Oh lord.. I cannot even count how many disagreements we’ve had.
I was raised with REALLY strict parents..and occasionally fall back on the old scripts re-running in my head. I think he’s not disciplining the kids enough..is being too lenient, he thinks I yell too much..and the entire family says I baby our youngest child too much (which, as the firstborn..who felt like my younger sibling was favored I find terribly ironic).
The big stuff we disagree(d) on and how it went:
a) He wanted to call the pediatrician and wait for a call-back when our oldest child (his daughter, my stepdaughter) was 18 mo. old and woke up with paralysis on one side of her body. I was gobsmacked. I snatched her up and told him I was taking her to the Emergency Room at Children’s Hospital and he could either get in the car or wait for me to call him later with updates. (I won that one. He gets a dope-smack in the head for his passivity when she clearly was in need of medical attention.)
b) When the oldest child wanted to dye her hair (with permanent hair coloring) at age 10 I said absolutely not. I was over-ruled by her biological mother and my husband. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever – what a waste of $160 to cover up her lovely blond hair. But, I bit my tongue since I wasn’t paying for it (the one thing we agreed on was that we wouldn’t pay for it—so her mother paid for salon hair coloring)—and she eventually tired of it after 3 years. She’s 14 now and finally back to her natural hair color. (deep exhale)
c) The oldest daughter (poor girl, such a guinea pig) wanted to get her ears pierced at an age I thought was too young. Or, at least the bio-mom wanted to take her to get them pierced..and SD was just 5. (Just around the time she started Kindergarten.) I disagreed—but lost this battle too. I think we were able to hold her off until grade 2..but my darling stepdaughter later said: “I should never have gotten my ears pierced that young..I couldn’t take care of them myself.” So – while I lost the battle, the SD appreciates that I tried to preserve her from the resulting infections and tangled hair that had to be cut out of her earrings, etc.
After 3.5 kids we’ve gotten much more mellow and both tend to do a better job of parenting without conflict.