Unison Parenting Blog: Avoiding Cat-and-Mouse Games

A friend and I were discussing one of the trickiest parts of parenting: how to respond to various kinds of disobedience.

Parents can fall into a trap of customizing their rules and behavior modification for every different circumstance. When the child does THIS, they counter with THAT, for every new behavior.

But this can lead to a Cat-and-Mouse Game. This parenting sets up a contest or puzzle for the child: How can the child get what they want? How can they find a loophole in the parents' strategy?

Let’s say you have a policy that children are limited to one hour of screen time per day. A child seeking loopholes might switch between devices to confuse the parent as to where the one hour of screen time was coming from. Or they might claim it was necessary to access the screen for homework. Or they might watch over a sibling’s shoulder but claim that time doesn’t count.

The parent gets roped into the trap of dealing with all the variants and making sub-policies to account for the loopholes. Cat and mouse. Or whack-a-mole, if you prefer.

There’s another way.

In “Unison Parenting,” I recommend a system of rules that are flexible and general. Each rule is accompanied by a pre-defined consequence for non-compliance.

In our family, we made seven rules, called the 7 C’s: Chores, conforming, cleanliness, courtesy, caring, classwork, and church. Most poor behaviors mapped to violation of one of these rules. (When your child becomes a teen, you need more complex rules around driving privileges, as one example).

In the screen time example, the root problem is failure to conform (obeying the parents). Instead of accepting the limitation, the child found ways to disobey. Allowing this behavior teaches the child to negotiate against your policies. Instead, you identify a violation and give the consequence.

This system doesn’t rely on threats. You don’t make things up as you go along. You establish clear rules, inspect behaviors for violations, and calmly assign consequences. We called it “The Choices Chart” to emphasize how choices lead to outcomes.