Tips For Handling In-Law Conflicts

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Hello my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. Today I have a really fun and helpful episode for you on How To Handle Conflicts With Your In-Laws. A member of this community wrote in with the following, asking for help on this topic of navigating in-law dynamics that can be challenging. So she wrote in and said,

“Hi Natalie. I’m struggling with my in-laws. They often overstep boundaries with our kids and it’s causing tension between my husband and me. For instance, my mother-in-law frequently gives our kids bad food for them like ice cream without asking us first even after we’ve set clear guidelines not to do this. It’s leading to arguments between my husband and me because he doesn’t see the harm, but I feel like it’s undermining our parenting. How can I address this without creating more conflict?”

The first thing I want to say is I’m so sorry that you are going through this. I know that when there is conflict, between close family members, family members that you might see often it can create a lot of tension and as you’re seeing it can overflow into other relationships like your marriage. And so for you to write in and try to get some leverage over this, I think is worth noting and you should be really proud of yourself because I can definitely help you with this. It’s something I coach on a lot inside the Mom On Purpose, Membership, marriage in-law dynamics, motherhood, parenting, all of those things that kind of overlap. And today I’m going to give you some free help and some tools here that will help you make progress in this area.

The first thing I want you to do is just ask yourself what your thoughts are about your in-laws. It sounds like you may be thinking thoughts like they don’t listen to me and they should, they don’t respect me. You mentioned that they’re undermining you and your parenting and when you’re starting from a place of it’s me against them, there’s a lot of judgment and it’s very adversarial. It’s like we are against each other in this fight. Versus what I think can be a lot more helpful is thinking about sitting on the couch with your in-laws as a team and they’re a part of your family team and the challenge that you are navigating is out in front of you, whether that is with respect to feeding your kids or something else, but that is separate and apart from the thoughts that you have about your in-laws.

And so I actually encourage you to try to get to this place where you’re thinking of your in-laws as being on your side and on your team. And one way you can do this is to just ask yourself what might their intentions be? What might your mother-in-law or Father-in-law’s intentions be? Are they trying to show love in their own way that is just different than your way? And this isn’t to try to persuade you to change your mind about your boundaries or anything like that. But when you shift your focus from feeling undermined to at least understanding their intent, it can help ease some of that emotional tension. Even if you’re not convinced that their intent is you know, actually wonderful, you can still give them the benefit of the doubt. And this is something that you do for your sake. It’s not something you do for their sake.

You will feel so much more connected and able to move forward in a relationship with them in a way that you like when you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. And this is something that I highly encourage you to do with your in-laws and with your spouse. The next part that I want to talk about is boundaries. Boundaries are something that we often confuse, whether it’s holding boundaries with our kids in parenting or whether it’s holding boundaries with our in-laws. As is the case here, a boundary isn’t something you set to control someone else. So in your entry you mentioned that you have given your in-laws and set clear guidelines to ask you before giving your kids foods that you believe are bad for them. And in this case you’re talking about ice cream, but that really isn’t a boundary because it’s asking them to do something and that is just a request.

I’m all for you making requests. But people have their own agency so they can say yes to that request, or in this case they’re saying no to that request. That’s not a boundary. A boundary is you deciding what you are going to do when something happens. So in this case, it’s you deciding what you are going to do when you’re in-laws. Don’t ask you and give your kids foods that you don’t approve of. I love boundaries because it empowers you. They’re not designed to control someone else, in this case your in-laws and they’re ineffective at that as as you’re seeing, you can’t use boundaries to control other people When you try, it can kind of make you feel crazy because you’re trying to control something that’s just totally outside of your control. So just remind yourself that the boundary is for me, what am I going to do when someone does X, Y, Z?

