The tension was palpable. Curse words were muttered. We were bickering, taking turns with exasperated sighs and proclamations to quit. Dirty looks were shot at each other.
My daughter, feeling the weight of it, stepped in to apologize on our behalf. Which broke my heart a little.
What was happening?
We were installing a bike basket and a kid’s bike seat. And it didn’t go as planned.
What was missing at that moment? The very thing I’ve been writing about in this four-part mini-series: leadership. (Click here for part 1).
Why Co-Parenting Is So Hard
I don’t need to tell you that going from couple to co-parents is a difficult transition. I’ve seen unpretty sides of myself come out under the pressure of sleep deprivation, constant demands, and too little time for everything — sides I knew existed but had managed to keep fairly contained before. My partner too.
We’ve moved past the acute survival mode of the early years. But somewhere along the way we picked up a harsher edge with each other — a short fuse, a rough tone, a quick leap to exasperation. And it’s hard to have a real conversation or work through a disagreement when a toddler is hurling their milk glass across the room. So stuff piles up.
Co-parenting is essentially co-leadership. You’re running a literal family business together — without off-days and with a tiny erratic board of directors watching your every move. Like a co-pilot flight crew you have to want to reach the same destination, communicate clearly, and trust each other at the controls.
And I would never treat a colleague or co-pilot the way I sometimes treat my husband.
The problem is, you can only fly your side of the cockpit. You can’t control what your partner does. But you can control what kind of co-leader you are. So here’s what that looks like, from your side of the cockpit.
What Good Co-Leadership Looks Like — From Your Side
1. Own your decisions
I tend to push decisions onto my husband so I don’t have to own the outcome when it wasn’t the right call. It’s a form of self-protection dressed up as deference. But that’s not partnership. A good co-leader makes calls and shares the consequences.
2. Know where you want the family ship to go
Chris and I are pretty aligned here, but a lot of it has never been said out loud. It’s assumed. Which probably explains some of our recurring disagreements — we’re not fighting about the thing, we’re fighting about two different unspoken visions of the thing.
It helps to have those conversations explicitly:
- What kind of home are you trying to create?
- What do you want your kids to feel when they walk through the door?
- What does family life look like in five or ten years?
3. Find compromise and step out of the battle
I want to buy a large and expensive food processor. He doesn’t. We agree I test the use case in real life and only buy it when I truly find it’s necessary. That’s our compromise, which we found by staying curious about each other’s position instead of playing games to push our will through. I’m not always this reasonable about it, for the record.
4. Face things head on
My instinct is to let it slide and hope it resolves itself. It rarely does. The conversation I avoid on Tuesday tends to show up again on Friday, even louder. A co-leader addresses things when both people are calm enough to actually talk — and when something’s off, stays curious about what’s behind it rather than just reacting to the surface behavior.
5. Take responsibility for the atmosphere
Some weeks I’m good at this, some weeks I’m really not. When I’m not, my go-to is the underhanded comment, or putting the dishes in the dishwasher with extra force and noise, instead of just saying I need a break and asking if he can take over.
The emotional temperature of your home is something you help set every day, which is a useful thing to remember when you’re the one making it worse.
6. Bite back the comment
If I’m honest, I usually say it. And then immediately wish I hadn’t. There’s something physically satisfying about getting it out — and then it lands, and you watch their face, and you know it wasn’t worth it. Waiting for a moment when both people can actually hear each other is the better move. I’m working on closing the gap between knowing that and doing it.
7. Take the high road, independently of what your partner does
This is the one Kristine, my med school mentor (if you missed part 1, that’s where she comes in), would stand behind most firmly — and the one I find hardest to swallow.
- Don’t get drawn into name-calling or provocation.
- Don’t drag the kids in.
- Don’t let both of you spiral at the same time.
Someone has to hold the line, even when it feels deeply unfair that it’s “always” you.
8. Don’t badmouth your partner
Not in front of the kids, not to friends over wine, not in the group chat. Venting has its place, but there’s a difference between processing and bitching about your partner. I’m careful about this one, because I genuinely believe the story you tell about your partner — to your friends, in the group chat, in your own head — becomes the story you see when you look at them.
9. Bring empathy
This one is genuinely hard on a bad day, when the last thing you feel like doing is extending grace to someone who is, once again, too overworked to help with the dishes. But your partner is also tired, also doing their best, also having a day. That doesn’t excuse poor behavior from either of you — but it might change how you respond to it. When I manage to find empathy for him we find our way through problems so much better and we stay connected throughout it all.
So What About the Bike Basket Afternoon?
It fizzled out. We didn’t have a big repair conversation. We acknowledged it was over the top and disappointing to both of us. We finished the job, my daughter rode her bike, and we moved on a little sheepish.
But what I know is that the next time one of us is about to lose it over something equally ridiculous, there’s a choice. Bite back the comment. Take a breath. Let the other person have their frustration without matching it. Hold the line.
That’s what co-leadership looks like most of the time. The small, repeated choice to be the steadier person in that moment — even when it’s hard, even when it’s unfair, even when all you want to do is win the argument about which Allen key goes where.
It starts with you.
