Children can be a great blessing, but they can also cause problems between you and your spouse if you are not careful. Children are very quick to pick up on ways to play one parent off against the other. It’s not just something that happens in a blended family but in any family. Talking to friends recently, one remarked that most of their arguments were about the children.
Even in a couple there will be different ideas about what appropriate behavior is and what it is not. A lot of that might depend on the way you or your spouse were brought up, as well as any ideas you may have picked up along the way. For example someone was talking recently about Dr. Spock (and not the one from Star Trek) and his ideas being all the rage when she was having her children.
Later, people came to the conclusion that his ideas were not such good advice after all, but by that time the damage was done as far as some families were concerned.
I admit I’ve always had fairly strong views about children and how to bring them up. So has Mick and for the most part our views coincided, because we’d talked about them a lot even before we were married as well as after and then when children arrived.
It’s still a little different though when you have a cute little face pleading up at you for something which you know deep down is not in their best interests. It’s hard to say no.
Yet we do our children no favors by spoiling them and not teaching them that they will not get everything they want in life. That is not love. It’s taking the easy option. It may seem easier at the time but later down the track when you child grows to be a selfish willful teenager and then adult who still expects all their own way, you might see they weren’t such wise choices after all
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