Family MattersPractical Parenting Blog

Know Your Partner: Parenting

Happy Family

If you are familiar with this blog, you know that parenting is one of our key topics and that is why it is important to discuss parenting when you get to know your partner. This is the final installment of Know Your Partner, a series of posts to help you get to know your partner, and today’s post is about parenting.

You may find that you need to ask many questions that are not cover here. Also, keep in mind that people’s opinions about parenthood are often not fully formed yet. If you have never been a parent, you don’t know what you don’t know.

In this case, parenting is like a discovery zone – you pave the path while walking it. Focus instead on attitudes you think will benefit you or may become an obstacle in your relationships. If attitudes are an obstacle, do not worry. It is possible to change them. It is just good to know what they are at the start, so you can make an educated decision about whether to go into this relationship or not.

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Teaching & Education Beliefs: Think Ahead

Education in letter chain

Teachers, just like everybody else, do better when they think ahead and get organized. Today’s 20 teaching and education beliefs are about this. If you are here for the first time, you may want to start reading “Teaching & Education Beliefs” from the start of the series.

1. When I need to cover a topic over 8 weeks, I aim to finish it early, maybe in 6 weeks. This gives me time to deal with unexpected circumstances that pop up. If everything goes to plan, we have 2 weeks to have fun. If not, we have two weeks to compensate for the delay.

2. If I want to help my student, I must take care of myself. Kids are born with senses to read the people around them. There is no point pretending when you are around them. They will be able to tell when something is wrong.

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Know Your Partner: Attitudes About Gender and Sex

Black Couple Laughing

You cannot truly know your partner without discussing beliefs about gender and sex. Even in our modern society, these topics are not easy to talk about, but are very important.

Our attitudes towards gender and sex stem from our childhoods. Sometimes it is because of something we hated and sometimes it is the opposite, something we liked or never really questioned.

I grew up in a house where my mom thought boys were worth more than girls. I, of course, am a girl and I had three sisters and one brother. For my mom, my brother was the “prince” and we were supposed to serve him. My dad on the other hand, was the opposite. He taught me a lot about gender equality. He cooked, he cleaned, he helped us with homework, he did artistic things. He would even force my brother to be part of the dish washing roster. I did not like my mother’s attitude and chose to follow in my dad’s footsteps where my own life was concerned. When I was looking for a partner, this was one of my “musts”, I was not willing to live with a guy who thought girls were supposed to serve boys. When Gal and I started going out, I was happy to discover he was on the same page as me.

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Know Your Partner: Beliefs & Attitudes

Demonstration sign: There is no plant B

To continue our “Know Your Partner” series, I want to share questions about attitudes and beliefs with you this week. It is hard to admit, but many of our beliefs and attitudes are part of our identities and can be the cause of relationship breakup or relationship build up. They are extremely important and somehow a bit sensitive.

The important thing is to find out which of these beliefs or attitudes are “musts” – those things that you are not willing to compromise on. For example, Gal and I do not share the same political opinion or even religious beliefs but this has never been a conflict between us.

The idea behind these questions is to find out what we think we “must” have and what our partner thinks they “must” have. Agreements will be easier to keep once we know and make a conscious decision to accept our partner rather than ignore their musts.

The attitudes and belief we will discuss are about culture, race, ethnicity, difference, truth and law, politics and community, media and religion.

Read Know Your Partner: Beliefs & Attitudes »

The Bystander Effect

Human behavior was always something that fascinated me. During my studies I learned about the difference between what people think they do and what they actually do. Since then I have been hooked. You see, when we are under pressure, we react differently to when we have time to think, analyze and react at our own pace.

Some people say that under pressure, we reveal our true selves. Others think it is the opposite – we are ourselves all the time and the ugly side of us comes out when we are pushed. I tend to think that when we are under pressure, our reptilian brain, the one in charge of “fight or flight”, takes over. Like a survival mechanism, we react instinctively to protect ourselves when we are stressed or we think we are in danger (whether that danger is real or perceived).

Often times, we see other people’s poor behavior and say, “Oh, I would have done it differently. I would have done such and such and I would have said so and so”. The truth is, we can speculate about what we might have said until we are blue in the face but until we are in a stressful situation, we will not know how we will react.

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Consistency is Key to Good Parenting

In my last post, I Learned it From the Best we talked about how influential parenting is for a child’s future. In the long term, some things parents do are positive and some are negative. But which ones are positive? Which parenting styles are good for your children? In this post, I want to go into detail about the importance of consistency – the value of giving consistent rewards, punishments, attention and praise.

