As single parents, we have so many battles we have to fight day in and day out. It could be with your kids, your ex or co-parent, your ex in-laws, the school, family members. Maybe you’re fighting against stereotypes. The list goes on and on. The reality is we only have so much energy for fighting and need discernment to know which ones will matter in the long run. If we try to take them all on, we exhaust ourselves and don’t have the energy for other things in life. This is a really hard balance. So how do we know which fights are worth it?

This week, we’re diving into this important question: Which fights are worth it? We’ll cover this in three main points:

1. The necessity of choosing our battles.

2. Six questions to ask yourself before engaging.

3. Defining success and what “winning” really looks like.

Are you more of a fighter or do you tend to shy away from battles? 

So I would say if you asked my family, if I was passive, if there was any suggestion that I ever was, they would laugh at you. I grew up a fighter. I was a third of four children and everything was a fight for me. My entire life has been a process of learning which fight is actually worth it because man, can I wear myself out fighting?

Let’s talk about the necessity of choosing our battles. Why is this important?

I really like this quote from author Mandy Hill. She says, pick your battles. You don’t have to show up to every argument you’re invited to. So yeah, I mean it’s as simple as that. You don’t have to do it. And why waste the time and energy to do just that? It’s not worth it. And weighing that is really important.

And along with that, every battle has a cost to it. And it may not seem like it’s a massive cost, but anytime you’re putting energy into a conflict, it’s taking away energy from something else or time away and everything costs something. And so it really is important. Like you said, we have just limited resources and we can spend it all battling every, and I think for me, at least when I was in the early stages of being a single parent, especially with litigation and all that kind of stuff. I was so trigger happy, everything that came along, every nuance of objections and co-parenting stuff, and I would just react to everything and I wore myself out.

Well, and some things that conflict just isn’t worth it. It’s not going to add to your life. So recently I took my kids for fall break to Florida. It was the week that they were planning Milton. We had actually planned to leave Tuesday and the airport was shutting down Wednesday.

With that, I was talking to a friend who lived there and she said, well, if they force an evacuation order, you will not be able to get the hour away. And I thought here, and I’m like, so I can leave right now and know I won’t have a problem or I can wait, wait it out and if I leave, I have to pay an extra night at the hotel both here because it’s too late to cancel. That was a fight that I thought, you know what? It’s not worth waiting to see if the fight comes. I’m getting out of it. And the boys and I had a great time. We ended up going to dinner in Orlando and had a great time with it. But that’s the kind of thing that sometimes there’s a fight coming that we just need to say that’s not going to be worth that fight.

I think the other thing that’s attached to this is relationships. There’s people on the other side of a lot of these fights. In the hurricane case, not as much, but those relationships matter and we only get so much relationship credit in every relationship that we have. And is this something I want to exhaust that relationship credit on, or would I just like to hold out for something that really matters? So for example, my youngest son is not like my oldest son. I could give my oldest son a curfew. He was home two minutes beforehand or I had a text. My younger son has a DHD. He does not look at time the way that I do. And if I told him nine 30 and he walks in the door at 9 35, that’s success. And I have to know that difference because I’m not going to wear hunter out saying, I need you to be as precise as your brother and I are.

That’s not worth that fight. It’s not worth the damage it would do to our relationship. And I know if it’s been more than 15 minutes, he’s getting a call from me and we’ll have a nice lovely conversation of course. But he’s usually home, sometimes even early where his brother, it was always nine 30 on the dot. So sometimes those relationships just matter way more than that fight does. One.

This is semi-related, but not completely. But someone I know, we were talking about curfew recently and his daughter, same thing. His oldest is precise on the dot leaves at the same time, never been late to work a day in his life, just very much like Colton. And then his daughter has  ADHD and same situation, time gets away, she doesn’t pay attention. And what he’s told her, instead of giving her a curfew for when to be home, he gives her a curfew for when to leave the place because he doesn’t want to create a scenario where she’s driving fast to get home by curfew. It’s better for me to give her. And he’s like, I can see her on life 360. So he can tell if she’s left or not and that’s her curfew –  leaving to come home and then he can say, all right, slow down, take your time, you’re good.

Along the lines of relationships, I think it’s also important to point out that it’s important to know which battles to choose because our kids are watching and if we are always reacting and always just jumping all over everything, A puts a lot of stress just in the environment. I recently last week was doing quite a bit of traveling and the people that I was with it, it wasn’t America. And so occasionally there would be discrepancies with a bill or a, I thought we said still water, not whatever. Then there’s the language barrier and it got to the point where I just let it go because what I was talking about, it created this environment of tension that not every battle is worth fighting. I mean especially if it’s something that is out of your control. It’s just a misunderstanding or whatever. And in regards to that, our kids are always watching how we treat other people and the environment that we create. That’s all we can do. We can’t force behaviors necessarily, but we can force what we want our environment to be like.

