Parents need to agree about how to raise children. Here's a book that helps
Do some parents confuse their own painful feelings with their child's, thinking that the child is in more trouble than he actually is? Boundaries with Kids sets out to answer such questions.
My husband and I never argued until our children came along. At first, we blamed the kids. Then we blamed the stress of parenting, both external and self-imposed. And finally, we began to see that our differences stemmed from the way we were brought up.
It hadn't occurred to us we had any cultural differences because we are both ethnic Chinese. However, he was raised in Hong Kong and I grew up in Canada. The big picture is the same for all parents: to raise their children to become happy, loving and responsible adults. Where many of us differ from our co-parent is the means to that end.
An important lesson that is best taught early on is self-discipline. Rather than labelling children as naughty or nice, we need only consider whether they have self-discipline or not. Today's children are not provided with the opportunities to learn self-discipline because parents have a fear of seeing their children suffering, displeased or unhappy.
In the 19th century, the notion that parents existed for the sake of their children was unheard of. Our child-centric family culture has taken form only in recent decades. Children and their feelings were neglected, or at least considered to be not worthy of concern, well into the 1960s. Although she might be deemed an incompetent mother by today's standards, Betty Francis (the former Mrs Draper) in the television series Mad Men was probably typical of her era.
I'm not suggesting that we regress to Victorian child-rearing practices; a child's mental and psychological well-being should be held in the same regard as his physical well-being. Cloud and Townsend state parents do need to empathise with their children's feelings. However, they are unable to delay their children's gratification because they "over-identify" with their children's pain, fear and loneliness.