In early childhood, parenting in general gives children a toolkit of skills and beliefs they can take with them. It helps them deal with the challenges that life puts in their paths. If parents give their child positive, useful tools, then they are well equipped for the future. Things like praise and attention give confidence. On the other hand, parents who give their children bad habits and poor attitudes are setting them up for struggle. Addictive behaviors and poor eating habits are examples of unhelpful tools.

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The Art of Letting Go: Be Right or Be Kind

I think the desire to be right is another survival mechanism that humans use in order to manage uncertainty. The belief that the truth is absolute and that our aim in life is to find it and live by it is false. Trying to make others live by our truth is even worse. This mindset brings lots of pain and misery to everybody and if we want happiness to come into our life, we need to let go of our desire to be right.

The desire to be right is always accompanied by the risk of losing the relationship, because the question who is right only appears when there is a conflict. Being right is another part of our identity, our emotional “skeleton”, and most people believe that letting go of it might make them unstable. In fact, people who have a high need to be right are trying to overcome a deep feeling inside of them that they are wrong. People who are secure trust that they are OK, that their beliefs are good for them and that they only need to follow what is right for them, so they do not need to “prove their points” to others.

The concept of being right is a relative concept and always stands opposite being wrong. When you have a high need to advertise your “rightness”, you are trying to force your surroundings to fit into your definition of right and wrong. This is the source of many conflicts in our society. In relationships between parents and children, the parents often think that they are “right” and their kids are, well, just too young to know what to do. This continues at school, where many teachers think that they hold the absolute truth about what and how kids must learn (and why). Sometimes, it leads all the way to relationship breakdown and, in extreme cases, even to war.

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Acknowledgment

Do you ever get the feeling that something is missing from your communication with other people, especially the ones you love? Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable, but cannot put your finger on why? Do other people seem like something is not quite working for them in the way you talk to them?

Well, I do.

There I am, having a nice conversation with someone, and then, all of a sudden, I feel like the subject has changed and the conversation has changed direction. This is often hard to detect, which makes me stop listening and backtrack a bit to see if I can spot the problem (of course, not listening makes things worse temporarily, so I try to be quick about it).

In many cases, I find that there has been no acknowledgment. Something I have said remains un-addressed – it has neither been confirmed nor rejected. This makes me wonder if what I have said has been missed or ignore.

When I am the one forgetting to acknowledge, it takes a lot longer to figure it out, either because the other person is not aware of the problem or because the friction keeps escalating and this little issue is completely forgotten until I have some quiet time to replay the conversation and figure things out.

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Topsy Turvy World (4)

Our world is a weird and wonderful place, but sometimes, we act in weird ways that make it not so wonderful anymore. In many situations, there is a conflict between what is good for us personally and what is good for everybody. In others, the conflict is between what is good for us right now and what will be good in the future. Without considering the implications of our actions, they sometimes make the world just a little bit less pleasant.

Of course, when we do many of these things and lots of other people do them too, the decline accelerates. I often think of my kids and the kind of place I would like them to have when they grow up and it makes me worry.

When we lived in Texas, there was a period of frost every year. That was bad for the lawn, roads were slippery during morning rush hours and there were always accidents because of the frost.

Yet, a friend of mine found a way to have fun with his kids during that time. Before going to bed on Friday night, he would water his driveway, which was short, straight and steep. When his boys woke up on Saturday morning, the driveway would be ready for some extreme sliding!

This went on for a while and nearly became a family tradition, except one day, my friend’s mother-in-law came to visit on Saturday morning and slipped on the ice. She was thoroughly upset with my friend’s carelessness and promptly sued him (and her daughter, who was married to him) for her medical expenses.

The following year, my friend’s insurance raised his premium and he stopped wetting the driveway.

Read Topsy Turvy World (4) »

War and Peace are Personal

People often wonder how a large-scale conflict, involving hundreds of thousands of people, causing numerous deaths and leaving countless people emotionally and/or physically maimed for life can occur. Yes, I am talking about war.

All around the world, no matter when you look, there is some war going on. Sometimes, they are obvious confrontations of armies. Other times, they are a wide spread collection of small events and often involve civilians, but they are wars nonetheless.

Wars are stupid. Wars are cruel. Wars are wasteful. Nobody truly wins in a war. Yet, they are always there. Worse, they mostly involve people who have no desire to fight whatsoever.

This week, Ronit and I watched two war movies: Letters from Iwo Jima and Captain America. That made me realize the extent to which everyday people can be mobilized to serve some external cause. The Japanese had their tradition, their emperor and their honor. The Americans had the propaganda that told them they were protecting their country and their freedom. In the end, many people fought on both sides, many people died, many were injured and many families suffered.

Watching a war movie, we do not count deaths. There are just too many. In reality, each dead soldier has a mother, a father, friends, maybe a partner and maybe even children. Each dead soldier has a future and then, nothing. A hole in the fabric of society.

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