Tug of War: The Rights and Wrongs of Parenting

\My family and I are sitting down together for dinner. I’ve cooked something decent and middle-of-the-road, like pork chops with mashed potatoes and carrots. My husband loads up his own plate while I cut my six-year-old’s pork chop into small pieces and give him a dollop of potatoes and a single carrot medallion, knowing he’s not an adventurous eater. The pork chop is supposed to be his “safe food” at this meal; he almost always likes meat. Much of the advice I’ve read for picky kids suggests offering at least one safe food with every meal while also serving what everybody else is having, giving the child an opportunity to try something new while ensuring that they have something to enjoy. This is a simple meal, but I’ve put care into it, and I’m tired after a day of work. We sit down—me after several trips back and forth to the table, making sure everything is set—and I’m looking forward to eating. I’m resolved to make mealtime breezy and low-pressure for my picky son, because that is what I’ve understood to be most effective. I will enjoy my food and let him eat what he wants from his plate. No coercion, no special orders.

But tonight he rejects everything with an out-loud “yuck”. I knew he wouldn’t want the vegetables, but the meat was supposed to be safe. Now he’s sulking and complaining while my husband and I try to enjoy our food. My husband offers to cook up some breakfast sausages, our son’s favorite, and my son lights up. Or we get exasperated and order him to eat at least one bite of everything on his plate, explaining heatedly that there are starving kids in the world and he should be grateful. Or his dad decides to try some light-hearted coercion, using the kiddie fork to pick up a bite of mashed potato and talking about buttery it is, and he should try it. All of these scenarios are more likely than sticking to the principle I’ve established and discussed with my husband. Real life with a child does not make it easy to stick to a parenting formula.

The path to raising a child is as full of branches as a family tree, each one representing a choice about how to react, what rules to enforce, which behaviors to modify. To anxious and overthinking parents like me, every choice looks like a “right” or a “wrong”, something that will either help my son develop in a healthy way or irreversibly mess him up. And there is no shortage of advisors with opinions on which is which. Online parenting groups, influencers, variously credentialed experts, peers, and of course, the generations before us.

In that dinner scenario, my grandma probably would have settled for nothing less than my son licking his plate clean. A contemporary behavioral specialist probably would disapprove of all of our responses. Offering an alternative food, for instance, violates the Mealtime Division of Labor, in which parents decide when to eat and what to serve, and the child only decides how much to consume. Giving into the child’s demand for something different reinforces their choosiness and gives them too much power. Theoretically, I’m on board with that. I want to live by the science and do what is best for my kid in the big picture. But I also want him to be fed and for the family to enjoy dinners together. It just takes a few minutes to cook up small link sausages, and when my son happily fills up on them, it’s hard to regret that choice in the moment.

Still, there is a constant push/pull dynamic in my mind regarding the right thing to do in a given situation. My methods evolve as I learn more, whether it’s a pearl of wisdom from a parent friend or an article written by a professional in some aspect of parenting. The net result is that I don’t always respond to the same thing in the same way with my son, which in itself is the “wrong” way to parent. We need to be consistent, they say, and show a united front between the two parents. But my husband consumes his own information too, and frankly we’re so busy that we don’t have much time for quality connection with each other, let alone for remembering to share all the knowledge one of us has picked up here or there. I do try to let him know when I’m shifting my approach to something. Lately we’ve been doing a family therapy program where only one parent at a time goes to a session with our son. Since I started first, I’m at least one lesson ahead of my husband, so when the counselor teaches me a parenting technique that I want to start using, I’ll tell him about it. Then, me being who I am, I’ll silently expect him to follow along with me and silently chastise him if he doesn’t.

Meanwhile, I can scarcely be consistent in my own application of those techniques and in holding firm to house rules. One day I might decide to enforce a shorter limit on my son’s gaming time. The next day, I might be too tired for the verbal judo required to entice him away from Minecraft. Ideals go out the window when the couch pulls me in for a weekend nap. On any given day, nap or no nap, I might just not have it in me to engage him properly. I don’t have mental energy for all the “rules” of talking to a little kid: keeping my tone positive but firm, setting clear expectations, laying out consequences for non-compliance, policing his volume and language (“stupid” and “poop” are among the words we hear too often). The most challenging part is handling his requests to spend all his non-gaming time playing with me. I hear competing voices in my head. One is from the camp that my son won’t be this small forever, and I should treasure every moment. It echoes in the snippets of talk I’ve heard from parents who say they can’t wait to spend every minute with their kids after work, and in pop culture portraying the ideal parents as those who play imaginative games with their children. Picture an Instagram reel of a dad dressed in a princess costume, waving magic wands with his daughter because #dadgoals.

That side has plenty of merit, I won’t dispute it. But the opposing voice speaks truth as well. I hear it in some gestalt of wisdom from older generations and non-American societies, whence children are supposedly less at the center of attention and are better off for it. I’ve read from some experts that it is not a parent’s job to play. Depending on my mood and busyness level, this may be the side I choose to get on board with, telling my son that he needs to do his own thing. He never likes that answer, probably in part because it’s inconsistent. He’s too young to understand why one day I lean hard into playtime, and the next day I insist on being left alone with a book. Honestly, my own wishy-washyness frustrates me too.

I wish there was a single rulebook for being a parent. A signpost at every fork in the road, showing the right way to go. People are just too complex. It turns out that my son is responsive to a little bit of coercion at the dinner table. He has surprised me by being cooperative, and even, on rare occasions, declaring fondness for a new food we have made him try. Using a positive, encouraging tone seems to be the key and perhaps a bridge between older and newer generations of parenting. We recognize that being too strict can backfire, and in the case of a picky eater, make eating even more unappealing to our kid. We also know his personality and that we need to push a little to get through his stubbornness, or give him a break if he’s having a rough day. One size does not fit all—not from one family to another, or even one day to the next. There is no victor in this tug o’ war. Both sides just keep pulling gently in their chosen direction, then giving the other team slack.