It doesn’t matter if you’re married, single, in a relationship, or whatever the circumstances, there are always other people in your child’s life who have ideas on how to raise children. It makes it especially interesting when you have two parents who were brought up completely differently. How in the world are you supposed to raise children together when you have different views of what it even means?
This is a big question my husband and I have run into recently. I’ve found that even though our daughter is only a year old, I feel strongly that we need to set rules for her. For example, I find myself being somewhat strict on the foods and drinks that we give her. Also, it makes sense to me that she take naps and fall asleep at bed time in her bed, rather than on the couch.
Whereas my husband is much more lenient. He likes to let her try chocolate cake, and french fries and such. It’s not like she has these foods often, but for me I want to keep her away from the junk as long as possible. He also doesn’t mind if she falls asleep in the living room instead of being put down in her room.
It’s not like either way is right or wrong, we just do things differently. Perhaps it is the way we were brought up, but I also wonder if it has to do with our professions. I’m a Web Developer and he is a Photographer. I live in cubicle land, my day is run by strict timelines and Project Managers watch my every move. He gets to be creative every day and determine his own schedule.
Our struggle is to make sure that as our daughter gets older, that we work together as a team. It would be way to easy for her to use our opposing views against us. I can hear it now “but dad said I could!” So far, we’ve run up against some minor obsticles and we’ve been able to talk through them. For us that really seems to be key. It is good for us to both state our case as to why we think something is important (or unimportant) and make a decision together.
I highly doubt that it will be that easy moving forward, but for now it seems to work well. I would love to hear how you work through these differences in your household.
Jennifer Sable Lopez is the Development Team Lead and Technical SEO for an online company. She manages multiple blogs, is a sucker for social networking and also writes for and manages momsbyte.com and codejen.com.
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