Splitting Hairs (Or Tearing Your Hair Out): When Parents Disagree Over Discipline

So what happens when you don’t agree? When your partner favours a gentle approach, but you want to send your child to their room?

One mother, speaking anonymously to HuffPost UK, said she’s on the softer side of disciplining her seven-year-old son, whereas her husband – who comes from a culture where it’s both legal and accepted to hit a child – disagrees.

“My siblings and I were beaten, not just slapped, by our parents, and not by the parent you might expect,” she said. “We have no feelings for our parents at all now and this has affected the way I discipline. My husband grew up with the belt, but bears no rancour at all because it’s totally normalised.”

She and her husband discuss how to discipline their kids, she says, adding: “He doesn’t hit our son because he knows I wouldn’t stand for it.”

Behaviour support assistant Kate Jones, who has spent 15 years working with troubled kids, said at home she tries to use “gentle parenting”, where her daughter is only told off if she is being unsafe or unkind, otherwise she’s pretty free to explore and experiment. But even Jones doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with her husband. “He nags our daughter a lot, over-explains and doesn’t use age-appropriate language,” she said. “It causes a lot of arguments – but I have to remind myself I have been trained in this for years!”

[Read More: How (not) to discipline our kids]

Other parents managed to come to a compromise – despite calling it a “work in progress”. One mum with a seven-year-old daughter told us she and her partner had a chat about how they discipline their daughter differently, and came to the conclusion they could both benefit from talking to her more about her feelings. “We’re trying to take her away and chat to about her choices – to remind her they have consequences,” she said. “We’ve decided we want to parent more alongside her now, rather than use so much discipline – but that’s taking some adjustment.”

The good news is that if you and your partner do differ on discipline techniques, you’re not alone. “Parents disagree, and this is a normal experience in family relationships,” David Patlin tells the Child Development Institute. “The issue is not that parents have disagreements about child-rearing, it’s how those disagreements are expressed in front of the children.” 

He said working out these issues earlier, rather than later, is crucial – as is sitting down and talking about “touchy but important” topics such as smacking or how you will react to a child wetting the bed. 

Whatever you do, don’t triangulate the other parent, i.e. jump in the middle of a conflict without being asked. “You might feel like you have a better set of tools to deal with the situation, but it undermines the other parent’s ability to work out a problem to its completion,” he said.