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In this follow-up conversation on the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide Podcast, Suzy Shaw welcomes back Katherine Winter-Sellery, founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution, to explore one of the most common challenges families face: co-parenting with different parenting styles. Building on their previous discussion about conscious parenting and self-awareness, they examine what happens when two parents bring different childhood experiences, values, expectations, and communication styles into the same household.
Katherine shares practical strategies for reducing mixed messages, navigating parenting disagreements, and strengthening communication between partners. The conversation explores power struggles, empathy, emotional regulation, family transitions, and the importance of truly listening to both children and co-parents. Together, they discuss how understanding the needs beneath difficult behavior can transform family relationships and help parents create greater consistency, connection, and cooperation at home.
Katherine Winter-Sellery is an internationally recognized parenting coach, speaker, mediator, and founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution. With decades of experience working with families around the world, she specializes in helping parents navigate conflict, improve communication, and build stronger relationships with their children through emotionally intelligent parenting practices.
Katherine is the co-creator of the Guidance Approach to Parenting, a research-informed framework that teaches parents how to move beyond power struggles and reactive discipline. She has trained thousands of parents, educators, and professionals in conflict resolution, emotional regulation, and family communication, and is known for translating complex behavioral and relationship dynamics into practical, compassionate strategies parents can use in everyday life.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
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Katherine Sellery, Founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution, is back with us to continue the conversation. In our last episode, we talked about conscious parenting, how our own experiences and patterns shape the way we show up with our kids. But it’s one thing to shift how you parent and another when you are parenting with a partner. So today we’re talking about co-parenting, how to get on the same page, reduce mixed messages, and create a more consistent and consistency at home. Thank you, Katherine, for joining this conversation again.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I am delighted to be here. Thank you so much. This is so juicy, as you and I were just talking.
Suzy Shaw: And I will say that when you become a partner with somebody, you sort of figure, I think, out your relationship. But then you start adding more short people to the mix, and the wheels begin to come off the bus of history and where we all came from. So, what awareness should we understand with two parents in the same household?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Let’s be honest, it’s super tricky. It’s super, super tricky. And this is where I think having ninja communication skills is so important. So that’s what I’ve coached parents who are in the situation that we’re talking about, where they’re co-parenting, and they have a partner whose approach is so radically different. Usually, for me, if I’m in the mix, it’s because one of them has probably taken my training. So that person will have, at that stage, really good assertive skills, rather than aggressive skills.
So the difference between assertion and aggression is that assertion tells people all about themselves. I feel I’m struggling. I’ve got this situation going on. I’m trying to meet my needs for whatever the need might be. It could be psychological safety. It could just be basic things like food, air, water, and sleep. It could be belonging. It could be autonomy. I mean, there are so many different needs. It’s really good to know what your needs are.
So, having the fluency to be able to use the language of nonviolent communication is the capacity to say, “I feel because I need.” Instead of, “I feel because of what you did to me.” So when we go into victim-blend consciousness, which of course is just a downward spiral, it is the dance of anger and defiance. So we have to stay out of that dance completely in order to be able to navigate through conflict effectively. There are lots of ways of navigating through conflict ineffectively, and that’s probably the number one way to do it.
So what I would say is to be able to hear what’s arising in your child. For example, let’s just use like, “I’m raising my child, and I’m co-parenting, and my ex has a very power over approach.” Let’s say that the mom has more skills with regard to guidance and knowing how to use assertion and effective conflict resolution skills. So they would be able to say things like, to their child, “It’s really hard when you went to dad’s house because you’ve gotten used to having a voice here. It’s really difficult when you go over there and feel like you don’t get to be an active participant in decision-making, and how you feel and what you need isn’t also taken into consideration.” Your child is saying, “Yeah, I mean, it’s really hard for me, mom. I feel like I don’t matter. It’s like I’m invisible.” So then you would be able to work with what arises in the child when their voice is marginalized.
Then you would turn, and you would have a conversation with your ex, and it would be something along the lines of, “I get that it was a really frustrating weekend.” They’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know what you’re doing over there, but he comes over here and there’s absolutely no cooperation. No matter what I say or what I tell him to do, he just pushes back.” You would say something to them like, “That must be so frustrating to have to feel like you work so hard to get every little thing done.” They would then begin to talk about how frustrating it is for them because in their paradigm, the child is just supposed to do as they’re told. And so, anything but that is just incredibly frustrating.
Do you see how you’re not teaching this other person? You’re not criticizing this other person? You’re just going back to what you and I have spoken about before. You’re listening to what’s arising for this other person, and you’re just providing some empathy and compassion.
