The First People You Have to Convince… Parenting Process

By Tyler Seabolt, LCSW | Bridge Family Therapy

It is almost never about the thing that set it off.

Advocating for your child does not start at a school meeting. It starts with the person you share a kitchen with.

You have explained your child before. More than once, to more than one person, in more or less the same words. The thing that looks like defiance and is not. The thing that looks like laziness and is not. The thing that happens at four in the afternoon and never at nine in the morning.

Ask a parent where the advocating happens and most will say school — the meetings, the emails, the plan with a number in its name. That is the part with a procedure attached, so it is the part that feels official.

It is not where it starts. Long before any meeting, you are explaining your child to your partner, your mother, your brother, your best friend. And you are accommodating them at home all day, in a hundred small arrangements nobody writes down and nobody approves.

Underneath it there is usually a specific fear, and it is worth saying out loud: what if nobody ever sees what I see?

Nobody is misreading your child on purpose.

The problem is almost never that people are refusing to see it. Most of the time they are reading your child in good faith, with the wrong information, using assumptions that work for most children and do not work for yours.

There is a name for this. The researcher Damian Milton called it the double empathy problem: when two people whose minds work differently try to understand each other, both of them struggle, and neither of them is broken. The gap sits between two ways of thinking rather than inside one of them.

Worth being precise, because the honest version is more useful than the bold one. What thins out across that gap is not information so much as rapport — the easy, wordless sense of being on the same page. Autistic people together tend to have that ease; so do non-autistic people together; across the gap it runs lower. Not because anyone is failing, but because rapport is built from shared assumptions and the assumptions are not shared. (The research clusters on autism, and one recent study did not replicate the headline finding. The idea reaches further than the evidence has been gathered, which is worth saying rather than hiding.)

What it changes is who has to change. If the gap belongs to both sides, closing it is not a matter of fixing your child until they are legible to everyone. It is a matter of getting better information across — and information is something you can move.

Advocacy is not a school activity.

Advocating means making your child legible to someone who is reading them wrong. Accommodating means changing the setting so they do not have to be. Both happen at every distance — in your bedroom, at your mother's table, at a birthday party, and eventually in a conference room with a folder on the table.

And they get harder as they get closer, which is the opposite of how we usually talk about it. The conference room has a procedure. Your partner does not. There is no form for persuading your own mother that your child is not spoiled.

So this starts with the nearest people, because the closest ones come first in time and they come first in weight. A child who is misread at school and understood at home is carrying something heavy. A child who is misread at home has nowhere to put it down.

Your closest support.

The first person you advocate to is whoever is closest in.

For a lot of families that is the other parent, in the house. For plenty of others it is a co-parent who lives somewhere else now, or your father, or a sister, or the mentor who has a key and knows which cup is the right cup. The ring is defined by closeness, not by the arrangement — and the work is the same whoever is standing in it.

And for some parents the honest answer is that there is nobody in this ring. No second adult, no relative nearby, no friend who knows the routine. If that is you, the rings in this post start further out, and that is a harder place to begin rather than a failure to have arranged things properly. It also means the next ring out is doing work it was never built for, which is worth knowing before you wonder why it keeps buckling.

What follows is written to the commonest version — two adults who share a house and a child — because the pattern shows up most sharply there. Read "partner" as whoever yours is.

That sounds like an accusation and it is not. Two adults can watch the same ten minutes — the same refusal, the same tears, the same flat fine — and see two different events. One sees a child who is overwhelmed. The other sees a child who is pushing. Both are watching closely. Both love the child. And they are about to make two different decisions about what happens next.

What makes this the hardest ring is that it does not stay a disagreement about one evening. It becomes a pattern where each of you is quietly correcting for the other. One leans firmer because the other seems too soft. The other leans softer because the first seems too hard. Each correction makes the next one necessary, and the gap widens while both of you are trying to close it. Your child, meanwhile, is getting two different houses in one house.

Four things help, and none of them is winning the argument.

1 - Trade the route, not the verdict. How did you get there is a better question than why would you do that. When your partner lands somewhere that looks wrong, the conclusion can be strange while the path to it is sound — they may have seen something that afternoon you did not. It is also the only version of this conversation that does not need one of you to be the bad parent.

