreed. In most partnerships, she said, two parents will have different ways of approaching issues or responsibilities, and that’s fine. “Having different approaches is not necessarily bad, as long as those approaches are reasonably within the range of being developmentally appropriate,” she said.
So differences are OK — as long as certain conditions are met. Let’s unpack those conditions a bit more, though, because they are important.
First, and this may sound obvious, but parenting approaches should never be developmentally inappropriate or abusive. (If you’re not sure what qualifies as abusive, check out this brochure from the NIH’s Child Welfare Information Gateway. And here’s a good CDC resource on what kinds of parenting approaches are developmentally appropriate by age.) Basically, Schoppe-Sullivan said, you want to ask yourself: Is this something that's so different that you feel like it could be harmful to your child's development? If so, then you do need to step in (more on how to do that in a minute). “But if it's just a different way of doing it, you might just support [your partner] and say, ‘Okay, well, my child's going to learn different things from from different people.’”
Second, if two parents have very different rules and boundaries, that can be confusing if it leaves the child wondering what’s OK to do and what’s not. For instance, one parent probably shouldn’t be telling their kid that she can watch the iPad before breakfast if the other parent says she can’t. “If children are spending time trying to figure out what the boundaries are between different parents, that's energy and time they're spending on that, which they could be spending on other things,” Schoppe-Sullivan said. Generally speaking, consistency is generally most helpful in the first two years of life, Pruett added. That’s when habits and schedules are most important for helping kids self-regulate; you don’t want one parent following a totally different nap or feeding schedule than the other.
Third, parents shouldn’t undermine or yell at each other about their parenting in front of their kids. “It's hostile conflict that's most detrimental to children's feelings of security in the family and social and emotional development,” Schoppe-Sullivan said. In other words, parental differences often aren’t anything to worry about, but if the differences are eroding your relationship with your partner and this is clear to your kids, that’s going to be a problem.
I also asked Schoppe-Sullivan if there’s research on whether the gender composition of parenting partnerships matters — whether, for instance, different-gender couples are more or less consistent in their parenting than same-gender parents are. She said she’s not aware of any research on this yet, but she speculated that the gender composition or sexual orientation of parents probably doesn’t matter that much. However, she said, because same-gender parents (and adoptive parents) often have to overcome more hurdles to become parents, they may have more conversations about parenting goals and styles in advance of having kids, and thus be more consistent in their parenting.
Gender may, however, shape how parents parent, largely due to gender expectations and stereotypes. Research suggests, for instance, that dads tend to play with their children more than moms do (perhaps because they have fewer parental responsibilities?) and promote more risk-taking. Pruett’s work has also shown that mothers tend to help their kids thrive by nurturing their sense of security, and by leveling the playing field so their kids get the best chance to succeed, while fathers’ nurturing tends to be more focused on preparing kids to succeed out in the world.
If you’re unhappy with how your partner is handling things, what should you do? Wait until you’ve calmed down and then approach them with humility. “Enter the conversation as though you are not the only expert in the family,” Pruett suggested. You might say something like, When I saw you do X earlier, I became concerned about Y. (Schoppe-Sullivan says “I” statements are a good way to start, because they are often less accusatory than “you” statements.)
Another strategy is to initiate an information-gathering conversation — I noticed you did X. Can you help me understand why you handled it that way? This approach will help prevent your partner from becoming defensive, and you might be surprised (and swayed) when you hear the rationale behind their decision. If you can’t make headway, couples therapy may be helpful, Schoppe-Sullivan said.
Also, don’t forget to commend your partner when they do something you like — if they stay up late to help your kid with homework or handle a playground interaction especially well. We shouldn’t always think of differences as being potentially bad; we also need to remember that our partners may be able to handle situations with more grace or insight than we could. Our children, in other words, are probably benefiting from our combined wisdom.
I’m still running a 20% off sale for paid subscriptions, which runs through Tuesday! Every subscription supports my reporting here. You can also, of course, give gift subscriptions — the holidays are coming up, and my newsletter won’t be affected by the totally screwed-up supply chain!
Book news: My book has been chosen as Monica + Andy’s October Book Club pick, hooray! I was also on the Suburban Women Problem podcast this week.