Now, you’re not confronting them on their style. You’re not advising them on what you think they should do. You’re not moralizing about the fact that that would probably never work with anyone because your job now, if you’re co-parenting, is to keep the relationship as clean and strong as possible to have as much open communication as possible. You may want to start toe-dipping into, “Yeah, little Johnny was saying to me it was really hard for them too, and I would love to see the two of you have the best time possible when you are together. I think it was just really frustrating. He was just trying to express his feelings and needs, but not challenge.” I think no matter what they said or did, it came across as being a challenge to authority. Of course, as the parent, we have baked into our role authority. It is true. We have authority. It comes with our position. I would just say that it wasn’t about wanting to challenge that authority that you have as your role. It was more about just figuring out how when he is with you, he could have conversations that would be okay with you, and he doesn’t know how to do that yet.
Suzy Shaw: Right. Yeah, trying to find his words. We’ve done a couple of podcasts on little children, helping them find their words on communication skills (Tips for Teaching Young Boys to Use Their Words: Advice from an Expert) and also better communicating with teenagers (How to Talk to Teen Boys: Communication Tips to Build Trust). Now, figuring out this communication with your partner is a whole other sort of communication nut to unpack.
I will share that my husband is the 7th of 9 kids. A very large family. Independence was not necessarily celebrated because they had to have order that was moving forward. I have one brother, so we had very, very different childhood experiences, which came up as we were parenting our children.
Probably one of the first ones was when Earnest the second baby was born and started to move, my older son, Ernest, decided he would only eat chicken nuggets moving forward. He became a picky eater. He used to eat everything. Now suddenly, no, not nothing. This made my husband sort of lose his mind. He was 7th of 9. You ate what was on the table.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: You were thankful.
Suzy Shaw: You were thankful, right? You ate it fast before it was all gone.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Or somebody else reached over and touched.
Suzy Shaw: When you’re looking at these sorts of significantly different experiences, what advice do you have for the other parents to find common ground?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, empathy. I would have a lot of empathy for your husband. I would say, “Gosh, I totally get where you’re coming from. This would be just, in your family of origin, this would just be so ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Just this perspective to even have this perspective.”
What I think you’re kind of opening up here is really a great big door around what I hear the word said a lot is “entitlement.” And that seems to be a word that I hear in a lot of families because our kids are growing up in maybe more wealth than we did. More opportunity. I think that also becomes a problem that arises because you do have your husband saying, “Oh my God, are you kidding me? This should just be like appreciation deluxe and gratitude on steroids. And if we have anything but appreciation and gratitude right now, I don’t even know what my hair is going to be on fire in a minute.” I hear this in my classes all the time.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah. And he was a fabulous father. But we all have these experiences that we show up with, right?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: We do. And they can inform in a really positive way, not just a negative way. And so the more we share with our kids our stories, the more they understand us. And I can remember just having more context to understand my own parents, the more I understood their stories, the stories that they grew up with, and actually how much empathy I had for how, gosh, difficult it would be to have been them growing up in those families at that time.
It’s different than now, I think, for most of us. It is different. We talked about that a little bit before too. So as we develop our practices and we take time out on a daily basis to cultivate within ourselves more space for less than perfect outside behaviors and circumstances, the better we are at dealing with them.
And then we have our relationships. So the stronger those are and the better and the more we cultivate, and there’s a rule of thumb 20-minutes per day with each child, one-on-one activity that’s child directed the more that those relationships are cultivated, not because it’s about getting homework done or getting the table set. It’s not about one of those 10 million things that we do every day, but just about hanging out and having fun. If we’ve cultivated that in our lives. So now we’re taking care of the relationship. We’re taking care of keeping ourselves as even-tempered as possible because we’ve given ourselves what we need to have the biggest, widest open window for less than perfect.
So now we’re in those times of our day where the less than perfect gets to arise and we’re able to handle it better because we have a stronger relationship and because we’ve cultivated within ourselves as much space as possible. So if that’s happening, then when that less than perfect arises, we can say things out loud like, “You know what I’ve noticed about my own mind is that when it encounters something that it doesn’t think is right, it goes straight into judging it as wrong, as bad. And I’m just aware of the fact that that’s happening right now. And I’m noticing that my own judgmental script is arising right now as I see how picky you are at eating. And I noticed that for me, what arises is this whole story about how you’re not a good kid if that is anything less than gratitude and willingness to eat whatever is put in front of you. So I’m noticing.”