So when my in-laws give my kids food, I don’t want my kids to have what do I want to do? And you could brainstorm 10 different options. The brain loves to go to all or nothing thinking and make it a really big deal and catastrophize. But there are so many options and so many different approaches that your creative mind will come up with when you ask yourself the question, okay, who do I want to be? What do I want to do when my in-laws give my kids foods that I don’t want them having? And this can be done from a very loving place. Love for yourself, love for your kids, and love for your in-laws. For example, you might decide that if your in-laws give your kids ice cream again, what you’re going to do is remove the ice cream and offer them fruit. And you can do that from a very loving kind, but also direct place.

You could say something like, oh my gosh, I know how much you love to have dessert with our kids and we are not going to be eating ice cream. So instead, I brought over this mixed fruit and my kids can have that with you for dessert or something like that where you are not making it any bigger than the actual instance right in front of you. I was thinking about why this is so hard. I think it’s hard because it’s not intuitive. It’s not how most of us were raised and it sort of threatens our attachment and our approval in the group. And so if you are thinking by asserting yourself in that way, your in-laws aren’t going to like you, they’re going to judge you, they’re going to disapprove of you, then you make that mean that you’ll be somehow less than or judged or excluded.

It’s a lot harder to kind of assert yourself. It’s a lot harder to hold the boundary. And so the work is to work on your mindset and decide that none of that is true, that it’s just your survival brain kinda in overdrive. And you can hold this boundary and you will still maintain your position in the group. And what they think about you is really just none of your business. This is who you want to be. You want to love them, you want to love your child or your kids. You want to love yourself and you want to have this rule where you are someone who doesn’t have your kids eating ice cream and so you swap it out for fruit. Or you can do this for any example where you want to hold a boundary that they are not following, right? Because really you’re just making a request of them and the boundary is what you will do.

This is such a game changer. The same is true for parenting. The boundary is not to get your kids to act a certain way. The boundary is not to control another person. The boundary is what you will do when someone else does something. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, it doesn’t have to be a big deal. It can be very loving and very direct and kind of without all of that extra drama. The next tool that I think will be helpful here is to expect your in-laws to continue to be exactly who they’ve always been. This is something that comes up so often when I coach inside the Membership with respect to marriage and in-laws because we are around our spouses and our in-laws so much, we often have years and decades of history with them, which means that we know them really well. And yet we are often surprised at how they act even though it’s completely aligned with how they’ve always acted.

And so a really helpful mindset shift that will change your perspective and help you stay self-confident and connected and calm in any situation is to just expect them to be them. Expect your in-laws to continue to offer ice cream and other foods that you don’t want your kids having. Now, what, who do you want to be? Do you want to be the mom who says it’s just totally fine when they’re around my in-laws for them to have this kind of food? Or do you want to be the mom who says, you know what, I’m going to have alternatives and I’m going to be prepared with the fruit or whatever else it is to step in and swap it out. Or do you want to be the mom who says, you know, after dinner we all leave and we don’t have to dessert there? Or do you want to be the mom who does something else?

Again, you can come up with so many different ways that you want to show up in your life with respect to how people are in the world, but it will be from a place of confidence versus a place of frustration when you have the mindset this is just who they are and I expect them to continue to be this way. It doesn’t mean you don’t make requests, but the request comes from a very different place when you are doing it because that’s who you want to be versus doing it because you are expecting them to change for you. When you expect someone to change for you, you are trying to control them again. It feels just so disempowering. It can make you feel a little bit crazy. And so going into it, expecting them to be them will help you just feel internally at peace because then you can ask yourself, okay, now what?

Who do I want to be with respect to, you know, feeling conflict? I like to think of conflict and tension as feelings that you feel internally, not something outside of you. And it is optional. This circles back to what I was saying in the beginning about kinda sitting on the same side of the couch and thinking we’re on the same team. We are a family and the challenge is what’s out in front of us that we are navigating. That is a very different mindset and perspective than thinking, okay, I am at conflict with my in-laws. It’s us against them, it’s me against them. And with that mindset, you will feel a lot of tension and conflict in your body and I just don’t see the upside to that. Based on kind of what you’ve said so far, there might be a time where you want to feel tension or feel conflict, but I think it’s important to not do that on default.