2 - Agree in the calm, not the moment. Almost nothing about handling a hard thing gets settled while the hard thing is happening. The conversation that works is on a Tuesday, about Saturday, with nobody activated. Same move that works with children, for the same reason.

3 - Have a signal, and use it. When one of you is too far gone to parent well — and you will both know the feeling — what helps is a way to tap out that is not a defeat and not a referendum. I am done, you take this. Agreed in advance, it costs nothing to use. Invented in the moment, it sounds like abandonment.

4 - And if you are both past it and the children are safe, do not parent. Nothing has to be addressed this minute; a consequence can be decided tomorrow. Two depleted adults improvising discipline at the same time is how an ordinary evening becomes an event everyone remembers.

And here is the part that explains why this ring is so much harder than it looks on paper. Whatever is making your child's day difficult is very often making somebody else's difficult too. These things run in families — by genes, by a shared or similar history, by two nervous systems built to the similar specification. If transitions are hard in your house, there is a good chance they are hard for more than one person in it.

Which means the standoff over bedtime is frequently not two readings of a child. It is two people with the same difficulty, one of them trying to manage the other through it. The parent who cannot bear the noise is regulating a child who cannot bear the noise. The parent who needs ten minutes of warning is enforcing a change of plan with none.

That is not a diagnosis of anyone and it is not an excuse. It is the difference between why can you not just handle this and neither of us can handle this one, so let us not both take it at once. The second sentence is survivable. The first is the argument you have been having.

One more thing, and it is the part that gets missed: the two of you are a double empathy problem as well. Not only about the child — about each other. The partnership version is the belief, early on, that you will each fix the other. It does not work, and finding that out is not a failure of the partnership. It is the same finding as the rest of this piece, arriving at home.

Your child.

The closest ring of all, and the one where accommodation gets mistaken for indulgence.

A child picks at a hole in the knee of their jeans. Picks at it through math, through the bus ride, through dinner, until the hole is the size of a fist and the jeans are finished. To the adult holding the ruined jeans this is destruction — carelessness, maybe defiance, certainly something to be stopped.

It was not destruction. It was the only thing keeping that child regulated through a day that was too loud. Ask them why and you may get I don't know, because at nine years old nobody has words for this is how I stay in my body. What they might manage, asked gently and not in anger, is I'm nervous.

Thirty years later the answer comes in a packet of fifty and costs about what the jeans did. A rough sticker under a desk, a metal ring for two fingers, a piece of putty. The same need, met on purpose instead of punished — and the child keeps their jeans.

Hold both halves. The behavior was never the problem, and the adult was not a monster. They were working from a reading that is reasonable for most children and wrong for this one, and nobody had handed them anything better. That is what accommodation is: handing someone something better.

And there is the one that happens in your kitchen. You say put your shoes away. Your child says why are you so mean to me? Something in you rises, because you were not being mean and you have a list of things you did today that were the opposite of mean.

Here is what is actually happening. You mean something specific by that word — raising your voice, name-calling, cruelty. Your child means something else — being told no, or being told wait. Neither of you is lying. You are using one word for two different experiences. The instinct is to correct them, and it rarely works. The thing that works is stranger and easier: you name that you have two definitions, out loud, and leave both standing. You and I mean different things by that word. I want to know which one you mean. You have conceded nothing. You have turned an argument about who is right into a question about what happened.

The point.

Advocating for your child is not an event you attend. It is something you do all day, at every distance, mostly to people who love your child and are reading them wrong.

Start with the people in your house. Not because they are the easy ones — they are the hardest, and there is no procedure for any of it — but because they are the ones your child cannot go home from.

And on the days when you have no explaining left in you: the fact that you see your child clearly, when much of the world does not yet, is not a small thing. For a child who is misread nearly everywhere, being accurately seen by one person at home is the whole foundation.

Further out there are the people who knew you first — the ones who raised you, the ones you grew up beside, the friends whose houses your child used to go to. That ring has its own problem, and it is the one where you cannot win. It is also where we hand you the sentence to carry out there, which turns out to be a better place to learn it than at your own kitchen table: Too Soft, Too Hard, and Never Right.

Bridge Family Therapy offers neurodiversity-affirming, trauma-informed care in Athens, GA and across Georgia via telehealth. You can meet our team or reach us at (706) 352-9199.

Additional Reading

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