Mother Inferior

Brief: Counter-Parenting refers to the tendency to make decisions not in accordance with what you or the child may want or need but in opposition to what another party wants or needs. While especially common with divorced or separated parents, this is an emotional instinct that plays out in small ways in all kinds of relationships. In this post we discuss what counter-parenting really is, how it plays out, the damage it causes and how you can avoid it.

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Counter-Parenting and How It Hurts Everyone.

A few years ago, when we were moving from a small town to a small city, we began the routine scramble of looking for a new school for the kid and a strange back-and-forth began between my partner and his former wife (because they are legally obligated to discuss new schools but not to agree on them). She suggested the kid attend a convent school, he said no immediately despite having been to one himself and agreeing that it was a good school. Then he suggested that the kid go to an international school but she was vehemently opposed despite having previously complained about the fact that when we lived in a small town the kid wasn’t getting access to big-city perks like international schools. The discussion was so convoluted and prolonged that by the end of it, my partner was suggesting the convent school and she was the one opposed to it. It made absolutely no sense! The decision regarding a child’s schooling may be consequential but it is also a simple enough component of parenting to not need to be contentious, but they were not parenting, they were counter-parenting.

Counter-parenting is a term that first gained popularity in conjunction with separated or divorced co-parents who continue to have a contentious relationship or harbour suppressed feelings of resentment towards one another that manifest within their parenting, often in indirect ways. In very simple terms, counter-parenting is disagreeing with or acting in opposition to a particular (parenting) decision, whether or not you actually disagree with it, simply because you do not like the source of the suggestion. It’s very easy to get up on a moral high-horse about this and condemn both parties for acting out of their emotions as opposed to in the interest of the child, but before you do that, think about this emotional instinct. I suppose you were once a teenager, and at the time, your parents probably told you to try something, not things like studying or respecting your elders, but something framed more like a suggestion, like listening to a song they liked or trying a new dish at a restaurant and you said no, not because you don’t like music or food, but because you didn’t think your parents could possibly be a good source for those recommendations. Obviously, in this example, you likely weren’t harbouring resentment towards your parents, or at least, not any more resentment than is baseline for your standard teenager, but the emotional instinct to act in opposition is the same.

It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to divorced co-parents (and often also extends to parents who stay together for the children but really do not like or love each other). Despite what Pammi Aunty from the corner shop might say, young people these days don’t actually make the decision to divorce, especially after having had children together, for small-small things. The perspective that has changed is what qualifies as a small thing, I suppose, because there was a time when a lifetime of marital dissatisfaction was socially-viewed as a small thing in comparison to presenting as a unit for  the children and it’s getting harder and harder to convince people they should spend their entire life with a person they do not like and view it as a small thing, and it will all work-out eventually. However, once you do pull that trigger and stand before a judge and justify why your marriage should be dissolved, it becomes hard to retain grace for the person you have rejected, not just as a partner but also as part of the parenting unit. Divorce is a brutal process and very rarely do you have the kind of divorce (or are even legally able to) where you can simply say—we aren’t great partners for each other anymore so we don’t want to be together but we don’t loathe each other either—and have that hold-up. Most of the time the process itself encourages you to dig through the lives of each other and find the villainy, and when it’s all over, it tells you to forget the Machiavellian-view you had to develop and work together at raising your child in accordance with the custodial agreement. This is an idiotic system but I get it, the law is not therapy. You have to take your own ass to therapy and fix your shit.

In the meanwhile, you will continually run-up against issues where you find yourself framing them as me versus them, and feeling the need to have your suggestion be the one that is enforced, and this is especially egregious when one parent has more legal power than the other. For instance, my spouse has permanent custody, which means he can make a lot more of the decisions that need to be made but it also means it is a lot more dangerous for him to operate out of a place where he only makes decisions that are contrary to what the other biological parent suggests. I cannot personally relate to the temptation because one of the unexpected privileges of being the step-parent is that I didn’t go through the relationship that led to this child, which means that I actually get to operate out of a blank slate (if I choose to, because it would also be very easy to take the side of the parent to whom I am attached) and it means that when I suspect that either one of them may be acting out of dislike for one another, I can apprise them of the bias (and how they take it is on them). Ultimately, it is true that the right way to act is the best interest of the child but that phrase, you know, it’s so neat and clean, when its reality is much more complex. Convent school or international school, they’re both good schools, so the child isn’t being short-changed which makes counter-parents more comfortable with fighting one another because you also get to believe you’re acting in the best-interest of your child and in that way, you start to weaponise (what you believe is) your moral high-ground.

If you feel like this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not divorced and you like your co-parent just fine, you may be right, but in contemplating this pattern over the years, I have come to realise that we don’t just counter-parent against our former spouses, sometimes we do it against our own parents (and how they raised us) too. I had a friend who was constantly telling me that he did not believe in forcing his kids to finish the food on their plates because his parents did that to him and he hated it so much that he developed an unhealthy relationship with food itself. Now, my friend has a point, the whole “there are kids starving in XYZ” narrative is logically-flawed. Kids are not starving because I didn’t finish my peas, they are starving because capitalism has made it so that it is more cost-effective to throw food out than it is to feed the entire population of the world (for whom we actually do generate enough food) and I very rarely encounter any parent who explains this to their children. That being said, his daughter would eat dessert but skip the peas which meant her nutrition was kinda fucked and his policy made it so that she could get away with that because he told her, always, to eat as much as she wanted, and he couldn’t violate his policy because it was healing his own trauma to be a different kind of parent than his parents.

This is counter-parenting too. You may believe that acting in defiance to a specific condition is subversion or liberation, but if you are as pedantic in your subversion, and your behaviour is just as defined by a single factor (even when acting against it), it is the same thing. You have to parent the child you have, what you do has to depend on what that specific child needs and responds to, and sometimes that means doing the things you wish you didn’t have to do because of your own associations with them. That does not mean everything your parents did was right, it does not mean your former spouses are suddenly in complete harmony with you but it does mean you have to rise past taking sides. It does mean that when you are fighting about an outcome-neutral situation simply because the alternate suggestion is coming from a person to whom you are opposed, you have to take a hard look at yourself and opt out of that fight because when you do that you will suddenly find  yourself listening to the party that matters most in this situation. You will find yourself listening to the child and that is the most important voice of all.