To decide intentionally, okay, how do I want to think about this? What do I want my perspective to be with respect to my in-laws? And really empower yourself because no one else has authority over your mindset, over your perspective. And it doesn’t matter what kind of people your in-laws are, you always can decide who you want to be. And I just find that to be so freeing because they can judge you. They can give your kids all the foods you don’t want them to have and ignore your requests and that still doesn’t give them power over your actions. You get to decide how you want to think, feel, and act. And I like to think that the most challenging people in our lives, particularly in our families who we want to maintain relationships with, are our biggest teachers. I have several clients inside the Membership with older adult children and I am just thinking about how I’ve coached so many of them on how their one adult child is turning out to be their biggest teacher because they feel so triggered by them for some reason.

So I say this because I think that you can reframe how you are thinking about this and instead of blaming them and thinking that this is all their fault and kind of just wishing they were different, which doesn’t really matter if it is their fault, it’s just a disempowering way for you to think about it because you can’t change them. I like to shift into the mindset that there’s always something to learn. So you can learn a lot about yourself by your biggest triggers. So if you’re triggered by your in-laws giving your kids ice cream, what is that about for you? What can you learn about here? Another tool I want to mention here is the tool that there are two truths. So you can hold two truths at the same time. For example, your in-laws love your kids deeply and they overstep boundaries sometimes.

And you can frame this in a way that feels good and true to you. But I’d like to just remind myself that two things are true. And when I do this, and when you do this, you might find you have a lot more compassion and you get out of that black or white thinking because this really encourages nuance, allowing you to see both sides without resentment building. And I do think that resentment builds the more you hold back what you want to say said differently, the more assertive you are, the less resentment you feel. And I say that with kind of an asterisk . I like to think of it as like compassionate assertiveness. So it’s being assertive with kindness and I think that’s hard to do. I think it’s actually a lot easier to be assertive with anger because anger feels very protective. And I am speaking from experience here, my friends, I have gotten so much better at assertiveness with kindness and it takes so much more mindset work for me to do ahead of time because I think it requires some vulnerability.

When you are assertive and angry, it’s very protective, it’s very defensive, it doesn’t require a lot of vulnerability. And so that feels safer. And for a long time I was like that. I was someone who would be assertive through the emotion of anger and not surprisingly, that was not helpful for me getting the result that I wanted. And so regardless of how someone else shows up in my life, if I show up assertive with kindness, IE like direct, but loving, then I am proud of myself. I said my truth, I was vulnerable and open and also honest and kind.

And I think that just takes a little bit more intentionality, at least if you are anything like me. So in this case it might sound like I really appreciate that you want to treat the kids, but it’s also important to me that we stick with what we agreed upon as a family. And this really blends both compassion with firmness. It blends those two truths. You’re not saying how could you do this? We agreed no ice cream and blaming them, you are acknowledging that this is a desire that they have something that they like to do with the kids. And also this is something that you’re not willing to budge on with respect to food with your family. It is an art, right? I’m giving you the science of it. So if you practice this and you can practice it out of the moment, you can get so much better at it.

Now let’s shift into how this is impacting your marriage. So why does your husband need to agree with you? What need is underlying your desire for him to be on the same page? Whenever I am coaching inside the Membership and someone wants their spouse to be on the same page as them, I say, okay, why don’t you just go over to his page then If we’re just concerned with getting on the same page, you could just get on his page. And the reason that I say this is because it brings to light what we actually mean when we say I want to get on the same page with my spouse. I want us to get on the same page. It’s just a polite way of saying I want to change my spouse and I want him to be more like me. But we don’t say that because we don’t think we’re trying to be controlling. So we say a lighter version, like I just want us to be on the same page.

