Every old cop drama has it. That part of the show where they bring the “perp” into the interrogation room and one of the cops is all, “I wanna be your friend, let me help you;” while the other cop is going, “Tell us what we want to know or we’ll put you behind bars for the rest of your bleepity bleep life!”
We can compare this type of scenario to discipline. In every house there is the good cop/bad cop. Sometimes it’s always the same parent who assumes one of the roles and sometimes things are switched depending on the circumstance.
One of the things that we had to determine early on was how my husband and I were going to discipline his girls. (I didn’t bring any children into the relationship.) We knew it was important that we were both on the same page and displayed a united front. In our case the “bad cop” was the person who doled out the consequence where the “good cop” was the one to diffuse the situation and once calmed down could go to the kids and explain further the reasoning and punishment.
- Never over-ride the one who is doling out the discipline. We learned this one the hard way. My husband was unknowingly changing the consequence I would give the girls for breaking a household rule. He would find out what happened then without asking how I handled it, handle it himself thus over-riding me.
- The Good Cop should never undermine the Bad Cop. We were very careful that while being the “good cop” we didn’t say things like, “Sometimes your dad goes overboard,” or “Tina is still getting used to having you around.” This would just confuse the girls and make them think less of their consequence.
- Never discuss a situation you disagreed on in front of the kids. This was probably the most important fact in displaying a united front. If the kids saw that we didn’t have the other person’s back 100% then the having rules and consequences would have been null.
Again, these are just the things that worked in our family. As always in parenting you take bits of information from all sources and develop your own style.
Tina can be found most days at her laptop, which according to her husband is a permanent appendage of her body, transcribing her “mad” life at Madhatter Mom or on Twitter when she should be cleaning the house.
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