About the author: Joe Ogborn is a certified parent coach (Jai Institute for Parenting), co-founder of Strain Relief for Parents, and dad to a PDAer who works with families across 1:1 and group coaching to build a steadier home. Rather than focusing solely on staying calm in the moment, Joe helps parents look upstream — at how their home environment and family culture can be shaped so the harder moments happen less often, and with less intensity, and so parents and children alike have greater capacity to navigate them with confidence and repair afterward. His work centers on building more capacity, more clarity, and more composure at home. Joe has a keen interest in supporting couples as they work through their different parenting perspectives, helping them move toward alignment and more constructive communication — the very process explored in this article. He runs workshops and courses on Parenting as a Team.
Does this situation sound familiar?
Your child has a moment. One of you sees the defiance. The other sees an overwhelmed nervous system. One of you would never have spoken to your parents that way. And one of you wishes you had been able to.
You responded to your child’s behavior and now you’re arguing with your partner because, apparently, you should have done it differently. And it keeps happening.
My wife Lex and I spent the last five years navigating parenting as an adoptive couple to two daughters — and as a couple with real differences:
- Lex is American; I’m British.
- Lex grew up in a family where every emotion landed on the table, often in quite a strong way. I grew up in a home that was calmer and more restrained, but direct communication and negative emotions were not expressed as often.
- And on top of those different starting points, we’ve had to learn how to parent through adoption, trauma, insecure attachment, additional needs, and PDA together — as two people who didn’t always agree on what “the right response” even looked like.
Along the way we started asking: what do we wish someone had told us five years ago about doing this together, not just individually? This article shares the framework that we developed and has helped us decrease the frequency and intensity of tension around parenting together — and it’s still what we lean on when we’re not seeing eye to eye.
The Parenting Gap
That gap between how you and your partner instinctively respond to the same moment — we call it the parenting gap. Rather than seeing it as a problem to solve, it helps to understand where it’s actually coming from.
Picture a road trip. There are (at least!) three sources of friction on any journey with someone else:
- The guidebook — where do you each get your information about “the lay of the land?” Google Maps versus a trusted paper atlas versus twenty years of just knowing the roads.
- The route — even with the same map, one of you might want the scenic road and the other the motorway. Both get you there, but they’re different paths.
- The navigation — what happens in the car when you disagree? How do you handle the missed turn or the “I thought you said we were taking the motorway” moments?
Parenting, believe it or not, seems to work the same way.
- Your guidebook – What’s going into your shared guidebook for understanding your child’s behavior?
- Your route – Once you’re looking at similar information, can you apply it to your unique family situation and agree what path is best for you and your children?
- Your navigation – And when one of you shows up in a way the other doesn’t like, how do you talk about it without it escalating into a heated argument?
Your Guidebook
Everyone gets their parenting guidebook from somewhere — usually more than one source, and often without realizing it. When we say guidebook, we mean: what forms how you understand your child’s behavior; the values in your home; and what you believe is how you’d like to respond to any given situation. Common guidebooks include:
- Family of origin — “it’s how my parents did it and I turned out fine,” or the opposite: “I refuse to do what my parents did.”
- Culture — the norms you were raised in.
- Trusted people — a friend whose parenting you admire, a book, a podcast, a particular voice on Instagram.
- Research — it’s not uncommon for one partner in a pair to gravitate toward in-depth research around child development, PDA, etc.
- Experience — as time goes by, you pick up the particularities of what works with your children, and you and your partner will not always have the same experience to lean on.
- Instinct — simply trusting your gut.
None of these are necessarily “wrong.” The point isn’t to judge where your values come from — it’s to notice that you have them, and that your partner’s may come from somewhere completely different. And that means that you are quietly working from conflicting guidebooks.
A concrete example: imagine a child in anger taking scissors to the mane of a sibling’s toy horse. One guidebook says poor behavior needs to be nipped in the bud — time in a room, an apology required, maybe the toy taken away.
A different guidebook, informed by understanding a child’s brain and nervous system, might lead you toward co-regulating first and then involving the child in making things right — perhaps by helping buy a replacement toy rather than being punished for the damage.
The same behavior is met with two entirely different responses, both flowing logically from a different starting point. Put simply, you can’t get on the same page if you are not reading from the same guidebook.
Setting Expectations You Can Actually Hold Each Other To
Once you’re pulling from a similar guidebook, the next friction point is expectations — what you believe is the best path for your unique family. Borrowing from Peter Scazzero’s work on emotionally healthy relationships, a workable expectation needs to be four things: conscious, expressed, realistic, and agreed.
- Conscious and expressed: As an example, Lex would come home from work to a chaotic-feeling house and immediately feel her body tense, dreading the hours of tidying ahead — while I, home-educating the kids all day, hadn’t registered it as a problem at all. That expectation wasn’t conscious or expressed for either of us until Lex noticed it and then named it directly.
- Realistic: Then came the harder part: what’s actually realistic? It didn’t seem sensible to expect a spotless house before dinner given our priorities.
