Duncan Gill  •  October 8, 2026

Avoid Adversarial Dynamics

One of our Leadership Principles is avoid adversarial dynamics. Put more simply: don’t fight with your kids.

Imagine your son Johnny is playing Fortnite late into the night. You’ve asked him several times to stop, and eventually you go upstairs and tell him firmly that it’s time to get off the Xbox. He finally shuts it down, but as he does, he mutters something under his breath about how you’re a terrible parent, you’re completely unfair, and you never let him do anything.

There are a lot of ways this can go from here.

One is to demand, “What did you just say?” Johnny repeats it, perhaps with a little more enthusiasm this time. You respond. He responds. Pretty soon, neither of you is really discussing the original problem anymore. You’re arguing about arguing. Voices get louder. Maybe Johnny storms off. Maybe you do. Maybe you rip the Xbox out of the wall. Whatever the particular ending, you and your child have moved from having a disagreement into a battle.

There are other possibilities. You could ignore what he muttered because, after all, he did turn off the Xbox. You could ask him what he said and, if he’s receptive, have a reasonable conversation about it. You could decide that neither of you is in a particularly good state of mind and come back to the issue tomorrow. You could even decide that the Xbox has become enough of a problem that you’re going to take it away.

The particular decision matters less than we sometimes think. What matters enormously is how you arrive at it.

The real issue isn’t Fortnite. It isn’t even whether Johnny stays up too late. The bigger issue is the relationship you are building with your child. Each time a conflict turns into a battle, that relationship moves another small step toward becoming adversarial.

Ideally, you and your child are on the same team. Not all the time, of course. There will be plenty of occasions when you want different things. Your child may want to stay out until two in the morning, skip school, spend money he doesn’t have, or do any number of things you think are terrible ideas. Being on the same team doesn’t require agreeing.

It means that, as much as reasonably possible, your relationship is cooperative rather than adversarial. Your long-term goal and your child’s long-term goal are ultimately the same: helping that child become a capable, independent adult.

Many of the other Leadership Principles are designed, at least in part, to protect that relationship. Maximum support and minimum interference means giving children as much latitude as reasonably possible instead of constantly stepping into their lives. Allowing space for failure means letting children conduct some of their own experiments rather than preventing every mistake. Giving up control to gain authority means recognizing that the more you try to control another human being, the more likely that person is to resist you.

Punishment can create the same problem. It may work perfectly well in the short term. You punish your child for doing something and he stops doing it. Success, right?

Only partly, if that. Punishment deliberately makes something unpleasant happen to another person in order to change that person’s behavior. That can create resentment. So the question isn’t simply whether you changed the behavior today. It’s also what effect your approach has on the relationship over the next five or ten years—and whether your child is likely to see you as someone on his team when he really needs you.

This becomes particularly important during adolescence because teenagers are unusually ready for a battle.

If you’ve spent much time with teenagers, you’ve probably experienced a conversation in which you could say the sky is blue and your child would insist it’s red. It can feel like opposition for the sake of opposition.

In some ways, that’s exactly what it is. But it comes from a fundamentally healthy developmental task.

Your teenager’s job is to grow up. That means becoming a separate person from you. It means developing his own ideas, preferences, values, relationships, and eventually a life that doesn’t depend upon you. Teenagers therefore have a powerful drive to establish that they are their own people and that Mom and Dad are no longer in charge of every aspect of their lives.

They sometimes go considerably overboard in proving it.

We can call that defiance, rebellion, or oppositionality, and sometimes those descriptions are perfectly reasonable. But it’s worth remembering that the underlying developmental drive toward independence is something we ultimately want. The difficulty is that teenagers can pursue that independence in ways that make parenting them extraordinarily frustrating.

That means parents shouldn’t be surprised when their teenagers occasionally seem to bait them into a fight. Different children do this to very different degrees, but it’s useful to assume that the invitation to battle will sometimes arrive.

You don’t have to accept it.

A battle requires two participants.

That is much easier to say than to do. Your teenager knows you extremely well. He has had years to discover exactly which buttons produce the most interesting results. When you’re tired, stressed, angry, or worried, it can be remarkably difficult not to respond emotionally.

But that is precisely when your own behavior matters most.

If you’re too angry to think rationally, walk away. Take some space. Return to the discussion when you can make a decision rather than simply react. That’s not weakness or surrender. In fact, it’s exactly the skill we’re usually trying to teach our children: when you’re overwhelmed by emotion, don’t immediately say or do something destructive.

Even if you’re calm, your child may not be. Trying to reason with a teenager who is furious and emotionally charged may accomplish very little. There is usually nothing magical about resolving the disagreement at that exact moment. You can come back to it later.

There is also an important modeling component here. We tell children not to scream when they’re angry, not to make impulsive threats, and not to lose control when someone frustrates them. If our response to being frustrated by them is to yell, swear, threaten, or explode, we’re teaching a very different lesson.

I’ve seen families in which this pattern has existed for years. The parent nags or yells. The child reacts. The parent escalates. The child escalates further. By adolescence, both sides can become so accustomed to the battle that almost any disagreement immediately activates it. At that point, getting out of the pattern can be extremely difficult.

None of this means you let your child do whatever he wants.

Avoiding adversarial dynamics is not the same as avoiding conflict. Conflict is inevitable, and sometimes it’s important. You can say no. You can enforce a limit. You can take away the Xbox. You can make a decision your child absolutely hates.

The goal isn’t to keep Johnny happy. It’s to make the decisions you believe you need to make as a parent without unnecessarily turning the disagreement into a war between the two of you.

Your child may already be primed for battle. You don’t need to be.

Over the long run, one of your greatest assets as a parent is having a child who believes that, even when the two of you disagree, you are fundamentally on the same team.