2 Ways To Team Up!

Are you lucky enough to have a partner in crime to help you get through this parenting gig? No ladies, I don’t mean your bestie that you like to drink wine with and share stories of tantrums and toileting disasters! I mean, if you are a parent that has a hubby, boyfriend, partner living with you and your children then this is the blog for you!

The reality is nearly all of us begin the parenting journey totally in the dark! We try to muddle our way through remembering what our own parents did (or didn’t do!) and then we take bits of everyone else’s advice, our own experiences and then some common sense added in to help us make our countless parenting decisions.

On top of all that, if you are raising a tiny human with a partner then you also have to consider that they too are muddling their way through this journey. In most cases, we tackle each parenting decision with the position of one parent as the primary carer right from birth and the other parent takes the role of what I call a wingman (or wingwoman)!

Your wingman helps make sure you carry out your mission. Your wingman is there to back you up and helps get you out of tough situations. So, think about your wingman… Are you a team when it comes to parenting your child? Are you backing each other up? Are you even on the same team?

If you are not sure or you answered “hell no!” Then read on…

Today I am going to share with you two simple tips to get you thinking and to help ensure your parenting is more successful. This is how you Team Up!

1. Respect their past! Think about where your partner has come from and how they were raised. Think for a moment about your partner’s upbringing. Think about who parented them and how their childhood has shaped the person that they are today. We all come from different experiences, some tougher than others and this will affect how we parent our own children. Sometimes this can help us make great parents and sometimes this influences some of our not so great parenting moments. I am not telling you to counsel or fix your partner’s issues here at all… but I do want you to just be aware, conscious and respectful of where your partner might be coming from when they make a decision or suggestion in parenting.

2. Back each other up! To put this simply, if your partner makes a parenting decision that you do not agree with or isn’t what you would have done, back them up and don’t ridicule them! There will be times when you don’t agree on how to handle parenting decisions and that is totally ok. What is most important here is that you communicate to your child that you agree with the decision and then quietly later the adults can have a conversation about it. You can absolutely tell your partner you didn’t agree, just make sure you are respectful and not condescending when you bring it up. One way to make it easier to back each other up is to have a conversation about the sorts of things that you do differently as parents. Often one parent gets pegged as the tough parent and the other is the softie! In my house, neither of us is the softie… We are both pretty tough really but I like to think of myself as firm but fair as a parent and I always do lots of talking and reflecting about mine or my partner’s decisions.

Regardless of your parenting styles, your upbringings, who the primary carer is and who the wingman is, what really matters is how you show up as a dedicated (still learning) parent and that the decisions you do make, you make them together. Be a team, back each other up! Even if you are making mistakes, make them together. Later, you can talk about it, laugh or cry about it and come up with a solution together!