You’ve married the perfect partner (or at least perfect enough), and now you’ve started a family together. The new baby smells and sleepless nights have given way to toddler tantrums, defiant preschoolers, and kids with minds of their own. Suddenly, what seemed perfect on paper feels very different in the reality of laundry, meal prep and parenting. That person you thought was so closely aligned, is now parenting your children in all the wrong ways. Now what?

One of the biggest sources of couple conflict is different parenting approaches.

The reality of relationships is that even though you can be very aligned and similar in beliefs and actions in some ways, you can be very misaligned in others. What you thought were good parenting practices are being openly challenged by your partner. You think bedtime should be on a schedule; they think kids will drift off to sleep when they’re ready - there’s no need to force it. Your teenager defied curfew and is challenging your parental authority. Your partner wants to ground them for life; you’re tired of being “the bad guy”. You’re trying to set healthy food habits and your partner is slipping the kids cookies behind your back.

You see your partner as the problem, and if they would simply align with your ideas and parenting style, then all would be good and the kids would behave perfectly.

Parenting will teach and redefine you in ways no other life event will. While there is no one way to parent perfectly, there are parenting practices that will help you manage the chaos and help your kids grow up feeling loved and secure while also being amazing humans.

You and your partner are 2 different people. You come from 2 different experiences and have 2 different sets of expectations as a result. You can be aligned on most facets of parenting, and find yourself at odds on others. Finding balance between the two of you so that you can parent effectively may require a little education, a whole lot of insight and tools for working together instead of against one another.

If podcasts, books, parenting classes and long discussions haven’t moved the needle, it might be time to work with a professional relationship counselor to help you negotiate those differences. Click the button for a free consultation to see if marriage counseling might be the next right move for you.

You deserve a better parenting partnership — and your kids do too!