GinaFish.com

Most of the time “Who wears the pants in your house” refers to who is the boss of the house. At my house? I’ll tell ya right now. I do.

My husband can’t discipline the kids without cracking a smile most of the time. 80% probably. And when he is effectively keeping a straight face, it’s to tell them “Do as your mother said”.

Disciplining your kids is one of the big hurdles you have to get over and figure out together when you get married. Money is usually the first thing. The problem is that you are both raised by different families.

I am the oldest of two girls. My dad was the youngest boy of eight and his parents were born about 1900. My mother is the second of four and her parents were born in the late 20s. Her grandparents were born around 1900. I imagine that for a while, my parents clashed over discipline styles also. My father tended to be stricter than my mom because he was raised by stricter more old fashioned parents. My mother’s mother is a free spirit, so my mom was a little more relaxed. Although in my teen years, I thought my mother was the mean one.

My technique tends to fall more in line with my father’s stricter approach, which would make my style the equivilant of parents born in the year 1944.

My husband’s parents claim he was the perfect child who was only spanked once, and they all cried about it afterwards together. Let’s all sing “Kum Ba Yah” together now.

So you’ve got 1944 versus free spirit.

Saturday night, my son decided it would be fun to eat his lemon pie by licking it. While we are at my parents house. Where my father is shooting him ‘don’t do that glances’. My husband actually picked up these glances and decided to tell our son to stop and eat with a fork. Ethan got a silly face, and Josh had to cover his mouth to hide his smile, and told him again.

I, on the other hand, being a little more relaxed than my dad, didn’t really see anything wrong with the licking and since I didn’t see the “don’t do that glance”, but did understand that my husband wanted it stopped, got the mommy tone out “E, stop it right now, or you will go sit on the couch and not eat any pie at all”.

Josh tries to cover his giggles while Ethan looks at him out of the corner of his eye, and licks it again. “Ethan!” I sharply said, “Go to the couch now, I don’t care which couch, just go right now” So he gets up. My softy mom gets up to go with him.

Now there’s discipline for ya. He gets in trouble, yet is immediately comforted by granny. Where’s the discipline in that??

I told Josh on the way home, that I hope as Ethan gets older that he never does any thing so serious that Josh doesn’t keep laughing. That Josh never gets really mad and grumpy at Ethan because then I’ll know that Ethan is really stepping over the line. And I don’t want that to happen, because Josh is a little like his dad, in that once you step over the line of good and bad, you don’t ever get the chance to be good again. It’s a good thing Josh also has his mom’s blood in him. The unconditional parent.

So there’s a few lessons here for other parents:
1. Just don’t discipline your kids in front of your parents or your in-laws. Always take the kids out of the room, if you really want it to stick. Otherwise, your parents will interfer and no lesson will be learned.

2. And if one of the spouses laughs when a kid is doing something bad, it’s probably not really bad, just annoying. So really step back, and see if it’s worth taking your kid aside for. If someone’s laughing, it’s probably not.

3. Having different styles of discipline is a good thing. Just take turn wearing the pants, so that if the ’stricter’ parent isn’t there, the softy can still be effective if they need to be.

4. After all, raising kids takes a village. So pass the pants around, and try to keep the laughter involved somewhere.

For fun, when have you laughed at your kids being naughty, when you shoudn’t have? Or which of your parents was the softy? Did it hurt more if they had to discipline you?