So just notice what the need is for you. Like what’s that really about? Get curious with yourself. And this can help you understand that your husband’s different opinion isn’t necessarily a threat to your parenting, but could just be an opportunity for you to feel more self-confident and trust yourself more and work towards a compromise or some other form of collaboration. I think that when you put kind of pressure on your spouse to agree with you, there’s probably something else going on here. Maybe it’s a little bit of insecurity, maybe it’s thinking that you are not good enough. And again, like you are going to be isolated from the family in a way that, you want to make sure your husband’s like on your team for, and again, if we go back to the, we’re all on the same team, we’re sitting on the couch together.

These are just all different types of humans. We’re all doing our best. And sometimes that’s messy. That’s a much more helpful perspective to solve the challenge in front of you versus, you know, trying to get your spouse on your side and you know, thinking your in-laws are on the opposite side and then it’s you against them and, it just perpetuates this idea that you are in conflict with them versus we’re all on the same team. We’re all a family and we have different opinions and that’s okay. One last tool I want to leave you with is to stop wanting other people to be more like you. And this is sneaky. So I want to give you an example. So I am someone who has the identity that I do what I say I’m going to do, and I like this identity. I think it’s valuable.

I continue to have it for my future self and I want to, so if someone in my life doesn’t have that belief about themselves and they don’t really care to, it’s very confusing for my mind. Like, why don’t you just do what you said you were going to do? And the problem with this is that there are lots of people who don’t do what they say they’re going to do. And when I think they should be more like me, I just create frustration for myself and I’m the only one who feels that frustration. So what I practice doing that I want to leave you here with is just wanting them to be the most them version of them. So I just want Steve to be the most Steve version of Steve. I just want my in-laws to be the most, you know, in-law version of them.

I just want my friends to be the most friend version of them. And what this does is it lets go of needing other people to be more like you. And the more that you like you and the more comfortable you get being around people who are different from you, the easier this is. But you do have to remind yourself, oh yeah, some people just don’t follow requests. Some people just don’t follow boundaries. Some people just don’t fill in the blank and that’s okay. This comes up a lot in my coaching and clients will say, but my request is so reasonable. This is like what everyone does. I don’t understand why, you know, my in-laws are doing this. And all of that might be true. It’s just extraordinarily unhelpful because they might be the exception. They don’t do it your way or the way that most people do it.

They do it differently. And as long as you keep thinking that they should be more like you or they should be different, you are continuing to waste your time and waste your mental energy. And it creates so much frustration because it’s arguing with reality. So shift your focus back on what you can control, which is who do you want to be? And I like to remind myself that I just want to be better at allowing people to be them at allowing people to be different ’cause they’re going to do that anyway. My frustration is not changing them, it’s just making me frustrated. This is something I’ve gotten so much better at with awareness and practice. So I definitely recommend here in this case that you practice not wanting your in-laws to be different. Even if that means it’s more challenging for you and you don’t have to understand why, you can just let them be them.

It brings about so much more peace in your relationship when you think about it from this perspective. Inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, we have a Marriage and Relationship toolkit that teaches so many of the tools in much more detail like boundaries, like not trying to get on the same page, like changing the dance that you’re in in your marriage or in your in-law relationships. And then there’s that added accountability and coaching inside Ask a Coach and on the weekly coaching calls. So definitely come and get support because anything in your life that you want to change or make progress on is work worth doing. I think it’s such a shame that a lot of times we think things have to get so bad before working on them. I like to think about my marriage and think about how I care about it. So I work on it. I don’t want to ever wait until it would get “bad” to work on it. I just want to work on it because I love my marriage and I love my husband. And then it’s a lot more fun when you’re working on it and things are fine. But from time to time you might have a challenge like an in-law Dynamic Challenge, as is the case, from this person who wrote in. So that is my invitation to you. You can join us over at momonpurpose.com/coaching. I will see you inside. Take care.

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