Not only that, you don’t know what other people are going through. So I think about something that happens in a grocery store and a kid is going crazy and you’re judging the parent or you say something to your kids in the car about somebody else. It’s not creating that atmosphere of calm and compassion and kindness to other people and giving the benefit of the doubt. And in those instances, it’s still a battle, even if it’s a battle with yourself, you might not be outwardly speaking to the other person and starting a battle, but you’re talking to your kid, can you believe this moron over here? Whatever. And you’re still creating an environment that’s not conducive to peace and calm and

Well, and even if it is just in your head, you’re not then present. If I’m at the grocery store, to piggyback on your example, I’m not present with my child enjoying that. He’s over there staring at the broccoli and wondering what’s going on with you staring at the broccoli. I’m thinking about that other thing and now I’m present in that fight instead of present in a good moment. I’ve become present in a bad moment and who wants to do that? And even if I am present, I may not be completely checked out now and that’s costing me something with what I actually value for sure.

Six questions to ask yourself before engaging

So number one, why does this fight even matter? What am I going to get from it? Is there an overall goal or objective that I’m getting out of it? Does it impact people around me, people that I love? Number two, is it your battle to fight?

So maybe there’s somebody else who deserves that energy. It can be really tempting to be scrolling through social media and see some injustice that’s done and in that moment wanting to just go out and start putting all this energy into social media post to say, Hey, all of this can’t happen. But if that’s taking away time from people in your immediate circle, people who are your family, your kids, maybe that’s not the best use of that energy.

I think that’s a good point. And as you were talking about that, I’m thinking I have the hardest time with this is with my kids. If they’re facing something that has some conflict, I want to jump in and just fix it. And sometimes it’s not our battle to fight. I mean, our job is to be with our kids, not necessarily go in and fight those battles. So this question is a good one for me to remember.

I have a friend who is going through a divorce right now and she is her soon to be ex is just running her through the ringer, smearing her all over everywhere and just, I mean, calling her coworkers, calling her boss, calling friends, calling family, just, it’s awful. And at first she was being kind of timid about it and was like, she was just scared she didn’t know what to do. And I called her one day, I was like, I want to go to the rescue for you and just take this guy out, whatever. And I was like, okay, no, I know I can’t do that. But I was telling her, I was like, you have to fight for yourself. You’ve got to find a way. And anyway, she has stepped up since then. But more in a very calculated, working with smart people who can take this guy out at the knees in the right way from a legal standpoint, you can’t just go calling people emotional. And so she’s doing the smart thing and choosing her battles wisely for sure. But it’s like, oh, in that moment, at first I just wanted to come in and just take care of my friend and go to battle for her. 

I think I’ve talked about instances with my kids’ teachers before where there was one teacher who told my son who was reading, this is in the few months after his dad died, a story about a kid who was losing his grandfather who had raised him. And one of the questions, he raised his hands and asked the teacher, it was like, what would the boy be feeling? And the teacher was like, well, you should know more than anybody else in this classroom. And I wanted to go punch her, this is the fighter part of me. But when I spoke to him about it, he’s like, no, mom, it’s fine. And that was the moment that I started learning both with my kids, but I do it with people who work for me as well, that I will tell them, I will do this for you. I will go talk to your teacher if you need me to, but if you want to take steps to try to solve that first you do that and come to me when you’re ready for me to take action. And the number of times that I found that my kids not only could fight their own battles but would prefer to, was astonishing to me. I thought my kids, he was in fifth grade, he was young and I just thought he needed me to come in and rescue him. And in fact, if I had, I would’ve taught him something about himself that he wasn’t competent to do that. And instead I just told him, I said, you know what? If you get an F on that assignment, I still love you and I don’t care. So it worked out just fine, but those battles.

Are you emotionally prepared to fight?

Emotions can be our ally. It can be something that fuels us to take the best action that needs to be taken next. Especially if we’re able to look at the situation and say, wow, this is really hurtful. I think I need to stand up for myself here. This person’s mistreating me. Or it can be an adversary in that it costs those things that we were talking about earlier that are unnecessary. And I know I’ve learned this recently that it’s most helpful. I can put my emotions kind of on a scale and it’s most helpful that even if it’s on a scale of one to 10, if I’m even at a three or a four, it’s best if I just stop, let myself rest for a little bit, get away from the situation, pull myself outside of it, and be able to go back and look at it when I’m more at a one or a two. Because ultimately, I mean I’m going to have feelings about it. And that’s again, what can fuel in a wise and a wise direction that’s pushing you towards that righteous anger, if you will. But having anxiety and fear and control that’s coming in and speaking into situations isn’t going to be helpful for me or the other person it’s affecting.

