When I finally decided to get married, it was the greatest moment in my life. My wife had two children from a previous marriage. We dated for a entire year before getting married and I never questioned her style of parenting. I had no children at the time. My thoughts at the were, if a person has small children, obviously they knew much more about parent than I did. A few months into the marriage, I long discovered that my wife's children needed a new direction very badly.
Her children took advantage of our different styles of parenting. If I said no, my wife would tell them yes. And they would actually be laughing at the both of us. Because to them, the adults could not find common ground. My wife would award her children for not doing their school work, she would reward them for not cleaning their rooms, she would reward them for bringing home bad grades from school,and she would reward them for being disrespectful.
I was very different from my wife, I would not reward them for doing wrong when I knew they were both capable of doing the right thing. Therefore, I implimented an discipline regiment into the household. For the kids and sometimes, even my wife.I found out that is was not their fault, it was their mother's.I wanted them to start cleaning up their rooms, keeping their hands of things that didn't belong to them, and to respect adults.
As mentioned, I would tell them the right things that they should do and she would tell them not to do it. Everything that I would try to do for those kids, my wife would undercut it. It almost seemed like that she wanted her own children to fail. They were not bad children at all, they were not getting the upbringing they needed to function in society. And when I tried to help her kids with everything they needed to be helped with, she got angry with me.
The children were starting to play me against their mother. And she knew that and accepted it. We soon separated and she filed for divorced. Our different parenting styles ended a marriage. All because my wife wanted her children to fail with no intervention from anyone.
By having complete different parenting styles, we were sending mix messages to the children, and in my opinion it had proved destructive to the kids. I did not check out my wife's parenting style before I had married her. So Therefore, I might blame myself for some of this.
I have learned that parents should be on the same page when it comes to their children. In traditional times, the mother was always seemed at the one time to be the most lenient when it came to discipline and the dad was a bit tougher. And that was reason to why most young children always ran to their mother more than dad when they got into trouble.
Children can become confused, to which adult to look up too, especially in a time of emotional meltdowns. There should be an equal ground when it comes to young children, They must learn real responibility. And as they grow older and enter society, they will look back on the parent who told them to study hard and you will make something out of yourself, than the parent who rewarded them for doing the wrong thing.
copyright 2006
contact me: Gwilder40@hotmail.com
www.freewebs.com/gwilder
I live in chicage with my six year old son. I have written several articles, some short stories, and I have a book that has been published. I wrote for the Chicago Defender for a time. I'm a stay-at-home dad at the writing of this.