Learning how to avoid conflicts with children rarely starts with the child. More often, it starts with us. Thomas Gordon, author of Parent Effectiveness Training and a pioneer of positive parenting, offered several paths for parents who want to work on themselves and move toward a respectful, conscious and cooperative way of raising children.
His starting point is simple and uncomfortable: the way we relate to our children mirrors the way we relate to ourselves. Before changing a single rule at home, it helps to look at our own self-acceptance, our own history and our own certainties.
This article walks through four of those paths in order, with practical ideas you can apply this week.
Quick takeaways
- Accepting yourself makes it easier to accept your child's differences.
- Self-knowledge work, therapy or parent groups can reduce reactive conflict.
- Your child is a separate person, not a project or a symbol of prestige.
- Rigid beliefs fuel power struggles; flexible values leave room for dialogue.
- Teach values through example first, then through a consultant stance.
- Repair after conflict matters more than avoiding every disagreement.
1. Love and accept yourself first
There is a direct link between how we accept others and how we accept ourselves. Gordon put it plainly: people who cannot tolerate a wide range of attitudes and behaviors in themselves usually find it hard to tolerate a wide range of feelings and gestures in others.
So he invites parents to sit with one question: do I really like the person I am? If the answer is no, it is worth re-examining your own life and finding a way to flourish and draw more satisfaction from your own achievements.
Why satisfied parents control less
Parents who feel fulfilled by their own efforts not only accept themselves more easily; they also stop needing to find satisfaction through their children's behavior. They feel less urge to control their child's personality and future. Gordon regretted that some parents "produce" good children as a symbol of prestige, driven by low self-esteem as adults and dependence on other people's judgment. Committing to your own personal growth is therefore not selfish — it is the ground you stand on to accompany your child unconditionally, much like the parental love unconditional that children need regardless of who they become.
2. Know yourself better to defuse conflict
Knowing yourself better takes time and real inner work. Growing in awareness can be painful, because it exposes the unconscious protections we built to cope. That work covers several areas of our lives at once.
It means bringing to light unconscious mechanisms linked to traumatic memory, healing our inner child, becoming aware of the conditioning and beliefs of the culture we grew up in, and developing emotional skills. None of this happens overnight, and none of it requires perfection.
Where to find support
This work can take many forms: parenting discussion groups such as Faber and Mazlish workshops or Gordon-style classes, therapy with a professional, reading, or simply exchanging with other parents around you. If your child is at an age where communication is still forming, the learning to speak stage is a good reminder that patience and repetition matter on both sides. Structured play also supports the same emotional growth, which is why the question of Baby Einstein works or not interests so many parents looking for gentle learning tools. It is also worth checking the toys you bring home, since some promise development they cannot deliver.
| Path | Rigid reflex | More open response |
|---|---|---|
| Self-acceptance | "My child must succeed so I look good" | "My worth does not depend on my child's results" |
| Self-knowledge | Reacting on autopilot | Pausing to notice what triggered me |
| Belonging | "You will do what I planned" | "What do you want to try?" |
| Values | "This is right, end of debate" | "Here is what I believe, let's talk" |
| Repair | Pretending nothing happened | Naming it and reconnecting |
3. Ask yourself: to whom do the children belong?
Gordon observed that the more possessive a parent is, the more they believe they have the right to mold their child in a certain way — and therefore the less they accept behavior that deviates from their prescriptions. Possessiveness and conflict tend to grow together.
He draws on humanistic psychology here: in healthy relationships, each person allows the other to be autonomous and distinct. A child has the right to become what they are capable of being, different from their parents or from the plans those parents traced for them. Gordon calls this right entirely legitimate and inalienable.
Autonomy in everyday life
In practice, this means letting your child make small choices — clothes, hobbies, friends — and resisting the urge to script their future. It also means respecting their interests even when they differ from yours, whether that is a passion for building with the LEGO custom builds or a taste for quiet afternoons. Giving children room to be themselves, including room for unstructured play with outdoor toys toddlers love, is one of the simplest ways to lower daily friction.
4. Rigid or open beliefs and values?
Gordon was surprised to find that parents struggling with serious relationship problems with their children very often held rigid attitudes about what is right and wrong. He concluded that the more certain a person feels about the absolute correctness of their values, the more they tend to impose them.
When parents hold a more flexible belief system, it becomes easier to accept that a son wears his hair long or that a daughter dates someone from a different culture. But a question appears almost automatically: can we still pass on our values?
Two ways to transmit values
Gordon believes parents cannot help teaching their values: children learn them by watching what we do and listening to how we talk. Values can still be passed through the sieve of meaning. The first channel is example — if we want honesty, generosity, non-violence or an ethical sense, we have to live those things. The second is the consultant stance: sharing our experience, ideas and knowledge without preaching, imposing, commanding or controlling our child's thoughts, and staying open to discussion. The same principle applies to the content children consume, from children's apps educate to the films you choose together. Even the way we talk about celebrities after giving birth can model flexible, respectful values.
5. Putting the four paths into practice
These four paths are not a checklist to complete once. They overlap: self-acceptance makes self-knowledge less frightening, self-knowledge makes it easier to grant autonomy, and autonomy makes flexible values feel natural rather than threatening.
Start small. Pick one area — your reaction to mess, to homework, to a choice of clothes — and observe it for a week without judging yourself. Notice when the tension comes from your own unmet needs rather than from your child's behavior.
Small daily habits that help
Name your own feelings out loud so your child learns the vocabulary of emotion. Ask "what do you need?" before "why did you do that?". Keep a short list of what genuinely matters to you and let the rest go. And remember that repair after a conflict teaches more than never having one — the same spirit behind self-improvement in children, which starts with the adults around them.
My hands-on take
I remember a phase when every morning turned into a battle over shoes. I was convinced the problem was my child's stubbornness. Then I started paying attention to my own state: I was already stressed about being late, and her hesitation felt like a personal attack. Nothing changed until I worked on that, not on her.
What helped most was small and unglamorous. I named my own feeling out loud — "I'm anxious about the time" — instead of issuing orders. I let her choose between two pairs. I stopped treating her preferences as a verdict on my parenting. The mornings are not perfect now, but they are shorter and far kinder. The real shift was accepting that she is not a smaller version of me.
Frequently asked questions
Does working on myself really reduce conflicts with my child?
It often does, because many conflicts are fueled by our own unmet needs, fatigue or need for control. When those are acknowledged, the same behavior from a child can feel far less threatening.
Can I still pass on my values if I stay open?
Yes. Children learn values mainly by watching how we act and listening to how we speak. Sharing your experience as a consultant, rather than as an authority, keeps the conversation open.
What if I was raised with very rigid beliefs?
Noticing them is already the first step. You do not have to reject your upbringing entirely; you can examine which beliefs still make sense to you and which ones you were simply repeating.
How do I start if I have no time?
Begin with observation rather than action. Notice one recurring conflict and ask what need of yours is involved. That small pause is the beginning of the work.
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