I was just talking about this with my counselor this week about some conflict that I’m sensing and my typical response is get in there and try to fix it. And I’m so worn out that exactly what you’re saying, I’ve had to realize that the problem’s not going to go away necessarily, but I recognize that I’m not in a good place to handle this, and so the outcome is not going to be good. So I love this point, the emotional side of it. Are we emotionally prepared to get into this fight?

And I was telling Elizabeth that yesterday, my husband reminded me late in the day that I was supposed to do something. It was an event I had been looking forward to and I wanted to snap his head off because I was like, no, I do not have the bandwidth to do this. And rather than yell at my husband, what I realized was if this is bringing up anger in me, I probably need to listen and I’m still recovering from the flu and I should just call it, I should just say I don’t have this in me because this is a fight that my brain was telling me, you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to do this right now.

How is the fight affecting your kids? 

And this could be to me, fighting with your kids or them seeing you fight and rubbing off on them. But this is a big one. We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but I had to recognize that exactly what you said, Marissa, my daughters are not the same. And so what worked or didn’t work for Zoe is not, or it’s not going to be the same for my other daughters, and we’ve said this before, but rules without relationship equals rebellion. And so if we are not really understanding the needs of our kids and how things affect them, more than likely it’s a battle. I’m not saying that you never need to fight it, but you just have to enter cautiously. It does affect our kids.

Those of us with younger kids, a lot of the fights in their younger years end up being about food, like what food you want them to eat and what food they won’t eat and trying to make them healthy. And there was a research study or there was a research, I don’t think it was a study anyway, there was some research that suggests when fighting with your kids about food, about what they eat, we end up in battles that cost us about 10 and a half hours a week. If you think about sitting at the meal, I mean three meals a day, if you’re eating three meals a day with your kids. And so at what point is it worth having those battles and not just listening to your child say that they don’t like peas and that’s okay, it’s okay if they don’t like peas, don’t make peas then. But what is it costing? Going back to that question that we talked about earlier, it could be costing fun meal times for you, a time of connection and being able to have conversation and have fun at the dinner table together. And if you’re kicking off your dinner with fighting over food, you’re not setting anyone in the family up for success when it comes to that.

What happens if you lose this battle? 

That’s another question to ask yourself. So try to understand or think about the possible downside risks that come with losing the battle.

And I might also add what happens if you win it? So when my husband died, he had a bicycle. The bicycle was brought to his funeral by somebody else from his house. That bicycle was supposed to be brought to my house and never was the individual stole. It said that Bill had given it to him and Bill, we had had court papers that said he could not give away assets or do anything like that. So legally I could have taken him to court and gotten it returned. My kids as they got older were wishing they had that bike. And there was a part of me that wishes I had it, but my parents had told me too, this was not a man who was known to be stable mentally. And for me to continue to have that fight, it could have put me in a dangerous place. And so I’m looking at it saying it’s a bicycle. Yes, there’s value in it beyond just the bite it belongs to my kid’s dead father. But is it worth what could potentially ensue in violence or whatever he would do? No. So even if I won that, so win or lose sometimes what is on the other side of that is not,

It’s really about just being clearheaded in the situation and knowing what that looks like, what success or winning or losing looks like.

Yeah. Well I want to say really quick too before we move on to the sixth question is going back to how it affects your kids and even winning or losing, at the end of the day, whatever fight it is, it’s going to affect your kids whether you’re fighting with them. Yes. But think about those of us who have co-parents. The kids may hear us fighting and there was an article in Parents magazine that I read that was really fascinating. It was showing all these different studies that showed the mental health effects of parents fighting the effect that it has on the kids and it increases the risk of depression and anxiety. It lowers their self-esteem, it impairs their sense of security. I feel like with those of us who are divorced, and Marissa, you can speak to the death of a spouse, but I feel like they’re already battling these things anyway. And so for them to hear us fighting and not providing that calm atmosphere is absolutely piling on. And so we have to be thinking when lose or draw, how is it affecting our kids? And that to me is the most important piece of it.

Even if you win, you may lose more because of the damage it does to your children who are seeing you.

If you don’t fight this battle regardless of whether you win it or lose it, will you be able to live with yourself afterwards? 

