Many disagreements among couples we interviewed center on the raising of children or creating and maintaining a specific business, project or production process. These disagreements often concern the identification of one’s own values and differentiation between these values and those that are inherited from our parents, our community, our church, our friends and so forth. Even after we have come to terms with the separation of our own personal values from those of our parents, something dramatic and often disturbing occurs when we have our first children or start our first mutual project. The voices of our mother or father suddenly come back to haunt us again. We tell our son not to play with that stick or “you’ll poke your eye out” and realize that we are using the same intonations of voice that our parents used and are basing our predictions and in junctures on the same faulty logic as our parents. We find ourselves using the same old outmoded assumptions about how to motivate workers or how to sell products as our father or mother used thirty or forty years ago. These assumptions were out of-date even back in those days!
Disagreements regarding rules of conduct and discipline often center on the issue of leniency when applied to the raising of children. One of the partners is “too strict” and the other “too easy” on the children. Caroline has no problem letting Sam (or anyone else, for that matter!) know that she believes he is entirely too harsh with the kids. According to Caroline, Sam speaks to them from a dominant, authoritative stance and they seem to react to that tone out of fear rather than respect. Sam disagrees with this assessment. He believes that they need strict discipline in their lives at this point in order to grow up to be loving, productive adults. In fact, Sam feels that Caroline is too permissive with the kids. Sadly, Sam’s own childhood was filled with violence and unpredictability, his father having been an alcoholic. While he tries to provide a home environment that is conducive to the love and respect that he never received, his own parenting behavior is undoubtedly modeled after that provided by his father — the only male parental role model he probably ever observed first hand.
Caroline and Sam tend to deal with these differences of opinion regarding child-rearing in a rather ineffective manner. Caroline’s comments about Sam’s relationship with his children were met by clear rejection on Sam’s part. She had no trouble at all saying that she felt Sam’s approach was the “wrong” one. On the other hand, Sam seemed to have no problem in ignoring what Caroline said. He waited quietly while she said what was wrong with his approach then took up the conversation by directing his comments solely to the interviewer. Caroline might as well not have been in the room.
