Couple
You set a rule and they break it as soon as you leave the room and the kids have learned which parent to ask for what.
You’re stricter. They’re more lenient. Or vice versa. You correct the kids and they undermine you. You set a rule and they break it as soon as you leave the room. The kids learn quickly which parent to ask for what. The fight is happening across the kids. They hear it. They’ve stopped trying to please both of you because pleasing both is impossible.
The parenting differences aren’t the real issue. The real issue is who gets to decide and how the disagreement gets handled.
The pattern resets the next time the kids do something difficult.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely both came up in households with very different parenting styles, and you each absorbed the script your parents ran. One of you may have grown up under strict rules and either swore you’d parent the same way or swore you’d parent the opposite. The other may have grown up with little structure and arrived at the same fork. You arrived at this marriage with two parenting frameworks that activate each other every time the kids do something difficult, and the disagreement has had nowhere to go because neither of you wants to be the one who concedes the question of who’s doing it right.
The rule treats parenting as a behavior to coordinate. The disagreement is structural. Each of you parents from a different framework. The framework difference is not going to be resolved by an agreement to act differently than you think.
The undermining is also a message. The lenient parent undermining the strict one is communicating disapproval without saying it. The strict parent escalating is communicating that the lenient one isn’t taking it seriously. The kids are the unwilling messengers.
For the broader marriage pattern, see We have the same fight over and over and Our marriage is in trouble . For the parenting side directly, see I yell at my kids and feel guilty .
The kids are the surface. The fight underneath is about which of you is doing it right.
Strategic therapy takes the disagreement off the kids and puts it back between the two of you. The undermining and the escalating both have a job, and we change what each of you does at the moment that job is about to run. Once the kids stop being the channel, you get to argue about parenting where parenting actually lives, between you.
You parent as a team. The kids stop being the proxy for the fight you’ve been having through them.
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