Do you see what I’m saying? If we begin to realize that it was my own judgment that activated my response, then it’s no longer about the catalyst, the child who’s picky, as being bad or wrong. It’s now just me recognizing that there’s something about this behavior that catalyzes me, that’s now taken me into my own land of judging it as bad, and that my judgment of it is bad and wrong, then catalyzes my own nervous system and my own response and reaction.
So Rumi, the famous Persian poet, said, “I’ll meet you in that field over there beyond right-doing and wrong-doing.” And if I can get to the field over there, beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, we can have a conversation about the behavior that isn’t based on right-doing and wrong-doing. And then we can have conversations with our kids outside of the problem zone to talk about, “I want to talk about picky eating, not because I’m going to make you wrong for it, but because it’s something that concerns me. And I want to chat about that. I know it’s hard to talk about these kinds of things because we all have preferences around food and we don’t want to ever, ever, ever sow the seeds of an eating disorder. So we need to be also consciously aware of how important this conversation is and how important is this change in behavior to me?” Because there are all kinds of minefields out there.
So this is where we go back to, “Do I need to modify myself? Or I’m pretty clear that no, it’s not about me modifying me. It’s about me getting you to modify you.” So I mean, there are all kinds of things that are going on in terms of these conversations. There’s one about our theory of change again. And what’s my theory of behavioral change? And what am I telling myself about the behavior that’s good, bad, right, wrong? And do I need to adjust any of those things in my own head? Or am I pretty clear, “No, I’m good with what I’m seeing and how I’m seeing it.”
Now I need to go to stage two. Do I confront you? Do I modify the behavior? Do I modify the child? Do I modify the environment? Do I modify myself? I have a checklist. I’ll tell you what’s the easiest thing to modify, believe it or not. It’s me. It’s the environment. Those two are the easiest to get somebody else to change their behavior. Okay, rolling your sleeves up, everybody. Because now we got… Now we’re talking big-time skills that are needed to get other people to change their behavior. Oh my God.
Suzy Shaw: The power struggle is something that we’ve all experienced and witnessed. And there is nothing like having a power struggle with a small child because they are much more powerful than you initially would expect.
So, what do you find the times are in the day when this disconnect between parents happens? You talked about the change periods or when you’re moving from one thing to the other thing.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: The transitions. Yeah, it’s a lot of transitions. So when these transitions are happening, it’s usually that people are just… They’re at that low point. I don’t know.
Is it 4 o’clock when we need to really take a tea break? A lot of cultures take a tea break at 4 o’clock. I think it’s because we need a little oof in order to create more space inside to have more energy. It’s toward the end of the day. I mean, it’s only 4, but if you’ve been up since 6 or 5.30, that’s late. So yeah, you think a lot of it just is recognizing when my energy is dipping.
Do we need to have a tea break? Do we need to have some apple and cheese? Do we need to have something to give us a little more, just blood stream, sugar in the bloodstream? Glucose in the brain. Glucose in the brain burns twice as fast in children as it does in adults. So I used to say to parents, actually, I still do, when you pick your kids up from school, bring a snack. And if they’re on the bus and they don’t need to eat on the bus, which unfortunately they don’t allow a lot of kids to eat on the bus, the thing they need to be doing on the bus is pulling out the apples and the cheese and the crackers and getting a little boost to the glucose in the brain so that they can stay regulated.
Suzy Shaw: Right. Well, and that regulation of food, I would say that there are three things. You know, it was exercise, sleep, and food. I call it the three-legged stool. And so I would go through with my kids, “Can I get you something to eat? Would you like to take a run around the house? Go to bed.” And that was where my typical go-to response is.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Amazing.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, totally. Keep it simple. But I will say that one of the most valuable things between my husband and me was to have a conversation about what I call the give job. And when you have two people that are both working, you know, something is going to happen. It is inevitable, right? Somebody’s going to get sick. Somebody’s going to need to go be pulled out of school. Somebody’s, I don’t know. There’s always something that’s going to happen.
And so we decided in a conversation when the kids were little that my job was typically, not always, but typically the give job in that it would give because something’s got to give. And that he would continue to work. He worked in an environment where it was really hard for him to leave. And just even having that conversation made a big change and helped us with co-parenting.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I love that. I mean, I think you’re right. It usually is exactly what happens with two working parents. And I was also the one in your context who was the give job. And it’s because I was a commodities trader and I had more ability to, I mean, not that you can imagine it, but in any event, I would put my daughter under my desk because I was trading on my own account. And so I could pull her out and breastfeed her. I could put her back down. I could change her diaper. I was like, she was fine for the first year. And then after that, the wheels came off.
