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Good old topic. Authoritarian VS liberal parenting.
I'm on team strict. It seems to work, get results right away and forms beneficial habits, and while it supposedly traumatizes the child, I think that's either untrue or insignificant compared to the obvious advantages for everyone involved.
My wife and her family, of course, are on team OH GOD DO WHATEVER THE CHILD WANTS OR ELSE SHE WILL BE RUINED FOREVER. I think this mode of thinking is obviously wrong in every way (history, incentives, habit-forming, observable effects, the parenting histories of the people saying so), but what do I know.
Right, so how did you navigate this? Sending her links to fancy-looking blogs doesn't seem to be working for me.
In general, I've been trying to get the message across that parenting has been becoming way more time and money intensive than it used to be, with no better results. I'm the youngest of a very large poor-ish family, that is to say, my level of received parental investment was not super high, and I turned out fine. Meanwhile it appears Gen Z and Alpha have very little resilience.
He doesn't need so many toys. He'll be fine with 2nd-hand clothes. Don't be so worried about leaving him with other people for a few hours.
She wants a 2nd child, but I refuse if it's going to be this circus again.
I navigate it by doing it my way while the wife does it her way. With all the fallout and obvious failure modes. Unclear rules and expectations, constant arguments, and me often straight-up ignoring her instructions (and telling her so). I'm not even giving her any instructions of my own; she wouldn't follow those either. Instead, she just gets a regular supply of "told you so"s.
The consequence of this is that our daughter (3.5yo by now) likes me better for playing, especially during the daytime, because we do more exciting stuff that my wife would never do because there's more than a minimal risk of phyical injury, but prefers her mother for sleeping in bed with because she can get her way with a long list of demands before sleep where I would just say "nope, sleepytime now, good night" and turn off the lights. Obviously when I and our daughter have an argument about something (making a mess and not helping with the cleanup, not wanting the food she requested, refusing to get dressed before we need to go out), I'll take the hard line and the kid will try to outmanoeuver me by running to her mom, who will make up some excuse for her. But shortly after that, her mom will be exhausted by trying to do paranoid helicopter parenting while also indulging in her smartphone addiction, and it's dad time again for actually doing things during the day.
I try to avoid all those stupid dynamics by just grabbing the kid the moment I come back from work (or right after waking up, on weekends) and proclaiming that damn the torpedoes we are now going to the playground/pool (depending on the weather) and we'll picnic outdoors and we're only coming back home after she's thoroughly exhausted herself. After which I get scolded for exhausting her, can't I see it was too much? Too much what - exercise and fresh air? Modern mothers are crazy. But screw spending any time in the pigsty those two create after just one day of me being away at the office. On rainy days I run another hard line of "no playing until we cleaned up this mess". And given some tasks that she can actually accomplish, it seems she even enjoys being helpful. Then it's puzzles and board games and ball.
So yeah, no second child while the mother is under the delusion that children need uninterrupted supervision 100% of the time, or that it's acceptable to give the child unlimited access to sugar and screen time just because the mother herself is addicted to the same, and that the outdoors is a lethally dangerous place because it triggers your social anxiety and so the child is best kept indoors at all times, and that because raising a child like this is so exhausting and all-consuming, you cannot be expected to not make the household explode as soon as the man is out of the house.
Oh hey, hope you enjoyed by blogpost.
I did; I don't like what it says about my future though. My wife was fairly on-board with "strict but chill" before the birth; I hope at some point she'll get there again.
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Oh wow, this sounds exhausting. Did ya'll know about the differing perspectives prior to having a kid or did it come up later?
Nah. My wife thought and thinks herself very wise in the way of children since she grew up with more siblings and WORKED AS A KINDERGARDENER (emphasis hers) FOR LESS THAN HALF A YEAR (emphasis mine). Fair enough, overall more experience than me. I for one just thought "we'll figure it out". My opposition to liberal parenting developed over time as I saw the absolute nonsense it devolves into.
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This is my exact relationship with my kids/wife. I suspect it's overall healthy for the kids to have one "strict" parent and one "soft" parent, but I agree that modern mothers have gone off the deep end. I often find myself having to be harder on the kids than I'd like to be in order to strike a better balance.
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Not to mention it’s extremely stressful and labor-intensive on the parents. And given that the evidence on the kid’s future well-being is inconclusive, that is the main thing.
They’re doing liberalism wrong. Liberalism is rooted in a profound lazyness. ‘laissez faire’, let [things] do, let it be. It’s like old hippies ‘free range’ education, not this micromanaging shit.
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