When Your Family Doesn’t See It…
Parenting Progress

By Tyler Seabolt, LCSW | Bridge Family Therapy

Too Soft, Too Hard, and Never Right.

Judged for too much by one relative and too little by the next, about the same child, in the same week.

If you have read the first half of this, you know the shape: advocating for your child means making them legible to somebody reading them wrong, and accommodating them means changing the setting so they do not have to be. We started in your house, with your co-parent and your child.

This is the next ring out — your mother, your sister, the friends whose houses your child used to go to. You cannot resign from these people, some of them knew you as a child, and that combination makes this ring harder than the paperwork that comes later.

Two sentences instead of one.

The psychologist Ross Greene has a line that does most of the work here: kids do well if they can. Not if they want to — if they can. It is the same idea as the one this post opened with, pointed at your child instead of at the people reading them.

What comes with it is a distinction worth more than any technique, and it is the thing this post is built on. Separate the skill from the problem.

The skill is general, and it is one a child can reach on some days and not others: changing from one activity to another. The problem is specific, concrete, and has a time and a place in it: getting off the tablet at eight on school nights.

That first half matters more than it looks. A skill your child can manage on a good Tuesday and cannot manage on a bad Thursday is not a thing they lack — it is a thing that is harder to get to when everything else is already costing them.

Most households have been running them together, as one sentence, and that sentence is usually about character. He is addicted to that thing. She just will not listen. Pulled apart, the same evening reads completely differently — a child who finds switching hard, meeting a nightly demand to switch. Nobody in that version is being difficult on purpose.

And this is the sentence you are about to carry outward. He finds it hard to change activities, and getting off the tablet at eight is the one that keeps going wrong. That sentence works on your partner tonight, on your mother at Christmas, and in an email to a teacher in March — because it names something a person can actually help with, instead of something they have to agree with you about.

One more thing from him, because it is the opposite of what most of us assume. The skill is not the thing you work on. It is the explanation. What you work on is the problem — that one expectation, at that one time, with your child in the conversation rather than on the receiving end of it.

Greene's organization, Lives in the Balance, publishes the instrument for working through this properly. It is free, and the current version is the ASUP 2024 — the Assessment of Skills and Unsolved Problems. The distinction above is the part you need for this post. The rest is worth your time if it lands.

Your family.

At a reunion, two adults who love the same children will look at the same roomful of cousins and see two different situations. One is counting exits and assigning buddies. The other is genuinely relaxed, because her older children have always kept half an eye on the little ones and she has never needed a system.

Neither is wrong about her own family. They are each reading accurately and arriving somewhere different — and then each quietly wondering about the other one.

Then there is the commentary. You're too soft with him. You're too hard on him. In my day we just got on with it. It is the same two-way gap as everything else in these two posts, except that the people on the other side of it love you, which somehow makes it worse rather than better.

You are being read too.

Here is the part nobody says about this ring.

The parent of a child who gets misread is, nearly always, a parent who gets misread.

You have spent a lot of effort on the idea that your child is being misjudged. Less on the fact that you are standing right next to them being misjudged at the same time, by the same people, for the same reasons — a few minutes of evidence and a set of assumptions that fit most families.

And the readings contradict each other. One relative watches you hold a boundary and concludes you are too hard on a child who is clearly struggling. The next watches you let something go and concludes you are making excuses. You cannot satisfy both, because they are not disagreeing with you. They are disagreeing with each other, and you are standing in the middle of it.

Parents have had the authorities called on them from both ends of that argument. One neighbor decides a child walking to the corner alone is neglected. Another decides a parent sitting in the garage while the kids ride bikes in the cul-de-sac is not really supervising. Same street, same week, opposite verdicts, and the parent cannot be in both places.

Two things, and the second matters more.

The first. Almost nobody at that table is deciding to think badly of you. They are doing what people do, which is read a few minutes and fill in the rest from their own life. It is a bad method, and it is the only one available to them, and you use it too.

The second. The bind is not solvable, and it is not yours. You are being handed a contradiction and asked to resolve it by being a better parent. There is no version of you that satisfies both verdicts, because the verdicts cancel. Noticing that is not resignation. It is the difference between a problem you can work on and a situation you are simply in.

Your friends.

The quietest ring, and the one that empties out without anyone announcing it.

The birthday party is its own small examination: do you drop off, or do you stay. Nobody posts the answer, so you read the other adults to work out what the normal amount of involvement is here, and whether you are about to be the strange one.

Whose house your child can go to becomes a calculation you run constantly and never discuss — not about whether the family is kind, but about whether the noise, the dog, the three hours, the unfamiliar bathroom will be survivable.

And then the invitations thin. Sometimes after something happened. More often because declining four times in a row looks, from the outside, like not wanting to come.

This is the ring where accommodation is almost entirely yours to arrange and almost never named. Arriving early, so the room fills up around your child instead of being full when they walk in. Saying yes to the first hour and meaning only the first hour. Telling one parent one true thing in advance — he does better if somebody shows him where the bathroom is when he gets there — which is advocacy, done in a sentence, with no meeting and no folder.

And the friendship worth protecting is the one where you can say the true thing without it costing you. Those people are rare, and one of them is worth more than a wider circle.

Spend it on the people who will use it.

This is the practical heart of both posts, and it is a permission rather than a technique.

You do not have to convince everyone.

Some people will use what you tell them. Tell them that goodbyes are hard and they will start the goodbye earlier, for years, without being reminded. Others will nod warmly and carry on exactly as before, and you will have the same conversation at the same gathering next year.

Spend the explaining on the first kind. Let the second kind have their opinion.

Advocacy is finite. It comes out of the same supply as everything else you are doing, and there is no prize for distributing it evenly. Declining to persuade somebody is not a failure of advocacy — it is how you still have some left in March.

And then the outer ring.

Further out is where the procedures start: school, activities, clinics, coaches, the woman behind the counter, the stranger in an aisle who formed a view in four seconds with nothing to go on.

That ring works differently, and it is the next thing we will write about. Two things are worth saying now. It is the ring where somebody is sometimes obliged to listen — which is why learning to ask well matters there in a way it does not at a family table, and why a request in an email exists in a way the same request in a hallway does not. And it is the ring where you owe the most strangers the least.

Everything in these two posts is the practice for that. The parent who has learned to hand their own mother one usable sentence is the parent who will do well in a room with a folder on the table.

The point.

You are going to be judged by people who love you and are wrong, and by people who do not know you and have decided anyway. Some of those judgments will contradict each other, and you will be expected to answer both.

You cannot make your child easier to read, and it is not a thing worth wanting — the version of them that is easy for everyone is usually the version that costs them the most to perform. The same is true of you.

What you can do is pick your people and tell them the truth, once, properly. That is a smaller job than convincing everybody, and it is the one that works.

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.