It’s a little bit like that now. I love it when I’m on a Zoom call with a, actually, it happened recently with a guy. And before I knew it, he was there with the baby. I love that. I know. It’s so good. It’s so good.
Suzy Shaw: So, since you have a boy and a girl, do you, and you talk with a lot of parents, do you find that you need a different co-parent, conscientious parenting style, depending on the sex of the child?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I’m happy you bring it up because I do think there’s almost a preconceived notion that the guys, the boys, are going to be more difficult.
And I’ll tell you what, God rest her soul, my little sweet pea. Man, was she hell on wheels. And he was the dream child. So when people go into gendering, I’m like, Oh, hold on a minute. You get what you get. And it’s not gender-based.
Suzy Shaw: We did a podcast on birth order. And so that pretty much follows the script for birth order. The second ones are “don’t tell me what to do” is the short answer.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Oh my God, I love that. Yeah. Draws a line in the sand, you know? And all I can say is another deep reserve is a great sense of humor. So if you’ve got a great sense of humor, that’ll also help pull you through. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Suzy Shaw: Well, I found, you know, having two boys and a husband, that I did not understand that in my experience, the men are more emotionally sensitive.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I agree.
Suzy Shaw: And, I found that sort of shocking. And that was like a big part of my parenting and, and, you know, journey to be a spouse was like understanding that there’s a little bit more emotional sensitivity, which is why I, when I discovered how important listening is, even to my spouse, that made a big difference in the household.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yes. I remember, so funny you would say this. I remember a gal, this has gone back a long time, 15, maybe longer years ago, who was in one of my trainings. And this is kind of funny because I run a training that is 12 weeks long. It’s a 12 week family reset. And I now do that virtually in the new world order, you know, as post COVID which is great because I’ve got people all over the world in the training, but somewhere along the arc of they’re there for this, you know, problem with one child that they’re worried about or another or whatever, but shortly, like within a few weeks, let’s call it week 4. I can’t remember exactly when I noticed it happening, but generally it becomes all about your partner. And it’s less about the kids, and it’s more about the dynamic that people are having with their partner. It’s just, it’s just always this way. It’s very fun.
And she said, “I don’t get it. He’s always saying that I don’t listen to him. What’s he talking about?” And I said to her, “well, why don’t you just listen to what he tells you?” “Well, what do you mean?” I said, “Well, you know, like you and I were saying earlier, just say to him, ‘So you feel like I never listened to you.” And so she did it. The next time he said, “You’re not listening. You never listened to me.” She just said, “So you feel like I never listened to you?” And he cried. It was the first time he actually felt like she got him. And she wrote me and said, “you saved my marriage.” And I said, “you saved your marriage.”
But yes, that, that I, again, I guess it goes back to those gender type things that somewhere along the line where, you know, earlier I noticed, like a lot of people come in assuming that, you know, the boys are going to be more difficult, further from the truth for me. And one thing that goes hand in hand with what you’re saying is, and what we’re both saying, is also this idea that we have to make them men. And so there’s not pushing away to make them more independent early. And I would just so, so, so counsel not to do that. And what I’ve seen over the years is that when families do that, and it’s earlier than those little boys are ready for, they become very needy. And then what’s met is even more pushing away because the neediness triggers, “Oh, now you’ve really got a problem.” You’ve got a needy little boy. Well, actually, meet the need. If the need is for closeness and you’re trying to create distance, you’re creating distance too soon. And it’s too soon for that child. How do you know? Because they’re needy. So let them, let them have what they need for as long as they need it. It will naturally happen.
The apple falls from the tree. We don’t have to make it fall. All of these things are normal developmental processes. They will actually happen all on their own. Just like potty training, kids will actually just go do that on their own. Um, you don’t have to have anything structured in place. We never did anything. They just, all of a sudden seems like, right? It’s natural. It’s normal. If you have kids who want to sleep in your bed, that’ll end too. They don’t want to sleep with you forever.
Suzy Shaw: And it reminds me of our pediatrician saying no one goes to college with a pacifier in his mouth. Exactly. It’s like, don’t make it, don’t make it the bridge you want to die on.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: So good, so good. I mean, going to pacifiers just briefly, cause our son loved his, his binky, his pacifier. And I mean, he was the kid who had one around his neck, one in each pocket. You know, it was like, he never wanted to be without one, but his teeth were starting to do this. And the dentist said, “You’ve got to get rid of it.” And so we explained to him, you know, honey, your teeth are starting to do this, and we don’t want your teeth to do this. And so it’s really time to get this up. And so he was choosing, we let him understand, and also we could see him choosing not to use it.
