Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Parental accord...

Generally speaking, my DH and I are of like minds when it comes to parenting. We're old school, kids in line, parents aren't friends kind of parents. We're not worried about their psyches being damaged by having to obey rules or whatever. Basically, we're hardasses. And our kids are well-behaved (mostly), creative, polite intelligent young people. Wouldn't you love to have DH as YOUR teacher? Actually, he's pretty easy-going until you make him mad. His students seem to respect that.

Another basic tenet of our parenting is that we support each other. Mom says no, Dad says no too. Dad decides a punishment, Mom doesn't go back and change it at all - not to make it easier or harder. End of story. No questioning the other parent (in front of the kids at least).

I begin with all of this because we had an incident the other night where I had to mentally restrain myself from breaking this cardinal rule of our parenting. On Monday night, DH said no one is getting dessert. Not because of any misbehavior. Our children are not fat - in fact, they're quite scrawny. He just banned dessert because he doesn't like that they expect it and ask for it after lunch and dinner everyday. I'm at fault there. I like my dessert. And I started, accidently, the ritual of having dessert. I don't see a problem with it. If he wanted to get rid of a dessert time, I'm willing to forego lunch dessert (which is usually fruit or fruit snacks anyway). Or if there were some infraction related to dinner or the time period immediately preceding, going without dessert would be an appropriate punishment, IMO. DH declared no desserts out of the blue.

So in solidarity, the kids went without dessert. And no harm came to them. But you better believe that the second they were in bed, I was having dessert. Cupcakes, in fact (see yesterday's post). You know, maybe it's not such a bad thing to try to break that habit.

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