The fighting went on and on below her in the living room.

Her parents were at it again.

Her kid brothers had snuck into her room, looking scared.

They sat on her bed as the voices below got louder and angrier.

She could hear little pieces of sentences they yelled.

"You always let her get away with it"

"O, if only you could lighten up and let her be"

She looked around in her room, the floor covered with clothes, her desk a mess, as usual.

As the fighting went on her stomach tightened and she held her brothers.

‘This has to stop or we’ll break apart’ she thought as she held her brothers, who clung to their older sister.

"I am going downstairs" she said to them. "I am going to stop them, ok."

Her brothers looked up in a mixture of fear and hope. "Could she?"

For many families, parenting has become a struggle between parents with different approaches in raising their kids, parents who don’t know how to work as a team in conflict resolution. Often noticeable when kids are in elementary school, the difficulties can explode when your children become teens.

A time of peer pressure, self exploration and challenging the boundaries parents set. Differences in parenting values, in how to deal with conflicts and not knowing how to shift when kids become teens, can drive any reasonably functioning family to destruction.

Joni’s family was no different. She had pushed her parents in every way she could, trying to find the limits of her freedom, her own identity.

The differences between her parents’ parenting styles were at first easy to use for her immediate benefit. They now had become the fault line on which her family could break apart. Break, as they were fighting over her.

"Stop it!" Joni slammed the door into its frame as she yelled it. "Stop it! You are killing us as a family!" Her parents stopped, stunned by her outburst.

"I am sorry, alright, I am sorry. I don’t want us to break up. The boys are scared upstairs and you are starting to hate each other. It’s just too much!"

Her parents were still fuming at each other but their attention had shifted to their daughter.

"I am scared too" she added softly." Please let’s try to find a different way than going at each other all the time." Suddenly she couldn’t stop talking.

"I want a family. I don’t want you to break up. I know you love each other and that I am pushing you to all of this fighting."

She looked up. Her parents looked at her, exhausted from the furious exchange they had a few moments ago.

"Can’t we find a way that we can all be happy? That we can all enjoy our family again? We used to have fun and do things together, now you just work and we run around and we don’t anymore. I know that I have been a pain and that I don’t clean my room, but is that such a big deal? I want us to be happy. Don’t you want to be happy? I want to find out who I am and I need you to be my home, where I can try and test things. I don’t want us to break up.

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