Gaslighted by proxy: how schools grant coercive power to the quietest parent

When one parent advocates and the other undermines, the school almost always aligns with the one who “gets along.” Not because that parent is more informed, more accurate, or more protective—but because they are easier to accommodate. They agree easily. They stay quiet. They don’t write long emails. They rarely attend meetings. They couldn’t draft an appeal if their life depended on it. And somehow, that silence is mistaken for reason.

This isn’t just anecdotal—it reflects a broader trend. Research on family court and educational conflict shows that institutions regularly conflate compliance with cooperation, and emotion with instability. In systems that prize neutrality and low conflict above all else, the loudest concern is often read as the greatest threat.

The principal’s gaze

I’ve lived this.

The principal looks at me like I have something unpleasant on my shirt. Like I’m one of those parents—the kind you whisper about. The kind with a disease, the kind who invents their child’s suffering for attention. Too intense. Too demanding. Too unstable.

The lifeline I never had

All I’ve ever done is try to make school safe for my children. I’ve always known, intuitively and through lived experience, what is required to create the conditions where they can learn and feel safe. I was that child once—autistic, misunderstood, surviving without support. I would have loved a lifeline.

It’s no wonder I recognise what’s missing. Research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) confirms that children who are excluded or unsupported at school face higher risks of long-term physical and mental health struggles. The pattern isn’t new—it’s just rarely taken seriously until the harm is too deep to ignore.

What I ask for

So I have asked for breaks, accommodations, and staff interventions. For a steady adult presence so my children are not left alone in hallways. For an end to screaming and exclusion. For records that reflect reality. For language that honours experience instead of burying it in euphemism and administrative distance.

Undone by silence

I’ve spent years documenting this harm. And my ex has spent years quietly undoing it—not with open conflict, but by echoing the school’s preferred narrative. He stays measured, mirrors their language, and furrows his brow at my tone. He says things like, “It just seems like fighting”,” and they nod”—like it’s worth nothing to try to protect our children.

And that is the version that gets believed.

It matches what scholars have long observed in custody and education disputes: that systems often misinterpret caregiving labour—especially when it is emotional, feminine, or trauma-informed—as instability rather than insight. The person doing the most work is the one most likely to be dismissed.

How coercive control enters the system

This is what coercive control looks like when institutions are involved. When you’re in a high-conflict separation, and you’re the parent carrying the emotional load, the daily logistics, the invisible planning, you are far easier to cast as unstable. You’re overtired, overextended, and forced to overperform just to hold your child’s world together. You’re coming apart and dragging along trying to function.

And when you come apart, the system sees the reaction—not the cause. Sorry, you’re not feeling well.

And in many neurodivergent families, this dynamic is even more pronounced. Neurodivergence can come with sensory sensitivities, executive dysfunction, trauma, and emotional intensity—but when misunderstood or unsupported, those traits can get pathologised by schools and manipulated in co-parenting dynamics.

Research on trauma and personality suggests that unprocessed neurodivergent harm can sometimes manifest in narcissistic patterns—particularly when control becomes a way to regulate anxiety or preserve status. In families where one parent has learned to mask and manage through compliance, and the other has been shaped by a lifetime of gaslighting, the school’s preference for order becomes a weapon.

What looks like “high conflict” is often just a visible parent trying to survive a no-win landscape—and an invisible one capitalising on that survival story to gain power.

This is what coercive control looks like when institutions are involved. When you’re in a high-conflict separation, and you’re the parent carrying the emotional load, the daily logistics, the invisible planning, you are far easier to cast as unstable, ungrievable. You’re overtired, overextended, and forced to overperform just to hold your child’s world together. Your affect frays. Your composure shatters. You react.

And when that happens, the system sees the reaction—not the cause.

The quiet one gets believed

And when the school sees you distressed—sees the other parent nodding calmly, saying, “I’m just trying to keep things light and make sure they do their homework”—who do you think they take seriously?

Not the parent who knows every specialist’s phone number by heart. Not the one who attends every meeting with binders of documentation. Not the one who stays up nights helping their child believe they are lovable in a system that constantly calls them disruptive.

