Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Mom VS. Dad

Do any of you have those moments with your significant other when you just look at each other and wonder how you could have such different stances on child rearing.Raising your children.(I hate that word, rearing, it sounds so just... well it sounds like you're talking about butts. You know your rear end.)

Now that the girls are getting older, it seems like my idea of parenting and his idea are on completely different ends of the spectrum. I'm on the end of being more understanding because I'm a girl and remember what it is like to be a tween/teen girl. He's on the end of being not a teen girl.

He was raised a lot differently than me. While my parents let me be more of a kid, he was working and constantly doing chores around the house. So he thinks the girls should be doing all these chores all the time. One time he and his younger brother decided to play ninjas and kicked a hole in their closet. Well, instead of telling what they did they hid it with their coveralls. This was in the spring mind you. Later come winter, their mom found the hole in the closet. They had to move all of their stuff to the barn. All of it... clothes, dresser, beds, everything. And sleep on the floor in the living room. Until their dad felt like fixing the hole.

Now, maybe this was a deserved punishment, but I think it was extreme. And since my husband was raised with this kind of parenting, he sometimes wants to use the same on the girls.

I just had to keep my room clean and occasionally unload the dishwasher. And the one time I put a hole in the wall behind my door, I didn't have to move all my stuff to the barn. I just told my dad and he fixed it.

Before the girls reached these tween/teen years, we just wanted our girls to be polite, use please and thank you, call adults by Mr/Mrs/Miss so and so. And all those other things. I think weekends are for the girls to have fun and relax. He thinks they should be filled with doing chores around the house and doing homework.

Do any of you out there have a different parenting style from your spouse? Is one of you strict and the other more relaxed? Do you fight over whose style is better?