Effective intervention in boundary violations by extended family needs to be thought out collaboratively.

Collaboration helps couples clarify shared parental values that will determine their boundaries.

Resetting helps a couple work as a team after a painful but necessary boundary setting.

Rachel didn’t expect the question to come from her eight-year-old.

They were folding laundry together when her daughter asked, quietly, “Mom, are you and Dad going to hell?”

Eli heard it from the hallway and stepped into the room slowly. They both knew where the question had come from.

This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Rachel’s parents had visited the weekend before. They had brought books again—Bible stories “for the children,” her mother said, smiling. Over dinner, there were comments about how confusing the world had become and how children “need strong spiritual foundations before it’s too late.” During bath time, Rachel overheard her father asking their son whether he prayed at school.

Rachel felt uncomfortable and angry. Then she told herself she would address it later, the way she had told herself many times before.

Eli had stayed quiet at the table. He had learned over the years that pushing back too quickly only escalated things. But being quiet had started to feel less like patience and more like swallowing his feelings and pretending.

Rachel was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. Eli grew up in a Jewish family. Neither of them practices religion now. Early in their marriage, they agreed their children would be raised secularly. They would teach ethics, curiosity, and respect, and leave spiritual choices to their children when they were older.

Despite Eli and Rachel describing their spiritual decision to Rachel’s parents, Rachel’s parents never accepted that decision and instead pushed their ideas onto their grandchildren. They framed their concerns as love. They said they were “just planting seeds.” They insisted that eternity was too serious to leave to chance. When Rachel gently redirected conversations, her mother would nod and then circle back later when the children were alone.

Over the past year, the pattern had grown more pointed. There were whispered side conversations. A small........

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