There are some times when I’ve looked back at battles that I fought and I thought I can still kind of look like a heel and that’s not really what I wanted. So why would I fight it? Why would I have done that so many times in my first marriage that I wish I could go back now and not fight those.

In the divorce? And I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, if she’s one minute late showing up for the girls or seeing the girls or whatever, okay, we’re out of here, it’s chill Robert, just take a moment, take a breath. Because there are some things that I think either side, some things that are worth fighting for. You have to ask yourself, can you live with yourself and then some battles that you’re fighting that you don’t need to, can you live with yourself? Those are the things that really haunt me. Some of the exchanges and the drop-offs and that they were, oh my gosh, I know I did damage to my daughters and I have a lot of regret about that. So I think this last question is super important.

Well even looking at your values too, it’s like do I stand for something? Do I stand for this and am I willing to go to battle for that thing? And so knowing your values can really help put some guardrails around what you’re willing to fight and what you’re not. And so thinking through that might be a good exercise to be able to start to uncover this.

I think too, you might be the crazy one. There are some times when you’re picking a battle that may make you more of the bad guy. And I think it’s, especially when we’re dealing with an ex or somebody who we’re kind of entrenched in battle with, it’s easy to say no, they’re the bad guy and any response I have to them is, but there’s a perspective from the other side and there’s people watching you, both your children and the other one. And you may look like the crazy one for fighting this battle.

Well, especially if it’s like you have kind of rules. Let’s just say you have rules that your kids can’t watch horror movies and your child is like, but mom, this is real life for me, but mom, I can handle it. I don’t care about scary movies, it doesn’t affect me, blah, blah blah. And then the dad that I deal with is like, yeah, it’s fine, whatever. He can watch whatever he wants and you feel like the crazy person because you got two against one or at least

I feel like that crazy person who’s battling against a child and an older child and not making good decisions at the end of the day and what I ended up explaining was you have high anxiety. You do not need to bring things into your life that cause you more anxiety. So I’m going to say no to scary movies, period. It has nothing to do with jump scares, it has nothing to do with anything that you’re talking about. It has to do with the effect that it has on you. So no, I’m not doing it.

What does it look like when we successfully are able to navigating whether fights are worth it?

I know for me in my more immature days what it looked like was did I get that rush after like, yes! I won it. Doesn’t matter who I took down and my path and what really happened to anyone else. It was just about winning. About winning. I won’t even say about winning or losing because I was going to find a way to win, but now being a little more mature than I was in my twenties, it needs to align with your long-term goals and for the collective good is kind of a big thing that I’ve learned for it to be successful. And the goal is to achieve a win-win, not to bring your opponent down, which is kind of where I started in this too. 

Especially if someone hurt you, my ex was just, she was treacherous and I would never have admitted it at the point at that point, but definitely there was some seething anger that winning felt so good because it was like you deserve nothing, you deserve to rot. I am ashamed to say now in my twenties, and this would be, I mean you named the person and I was okay to do it, but I would be like, I will destroy your soul.

For me, in my younger days there was always this, I want to be heard, I want to make sure I’m heard. But also that last word was always like, I’m the one who got it and that means I won. That’s success. There was a quote, and I don’t remember what movie it is it’s in, but this character says, do not mistake my silence for weakness. I love that quote because sometimes walking away is that sign of strength and wisdom and when we can say, I’m not going to take that last word, it actually is the power, but it took me probably 30 years to realize that.

I love that. I love that you brought that up because I do think that it’d be helpful for us to reframe this winning or losing. I recently, I don’t know where I heard it, but one of the best analogies of conflict is if I’m in a conflict situation with you, Marissa, think of it as we are holding two ends of a rope and in the middle of it is a knot. The more we pull on our side, the more that knot gets tighter and almost unsolvable. So if we can try to pull that apart, that is not a resistance thing. That is an untangling kind of thing.

So often I used to think about conflict or battles as a win-lose thing and there’s some things that it’s not losing, it’s just walking away. And to your point, it’s like it’s not weakness. It’s just like no, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, that’s more often than not. That’s what success looks like for me is just going, choosing not to engage. And then when you do engage, you are so sure that no, this is worth fighting for and not even winning. This is worth really making my point, my voice known. There are things like that, but it’s not the same for everybody.

