Parenting as Partners ─ How to Launch Your Kids Without Ejecting Your Spouse

Before having kids, did you and your partner discuss at what age you would stop packing their lunches? Or whether you would use grounding as a punishment? Or if you’d require them to pay their own way through college? Most parents don’t, and so are taken by surprise when disagreements over decisions like these begin to erode their marriage.

Over the past decade, parent educator Vicki Hoefle has worked with countless couples who believed they had parenting problems, when the real issue was a failure to communicate clearly about expectations for how they would raise their kids. More than ever today, we see both parents actively involved and participating in the raising of children. While beneficial in many ways, this balance of roles does often lead to increased conflict caused by the differing life experiences and beliefs of each parent, which influence how they think their kids should be raised. When conflict, judgment, and stress build up between parents, the whole family suffers.

Parenting as Partners will help parents thoughtfully and intentionally merge together different life experiences and navigate the tricky terrain of parenting by exploring their own upbringings and shedding light on their beliefs, preferences, and values concerning parenthood. It will guide parents as they develop strategies that allow them to work with their spouse in creating and implementing a cohesive parenting plan to support their marriage and their children from infancy to their launch into adulthood.

For more than two decades, parent educator, author, speaker, and coach Vicki Hoefle has been helping tens of thousands of families across the country. She combines expertise in Adlerian Psychology with a suite of actionable, time-tested tools. A master story-teller who is part comedian, part sage, and mostly parent, Hoefle offers ways to strengthen and enhance the parent-child relationship and bring out the best in each parent, the best in each child, and the best in each encounter.

Hoefle leads parent education programs nationwide. It’s not about the latest quick-fix discipline strategy, sticker-chart, or trying to become the perfect parent. It’s about developing relationships that will last a lifetime.

Her strategies work for every family: whether you have young children and are just starting the parenting journey; are beginning to experience the first challenges of raising children in the 21st century; or if you’re facing crisis, stress, or the effects of divorce. Hoefle inspires REAL families and shows them how to spend time and energy investing in the relationship, to focus on what is important and experience the joy of living in a healthy, loving family.

Hoefle is the author of two other highly acclaimed titles, Duct Tape Parenting: A Less Is More Approach to Raising Respectful, Responsible, and Resilient Kids and The Straight Talk on Parenting: A No-Nonsense Approach on How to Grow a Grown-up. She lives in Lincoln, VT and is the mother of six beautiful kids.