Is Codependency Affecting Your Parenting?

Maybe you’ve heard of codependency as it relates to relationships – but did you know it can spill over into your parenting too?

See if any of these sound familiar:

You often tolerate quite a lot of misbehavior, but then end up extremely frustrated with your children. You may also regularly find yourself angry or irritated at them, to the point of yelling at or constantly critiquing your children.

By the time you realize just how frustrated or critical you’ve become, you may fear you’ve damaged your relationship with your child. Suddenly you become very focused on explaining your choices or apologizing to them. You may also find yourself doing things to smoothe things over with them.

When it comes to consequences, you may find yourself falling somewhere between being too harsh or too lenient. You may also end up negotiating to reduce the consequences you dole out.

In parenting, codependent habits often leave us feeling uncertain about our parenting. You may start off really intense, only to back down later. Or you may struggle to enforce routines or discipline altogether.

The main culprit: Codependency

Codependency in Parenting—What is it?

Codependency is the tendency to avoid disconnection in relationships – sometimes at all costs.  

Codependency is a pattern of relating in which you may be inconsistent with your values and choices because you have a concern about how you will be perceived. In parenting, codependency often results in poor boundaries for fear of losing connection or affection from a child, or for being perceived as a “bad parent” by someone else. Poor boundaries are especially evident when words and actions don’t match (i.e. if a standard or consequence is given and then pulled back).

Having low boundaries keeps us from experiencing a break in the relationship. It’s why we often contort ourselves to fit whatever is needed to keep the relationship status quo. It’s why we excuse poor behavior, avoid confrontations, absorb the damage caused, or shorten/ soften consequences. 

Consequences are essential to the learning process, and when we minimize or omit them, our kids perceive that there’s not an expectation of actual change. 

When we have weak boundaries, we can also end up waffling back and forth and our parenting becomes very inconsistent. When we do this with our kids, we shield them from the consequences that are meant to teach them the cause and effect nature of their choices. Our words become hollow, and our kids end up with more power than they were ever meant to handle.

Some of our kids are particularly adept at picking this out and will use this to their advantage through lying and manipulating. They learn to tell us what we want to hear, and then continue on doing what they were doing before. This doesn’t mean they are terrible people; it means they are perceptive! But to channel that intelligence in the right direction, you must to recognize the patterns that lead to being a pushover parent, and make the necessary changes.

Rewiring Patterns of Codependency in Parenting

Setting good boundaries is essential to rewiring patterns of codependency. While there are tons of great books on all things boundaries out there, there’s a simple framework from the Bible that has made all the difference for me.

Here are the basics:

Many of us who have low boundaries often feel as though we are applying grace to a situation where understanding is needed. And while that may or may not be true, this is not really the way God as the Perfect Parent guides us.

Dr. Tim Kimmel (one of my mentors and author of Grace Based Parenting) describes the nature of grace in relationships by highlighting John 1:14, which says Jesus came to us “full of grace and truth.” Tim points out that this verse reveals God is not a mixture of 50% grace and 50% truth; He’s 100% full of both attributes, which are inseparable.

As humans, we aren’t capable of doing this grace/truth thing nearly as well, but when we have poor boundaries, we end up swinging wildly between extremes. We may tend towards putting up with a lot, believing we are giving grace. But when our long-suffering is taken advantage of, we often then alternately swing towards applying truth, in ways that are critical, rejecting, and unloving. After exploding/ imploding, we then often feel the need to explain, apologize, or fix the situation, and the whole thing starts over again.

Boundaries are essential for delivering a balance of both grace and truth in all of our relationships, especially in parenting.

How Jesus Modeled Grace and Truth

Thankfully, God did not leave us to figure out how to get things into balance on our own. Jesus, being completely full of these attributes yet human in form, modeled when it’s appropriate to move more towards grace or more towards truth in our interactions with each other.

Jesus allowed grace to lead His interactions with people who had been lowered by shame (and knew it). Think of the woman caught in adultery, or Peter after he’d denied Jesus. Jesus demonstrated mercy in these instances, and in others like them, when the person before Him had been humbled by their sin. In parenting, this looks like praising a child for coming to you when they know they’ve made a mistake, and coaching them to take responsibility. 

After all, we want our children to run to us when they have a problem, rather than run away.

However, Jesus allowed truth to lead His interactions with people who had wrongly and pridefully exalted themselves. He demonstrated this repeatedly in confrontations with the Pharisees, who were blind to their sin and needed to be brought down to reality. In parenting, this looks like allowing for meaningful consequences that will teach our children the way to go, especially when they have attempted to cover up their behavior. 

James 4:6 sums it up like this:

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (NLT).

The Role of Consequences in Healthy Parenting

Consequences are the natural result of choices. This is different from punishment, because punishment is about retribution, about making someone “pay” for what they’ve done with suffering. If you are doling out consequences in anger or coming down on your kids to make them feel the weight of what they’ve done, that’s punishment. Punishment instills shame, which is crushing to our children.

But discipline is different. Discipline involves coaching and training that is for the benefit of the one being discipled. It’s reforming the person in a way that gives them skills to be successful in the future. Consequences delivered in love, with a heart of encouragement to carve out a new path are an essential component of balanced discipline. The Bible guides us to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15, NLT). Whether moving towards grace or truth, both situations require empathy and compassion towards our children to teach them that they are safe with us and with God, even in their mistakes.

What Healthy Boundaries Look Like With Our Kids

When it comes to communicating boundaries and expectations with our kids, there are a few practices that can be tailored to meet your kids where they are at, regardless of age.

Use kind and clear language. Setting expectations is a step many of us skip, and it’s the reason why we get so frustrated when our standards are not met. Lay out clear expectations, and give your child a heads up as to what they can look forward to once they’ve met them. We want our kids to know we want them to get a win! For example: I’d like you to clean up your room, including under the bed and inside your closet. When you are done, you will get to go out and play. 

Give room. Allow your kids some freedom in how they go about meeting expectations, and offer choices as often as possible. Work at letting go of control, and give your kids room to problem solve on their own. You can still offer encouragement or suggestions, but be mindful of constantly intervening or nagging.

Let the rewards (and consequences) do the talking. Let’s face it, kids are going to push back and make choices that will need addressing. Sometimes, we end up watering down the learning process by using too many words (and too many emotions), rather than letting the outcomes of our kids’ choices do the teaching. Allow natural consequences to play out, while offering empathy (for example: I’m sorry, honey. Because you chose to wait to clean up your room, it’s too late to go outside now. Tomorrow you can try again). 

Do your own work. As parents, it’s our job to reflect to our kids what we see in them, not see them as little reflections of ourselves. Get help to work through any tendencies you have to get your emotional needs met through your children, so you can be emotionally available to meet theirs.

For more on parenting with grace and truth, check out the digital course “Healing Your Hurting Child”