My husband and I haven’t always agreed on child rearing methods and practices.  He is more lenient, kinder and if our kids came to him asking for money he had his wallet out asking them how much they wanted before they even finished asking him for it.  He believes, and rightly so, that you treat a person as you want them to become and you just love them.  I believe that’s important too but that child rearing needs rules such as everyone has jobs to do in a family which allows people to feel good about contributing, being a valued and important member of the family and teaches them to work.  If they wanted to have some extra money, I had a lot of extra jobs they could do to earn it themselves. He feels that rules are important too but that you mostly lead by example and kids learn from what they see their parents doing, and of course he’s right again because kids do learn from what you do and say. He is a hard worker, he’s honest and faithful to responsibilities and commitments and so our kids will learn to be also (and they have). I think children and teens earn trust, respect and privileges, especially as they grow older and as our children grew older he thought that they just got more privileges because they were getting older.  I think that by giving kids everything they want they develop a sense of entitlement.  He once told me that he naturally deferred to how he was raised, that his parent treated him with respect and love and he just always wanted to measure up.  I have pointed out that he was always a good kid, that he didn’t lie to his parents and steal from them to feed a growing drug habit or to just buy something they wanted.  That he didn’t sneak out after his parents went to bed to meet up with his friends, that he wasn’t doing illegal things when he was with them and that he was morally clean, and most importantly that he didn’t have mental health issues that clouded his thinking. We basically approached child rearing from very different viewpoints.

If we ever had disagreements it was usually about how to handle a problem with one of our children.  And sometimes I would be really mad at him but through it all, I always tried to remember that he loved our kids just as much as I did and that he wasn’t trying to be difficult or stubborn but that he truly thought that how he wanted to solve the problem was the best way to do it.  Remembering this helped me to focus on the issue, to listen better to what he had to say and to try to understand him and then to compromise.  In compromising we tried to combine some of his ideas and some of mine.  Usually we ended up with a better way to deal with the problem.  Sometimes when there could be no compromise, that it had to be one way or the other we went with the one who felt the strongest about the issue and sometimes we just took turns doing it the way one of us wanted. And I have also tried to focus on that he was an involved parent, that he was there physically and emotionally, he didn’t defer everything to me and take the easier path of noninvolvement.  He loves our kids just as much as I do.