They believe the parent who doesn’t interfere with the flow of business as usual. The one who is an ineffective yes man. The one who doubts you.

This is not unusual. It fits a long-documented pattern across legal, medical, and educational institutions: the professionalised narrative wins. The regulated voice gets rewarded. Even when it’s empty of knowledge.

Abuse by proxy

That is what makes it abuse by proxy. Not loud. Not overt. Just quiet alignment with power. A slow erasure.

It requires no malice. Only proximity to institutional authority.

The erasure of your credibility

And it breaks you.

Because the harm you are trying to name keeps getting waved away. You’re told it’s not real. Or it’s too emotional. Or it only happened because you made it worse. You’re told someone else could have managed it more gracefully. You’re told your tone is the real issue. You are the worst!

And meanwhile, you lie awake at night questioning everything. You replay conversations and try to remember what was said, and whether you imagined the implications. You rehearse explanations you might need if someone calls the Ministry, or the police, or accuses you of something worse. You wonder what they’ve written in the file. You call your social worker spontaneously because you want to make sure you’re communicating often to make sure the record is straight. You wonder if they’ve called your ex. You wonder if you’ll be believed.

When the district counsellor said to me, with a measured tone and a too-long pause, Why would you want your son in a school if you think it’s harming him?—it didn’t sound like empathy. It sounded like a warning. Like a trap. Like a suggestion that if I kept pushing, they might decide I was the one causing the harm by wanting my son to be included.

And what I keep returning to is this: I never wanted to be here. Fuck homeschool! I didn’t want to be in conflict with the public school system. I wanted them to do a half-decent job—kind, imperfect, enough. I would have taken “enough.” I probably even would’ve settled on below average, or ‘beginning’ as they say on my children’s report cards despite not having anything to evaluate.

I’m a digital solutions architect. I build frameworks and systems. I wanted to focus on my work, love my children, and trust that the people paid to teach them would do their jobs. But instead, I became the one holding the flashlight in the dark hallway, looking for the way out, with the weight of everyone’s denial pressing down on my ribs.

And what I’ve learned is that when institutions fail your children, and one parent tries to speak up, the system looks for ways to silence them. Especially when that parent is a mother. Especially when that mother is already exhausted. Especially when she tells the truth plainly.

And it breaks you.

Because the harm you are trying to name keeps getting waved away. You’re told it’s not real. Or it’s too emotional. Or it only happened because you made it worse. You’re told someone else could have managed it more gracefully. You’re told your tone is the real issue.

This is structural

And it’s not just me. There’s a whole body of research that describes this pattern—though most of it lives in PDFs no parent has time to read while they’re cleaning up the fallout from yet another exclusion phone call.

Studies on high-conflict separation show that children suffer most not from where they live or how much time they spend with each parent, but from prolonged exposure to hostility. And yet, schools often fail to distinguish between hostility and advocacy. One parent raises concerns, demands accountability, asks for written plans. The other shakes hands, smiles politely, and says they’re just here to support the team. The institution sees calm and assumes competence. It sees emotion and assumes instability.

Even coercive control—long recognised as a form of psychological abuse—can operate invisibly through this institutional bias. The quieter parent gains power not through care, but through alignment with institutional harm. And in systems designed to reward compliance, this kind of silence becomes strategy.

I never know when I’ll get another email complaining about me causing so many problems at the school and insinuating that I am insane.

When decision-makers seek low-conflict dynamics at all costs, they routinely mistake disengagement for reason, and urgency for aggression. It’s not malice. It’s a policy gap. But the outcome is the same: schools end up reinforcing abusive patterns simply by preferring the parent who doesn’t make things hard.

And it’s devastating. Because it means the child with the most complex needs ends up with the least advocacy—and the caregiving parent ends up with scrutiny instead of support.

You’re not just navigating a fractured co-parenting relationship. You’re navigating its reflection in a system that already believes mothers are excessive.

This is not just personal. This is structural.

And it must be named.