This has come up a lot at work lately. I work in a department that is 90% male, and most of the wives are SAHMs. I live in the South, bible belt, lots of spanking and punitive discipline.
Several of the guys at work say that their wives depend on them to be the disciplinarians. They are dismissive of their wives' permissiveness and feel they have to go further down the punishment spectrum to really "make an impression" on the kids because their wives let them run wild all day. To make it worse, the moms brandish the dads like swords against their children in a classic "just wait until your father gets home" fashion.
I am always pushing my non-spanking, non-punishing, GD, empowered mother position in these conversations. Now I have one guy at work who's really interested in my parenting style, and I'm trying to get across to him that his wife is perfectly capable of discipling her own child and not relying on his father to enforce the situation.
My own parents were a classic example of this, although they have vastly improved over the years. My mother's wet sock parenting spurred me to find a better way, and MDC has furthered this cause.
It just causes me to wonder, why parent this way? It makes no sense and really gives the children the opportunity to rule the household in an unhealthy manner.
If anyone's read There's Gotta Be A Better Way by Becky Bailey, she says that Power Over people (Dad the Punisher) and Power Under people (Wet Sock Mom) attract each other, but that this scenario seriously undermines the family structure.
So how to we empower our fellow mothers? It honestly shocks me to think that people just let their kids beat on them all day and their only method of dealing with it is to threaten, threaten, threaten and then let someone else handle the discipline.
[Obviously, the roles can be easily reversed and don't really apply to gender or even heterosexual couples - this is just the scenario I deal with a lot at work
]
Several of the guys at work say that their wives depend on them to be the disciplinarians. They are dismissive of their wives' permissiveness and feel they have to go further down the punishment spectrum to really "make an impression" on the kids because their wives let them run wild all day. To make it worse, the moms brandish the dads like swords against their children in a classic "just wait until your father gets home" fashion.
I am always pushing my non-spanking, non-punishing, GD, empowered mother position in these conversations. Now I have one guy at work who's really interested in my parenting style, and I'm trying to get across to him that his wife is perfectly capable of discipling her own child and not relying on his father to enforce the situation.
My own parents were a classic example of this, although they have vastly improved over the years. My mother's wet sock parenting spurred me to find a better way, and MDC has furthered this cause.
It just causes me to wonder, why parent this way? It makes no sense and really gives the children the opportunity to rule the household in an unhealthy manner.
If anyone's read There's Gotta Be A Better Way by Becky Bailey, she says that Power Over people (Dad the Punisher) and Power Under people (Wet Sock Mom) attract each other, but that this scenario seriously undermines the family structure.
So how to we empower our fellow mothers? It honestly shocks me to think that people just let their kids beat on them all day and their only method of dealing with it is to threaten, threaten, threaten and then let someone else handle the discipline.
[Obviously, the roles can be easily reversed and don't really apply to gender or even heterosexual couples - this is just the scenario I deal with a lot at work
]
