Explore how to (actually) be a good partner and build a united front as parents, leading to more harmony at home, in this excerpt from Dr. Rick Hanson’s article.
What Makes a Good Partnership?
A good partnership has these characteristics:
- Alignment — Shared values about life, family, childrearing, the roles of mothers and fathers, and the involvement of the father in childrearing and housework; specific agreement about parenting practices, schedules, and finances; backing up each other with the kids
- Fairness — A workload that is similar in its hours and stresses
- Ownership — Shared, mutual responsibility for planning, worries, and important decisions
- Trust — Agreements are kept or renegotiated; each person is reliable and sensible
- Communication — Civility; empathy; emotional support; open, explicit, direct, authentic conversation; skillful negotiation.
Assessment of Your Partnership
Different couples have different kinds of partnerships. By understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a team, you can build on what works well and start shoring up what could use some improvement.
Please take a look at the assessment below. You and your partner can fill it out individually and then talk about it, or you alone could do it. If each of you do the assessment, we have some suggestions about how to talk about it from our own, sometimes bumpy, experience:
- First, focus on the experience of yourself and your partner, rather than disagreements about how each other acts, the circumstances, justifications, or what to do. It is hard to argue about how you feel; no one can tell us what our feelings are or what it’s like for us when something happens.
- Second, try to resolve what the facts are. Do not get bogged down in disagreements about what happened the past. Rather, start tracking what the facts are right now. For example, if there is a question about who is doing what, for a week each person can keep a log of his or her activities: this is usually very eye-opening, and we will say more about this exercise in future columns.
- Third, each person should make at least one agreement about how he or she could be a better partner. Try to focus more on what you could do better than on any grievances you may have with your partner.
Assessment of Your Partnership
Please consider the past month. Unless otherwise indicated, please mark the questions below using the following scale:
- 0 Not at all or very little
- 1 Somewhat
- 2 Very much
When you are done, take a look at the overall picture. Are there many more “2’s” than “1’s” and “0’s”? Also look at specific questions: Where are the zeros? (Note that this scoring is reversed in the negative characteristics section of the COMMUNICATION part, where high scores are a problem.)
Also consider where you and your partner view things very differently, especially if one person’s score is a “0” while the other’s is a “2.” In these cases, you might agree to rate the question on a daily or weekly basis, both to come together on how you rate things as well as to have things go better from now on.
This is one of three pages of the assessment. Access the full printable version here.