- Agreed: So we agreed on something smaller and mutual — a heads-up before Lex got home, or simply corralling the mess by the sink or popping toys in a box. Eventually it became a family rule: tidy one activity away before starting the next.
That family rule won’t be for everyone, and it goes against some parenting advice we’d come across, which argued that open-ended, unstructured mess is good for imaginative play. We had to weigh that against what actually worked for our household and our own capacity to show up well.
That’s the point — an expectation only holds weight once it’s been made conscious, said out loud, checked for realism, and agreed by both of you. Skip any one of those steps and you’ll find yourself holding your partner to a standard they never actually signed up for, which is a recipe for low-level resentment or arguments.
Talking It Through Without Escalating
Even with a shared guidebook and agreed expectations, there will be moments where one of us shows up differently than the other hoped. How we talk about that moment often matters more than anything else.
We lean heavily on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication framework here, although we prefer the term “constructive communication”. The key distinction is between interpretation and observation. Interpretation assigns meaning, intent, or character to what your partner did — “you totally overreacted,” “you’re being so harsh.” Observation simply states what happened, without the judgment: “I noticed your voice got louder and you slammed the door.”
The full framework moves through four steps:
- Observation — what actually happened, without labels or comparisons.
- Feeling — “I feel sad / worried / frustrated…”
- Need — the unmet need behind that feeling. All needs are valid, whether or not you agree with them.
- Request — a specific, “gentle” ask: “Could we consider…?”
So instead of: “You never do this, I’m always left to do everything, why can’t you pull your weight” — try: “I’ve done bedtime every night this past week. I feel sad because I’d like us to share that responsibility. Could we look at alternating nights?”
It felt stilted at first — it was genuinely a bit robotic to walk through observation, feeling, need, request in our head mid-argument. But over time it became more natural, and we stopped needing the scaffolding as consciously.
It’s worth naming, too: your partner can still say no to the request. That’s not a failure of the framework — it just opens the next question: if not that, what would you propose instead? The goal isn’t compliance; it’s landing somewhere you can both actually agree to.
The Bigger Picture: Clarity, Capacity, Competence, Commitment
Even once you have clarity — a shared guidebook, agreed expectations, and a way to talk it through — your partner (or you) won’t always show up as hoped. It’s worth asking why, because “they don’t care” is (hopefully) rarely the full answer. We think about it as four possibilities:
- Clarity — do you actually agree on the expectation, or has it never really been discussed?
- Capacity — is there simply nothing left in the tank right now? You can be fully aligned on the destination and still not have the fuel to get there.
- Competence — is this a skill still being learned? If you grew up in a volatile home, staying calm under pressure isn’t a switch you can just flip — it takes repeated practice.
- Commitment — is there a genuine lack of openness to engaging at all?
A quick story on capacity: after a difficult morning where Lex hadn’t handled things the way she’d wanted to, I stepped in, Lex went upstairs to get space, and ten minutes later I came up with a coffee. I simply said: “I know that wasn’t how you wanted to show up this morning. It’s not a clarity issue — we’re aligned on that. It’s a capacity issue. I know you’re just running low.” No breakdown of what went wrong, just recognition. It completely changed the shape of the day.
On competence: my daughter and I used to get into these standoffs — a battle of wills that I, staying calm, would sometimes win by outlasting her, which only escalated things further. It turned out what she actually needed in that moment wasn’t me holding my ground — it was a hug. The next time it happened, as we reached a point of escalation, she shouted: “Daddy, you said you were going to hug me.” Learning to let go of “winning” the standoff and reach for connection instead took real, repeated practice. That’s competence — something you have to build over time, and often with repeated, genlte reminders from your partner and even your children!
On commitment: perhaps the most painful situation — and one I hear about more often than I would like — is when one partner simply seems to disengage from parenting at all or lacks a desire to change how they show up. I’m wary of offering any trite advice in such a situation. But something I have observed is that what looks like a lack of commitment can sometimes be something else entirely — fear of stepping into a role they don’t feel equipped for, grief over the version of parenthood they expected versus the one they have, or simply being at capacity without the bandwidth to do anything differently. My only hope is that the tools we rely on for constructive communication might also serve such a situation and uncover the feelings and unmet needs behind such behavior.
Getting on the Same Page: What’s Next?
Getting on the same page is not achieved through a single conversation — it’s an ongoing commitment to work through the tough stuff, knowing that the hard work of building a strong foundation now is far less work than living with disagreement and arguments on repeat. None of this resolves overnight, and none of it is about getting everything “right.”
For some, it feels manageable to do it alone. For others, more support is needed, and I offer a workshop, a guided course (four weeks, limited spaces, starts September 9th), and coaching that helps couples set aside the time and commit to working this through to see long-lasting change.
And as I bring this article to a close, it might be helpful to identify where you and your partner are on the journey:
- Do you have a shared guidebook or are you both reading from different maps?
- Are your expectations worth revisiting out loud?
- And finally, can you benefit from a way of talking to each other that gives you the best shot of feeling understood by one another?
And it’s helpful to remember that we are not aiming for perfect alignment, but a steadier way of finding your way back to each other when you’re not on the same page.
