What do you do when you and your dh have very different parenting styles? I classify myself that I can be a great mom and a horrible mom but I at least try to be a good mom. I realize that as a parent we are shaping our children for better or worse. Dh can be a good Dad, he will throw the ball around with the kids from time to time and he came from a good family so he remembers some traditions they had and tries to implement them (I came from a crummy family and am trying to figure out how to parent effectively). But I hate that most of the time dh talks down to the kids, is frustrated with them easily and just gets through the moment without realizing what he's teaching the kids. He uses a really bad tone with them and now they talk that way to each other and to me and I hate it.
We have *lots* of emotional/physiological issues with our oldest son (9)...he has Sensory Processing Disorder and ADHD and possibly some other stuff but we haven't figured out what exactly is going on yet, he soaks up a tremendous amount of emotional energy each day but he's been impatient with him from day 1. I'm impatient enough myself so it's really hard to try to be around my dh who I would like to be a support and example and have to navigate all this stuff by myself. I bought The Total Transformation program a few weeks ago to see if it would help but I'm going to call and send it back tomorrow. I've tried to get dh to listen to it. He listened to 1 CD and called it good. He seemed genuinely surprised when I told him my frustration that he wasn't participating and he said he had "listened to the one CD." Really?! There are 8 and a booklet, you couldn't listen to a few more on your commute to work? ARrrrrggggggh. This has been an issue for years and it's just getting magnified with ds#1's issues as he grows older. There's nothing that's more important to me than to have a good family after coming out of a very bad one and I'm so disappointed that I picked a partner who cares so little about his role as a father beyond providing for his family financially.
We have *lots* of emotional/physiological issues with our oldest son (9)...he has Sensory Processing Disorder and ADHD and possibly some other stuff but we haven't figured out what exactly is going on yet, he soaks up a tremendous amount of emotional energy each day but he's been impatient with him from day 1. I'm impatient enough myself so it's really hard to try to be around my dh who I would like to be a support and example and have to navigate all this stuff by myself. I bought The Total Transformation program a few weeks ago to see if it would help but I'm going to call and send it back tomorrow. I've tried to get dh to listen to it. He listened to 1 CD and called it good. He seemed genuinely surprised when I told him my frustration that he wasn't participating and he said he had "listened to the one CD." Really?! There are 8 and a booklet, you couldn't listen to a few more on your commute to work? ARrrrrggggggh. This has been an issue for years and it's just getting magnified with ds#1's issues as he grows older. There's nothing that's more important to me than to have a good family after coming out of a very bad one and I'm so disappointed that I picked a partner who cares so little about his role as a father beyond providing for his family financially.
We both came out of it very different parents. We both still fall back on the parenting 'skills' (or lack there-of 
) that we had before, but now we have a handful of techniques in common, and that makes all the difference. If one of us takes charge of a situation and uses a technique we learned in the class, the other can say, "Ohhhhh, I see where he/she is going with that..." - it makes it easier to trust that the other parent is handling the situation. Love and Logic gets mixed reviews around here, but it is all about boundary setting and treating children with respect, so it sounds like it might be an option for you. And maybe your husband would find a class easier to keep up with than a book.
