What happens when parents clash over the kids?

Meals. Bedtime. Discipline. The reasons parents clash over the kids are endless, especially now that more unemployed dads are filling in for back-to-work moms as the bad economy grinds through a second year.

Nerves are definitely taut on today's home front, compounding the challenge for parents looking to navigate and negotiate disparate views on child-rearing.

"I've never seen such stress in parents and families," said Michele Borba, a psychologist and mother of three boys who has written 22 books on parenting. "The recession is causing stress, number one. And number two, it's a pressure-packed world. Parents are very often at that level when they think being a to-do list is more important than who they are."

Borba and other parenting experts suggest a game plan that recognizes differences among partners as positives rather than sources of scorn and blame. But reversing long-standing parenting patterns while managing the day-to-day can be daunting.

"Our roles are sketched out," said Jennifer Aniskovich, who with husband, Bill, is raising daughters Celia, 17, and Emi, 7, in Branford, Conn.

"He's the fun dad and I'm the mom who's always saying 'No.' You'd think after 20 years of marriage you'd have it worked out," she said. "We met in law school and we joke that we fell in love while we were learning to argue."

Jennifer, 44, works part time as a consultant to nonprofit groups and Bill heads a substance abuse facility. With a 10-year spread between their girls, they've learned to diffuse parenting clashes through humor and knowing when to walk away from a disagreement over the kids.

"There are moments when the worst of us comes out and we march out in a huff, muttering under our breath, and it's a complete meltdown, but that doesn't usually happen," Jennifer said. "But no matter how careful you are, there's always the lurking danger that you're going to view yourselves as being on separate teams. That's the biggest challenge of parenting."

Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist and co-author with his wife, Marcia, of the new book "Partnership Parenting," said parents too often find themselves keeping score.

"The idea of bean counting, of 50-50 parenting, is just bankrupt," he said. "'I'm doing more sandwiches than you. I'm changing more diapers.' There is this wrong-headed and tragic misconstruing that parenting is an equality project. It can't possibly be. You're not clones of each other."

Consistency is perhaps the top parenting clash, said Borba, who has written a new telephone book-size tome called "The Big Book of Parenting Solutions: 101 Answers to Your Everyday Problems and Wildest Worries."