And I wouldn’t might even add to that. There’s this concept in business called sunk costs. So if I’m going to invest in something in a project and let’s say halfway through it, I’ve invested $2 million at that mark, I have to choose whether I invest another 2 million to finish the project or just say, Hey, I’m done. It’s not going to work. There’s a lot of sunk costs in some of these fights and sometimes I will get to the point where I’m like, well, but I’ve been fighting this for so long, I have to win it now. But I really need to step back and say, no, the fight that has been had is I, it unspent it, it’s back there. The decision to move forward or not from here needs to be based on what the future from here on out looks like. So if this looks like a failing proposition, sure I’m going to lose $2 million, but I’m going to provide a way for me to not lose $4 million with that, whether it’s emotional capital or relationship capital that I’m choosing here. It might be time to cut my losses and just say, Hey, enough is enough.

Yeah, absolutely. I think in all of this, the personal growth side is so important because if we can walk away from battles that we normally would go just charging at, we can find ourselves maturing. And that’s a good thing. That’s a win in of itself. It is. That is huge success that we’re not the same people. I mean when we talk about there is hope that you can be transformed because of this difficult season, this is what we’re talking about. You go through this conflict, you go through this struggle and it doesn’t mean the struggles all go away. It means that you come out the other side a better person because you were in the fight, you were in the conflict and in the battle. And I think that’s such a big piece of this is realizing that whether you win or lose a battle or conflict, if you have the right mindset, you always gain something from that if you’re looking for it.

Listener Question:

My ex’s new significant other wants us to become friends. I think that’s weird. I’m not interested in that and don’t see any reason it’s necessary. How do I handle it when they keep reaching out?

The person who sent it to me, I was like, are you in my brain right now or what’s the deal? Luckily my ex’s significant other has stopped reaching out. Thankfully she has given up hope and I’m very grateful for that because I could care less about having a relationship. Yeah, I mean honestly, I had to tell my ex, I was just straightforward with my ex and said, Hey listen, this is not something I’m interested in. I told him, I said, I wish I was a better person than this, but I’m not in the emotional head space to be able to have a relationship with this person. I’ll be cordial, I’ll say hello at kids events and of course be a nice person, but I’m not willing to have a relationship with her. If I were to have a relationship with her, it would be because she wants a relationship with me, not because I want a relationship with her. And I am trying very hard to not be codependent anymore So I’m not going to be friends with her just because she wants me to be and because you want me to be. So I just put that kind of line in the sand and I told him I was like a couple years down the road I might feel different. But today as it stands, I have no intention.

If they’re shared parental responsibilities and that person is in your kids’ lives. I think about when my ex was dating a person that I knew, I actually tried to stay kind of close to the situation just to kind of figure out what was going on there. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. And I don’t mean that in a snarky kind of way. I just mean that there’s more than just our feelings here.

It is weird. And I don’t know what that’s about. If they were like, Hey, let’s go grab some barbecue or something, I wouldn’t do that. But we do have to consider that they are in our kids’ lives. And as much information and as much exactly what you said, being cordial is super important, but I can see value in having a relationship of some kind.

Well, my experience with my ex has been that he will defer to the women in his life as much as possible in terms of parenting. And I am not interested in parenting my child with a woman that I don’t know and don’t care to know. And so I just made that really clear that parenting decisions, I told him that too. Parenting decisions, conversations that need to be had about clothing, about scheduling issues between us. And it has nothing to do with her. It has nothing to do with my significant other it to do with us. And the reason why I set that boundary is because his girlfriend was stepping in that way quite often in the early when they first started dating, she was stepping in that way and trying to insert her opinion and make herself visible and known in those discussions and try to jump in and solve problems. And I was like, mm, no, we’re not doing that. That’s not the role we were playing with here.

How about you, Marissa?

So I don’t have an ex to have significant others, so it gives me a little bit of a different perspective, but it’s not like they have significant others who are then trying to, their best friends aren’t coming. But my personality, I don’t want enemies anywhere because enemies are harder to work with than acquaintances. And so I’d rather just keep everybody on cordial terms. And I have kind of had this idea that especially with my in-laws, the more people who want to love my children the better. Now that said, sometimes loving my children and loving me are two different things. Again, I guess being an outside observer too, I might be a little bit flattered that the ex didn’t say such terrible things that his new girlfriend doesn’t want to have anything to do with you because if he was over there bad mouthing, saying horrible things. So take it as a compliment. But if emotionally it’s not something you’re ready for, we don’t have to be friends with everybody. But I also would be careful not to make enemies.

Well, and I’ve done nothing to discourage Jax from having his own relationship because in my experience, I have two step kids for my first marriage and I have a great relationship with them. And so I would never want,

There was just an odd expectation there. But yeah, I would never do anything to hinder Jax’s relationship with her because I don’t think she’s a horrible person. I just don’t want to have a relationship with her. And I think that’s okay.