I mean, if you can explain a problem to someone so clearly, so visually that they themselves see it, then they own the problem. You don’t have to reward and punish and all the rest of it. So anyway, he would say, “So my teeth are doing this mom?” And I’d be like, “yeah, they’re doing this.” And that’s really all it took was for him to see the problem and give it up on his own.
It’s amazing. It’s amazing when you can explain things in a way in which a child sees the problem themselves, and they have self-started behavioral change. And I have so many examples of that.
Suzy Shaw: So, as we wrap up this conversation, is there like one shift that you would recommend to a couple that might make a better connection in parenting?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: You know, it’s so funny you would say that. And I want to say the same thing. I mean, if you could see your partner, beautiful, if you could see the need that’s driving the breakdown, then it will change everything. It is literally the one thing you need to do, is to be able to change your mind and meet them in that field beyond right-doing and wrong-doing that one that Rumi talked about. It sounds trite maybe, but it actually is a game-changer.
If I remember, have you ever heard of “Shenpa?” It’s a term used by Buddhist communities. There’s a woman whom I listened to, and she was talking about, you know, Shenpa basically, are our prejudices. And if we can see what our Shenpa is, it’s, you know, the next thing in our spiritual evolvement to realize where you have this Shenpa.
And she was talking about within herself, she realized that she had a lot of negative feelings about rich people. And that was her Shenpa. Was that she realized, oh my gosh, when I see someone with affluence, I think about them with a lot of negativity. So when I see someone with, and fill in the blank for yourself, I see them with a lot of negativity, a lot of times marriages, you know, that have broken is because of someone being verbally abusive or physically abusive, or, you know, there can be infidel, there can be so many reasons, but a lot of it, I think really gets back to the adult who has identified with their inner wounded child and is fused with that inner wounded child. And their behavior is a reflection of the inner wounded child in pain. And it comes out, you know, in abusive language, it comes out in ways that are not okay, they’re not acceptable. However, if you can now, because you’ve put yourself in a different position, you’re out of the toxic marriage, whatever, but you see those as the secondary problem, it’s your capacity to see past it and to see to that unmet wounded child inside with so many unmet needs. It’s not your job to fix or repair or rescue, God knows, none of those codependent behaviors. However, you may find that by having empathy for the wounded inner child in that person, whose manifestation of their unmet needs is coming forward in ways that are socially acceptable and hard to be around and toxic. If you can pass them to the inner problem, then you can connect with them there. And so that would be what I would say would be, you know, what’s your Shenpa?
Suzy Shaw: That’s really interesting and powerful. So thank you for sharing that. Do you have a mantra for this co-parent topic?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, I think that, you know, in this case, the mantra has to be, “to thine own self be true,” and don’t ever betray yourself in service to the other. Don’t make your voice invisible.
And so if you want to eliminate a resentment flow, the only way to do it is to speak up. Otherwise, if you are silent in service to the other because they are so loud or so big or get so triggered, then you will forever subjugate your own voice. And so as long as you are not about fixing, changing, or, you know, healing the other person and haven’t fallen into the trap of thinking it’s your job to make them okay. Um, let’s say you’ve moved past that, not rescuing anymore, then you may still find it hard to speak up because it can activate the other person into great big explosions.
But if you’re true to thine own self, you have learned how to speak your peace and not be responsible for other people’s responses. Cause other people who live in the land of victim-blame consciousness, of course, blame you for their overreactions when it’s not your fault. You catalyze, but are not the cause. So recognize, and maybe that’ll be our new mantra for this one. You know, you may be the catalyst, but you’re not the cause. They may be the catalyst, but are not the cause. For us all to get clear about the fact that people can catalyze, you can catalyze, other people can’t catalyze, but they are never the cause of how you feel and they’re never the cause of your response.
Suzy Shaw: Well, Katherine, I really thank you for making time to talk with us and the mothers of boys, and, and really parents in general, this isn’t just for moms. And, I know that you have a website, consciousparentingrevolution.com. Is that the primary place you would like people to find you?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I have an Amazon bestseller, “7 Strategies to Keep Your Relationship with your Kids from Hitting the Boiling Point,” but those same seven strategies could be applied to any dynamic. And so you can go to freeparentingbook.com and download my Amazon bestseller.
Well, thank you. And the mothersofboys.life website, we will have this podcast, and we will have all the links to Katherine’s websites, books and everything else. So I appreciate you joining us.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Thank you. This has been so fun. I love chatting with you.
