A Divided Village

Welcome to the "On Balance" guest blog. Every Tuesday, "On Balance" features the views of a guest writer. It could be your neighbor, your boss, your most loved or hated poster from the blog, or you! Send me your original, unpublished entry (300 words or fewer) for consideration. Writers need to use their full names. Obviously, the topic should be something related to balancing your life.

By Diana Beckmann

My sister and I are two years apart. I'm the oldest. We have always been very different, and not able to appreciate each other. So ours was a tense childhood. But then we both got married within a year and had daughters 13 months apart. Suddenly, we had so much in common, or so I thought.

I knew that my sister and I were raising our kids differently. But she lives hundreds of miles away, and the differences weren't so obvious over the phone and via e-mail. Then, last summer, I realized just how different we are as parents.

As a village-type parent, I can deal with letting other adults acting as an authority figure even when I'm there. My friends have scolded my kids for jumping on the furniture -- and they have also given them ice for their bumped knees. I have to be comfortable with other parents making minor decisions about my child that I might not -- like giving them popsicles an hour before dinner. No big deal in the overall parenting scheme.

My sister is what I call an island type of parent. It is important for her to make every decision. She doesn't want anyone else to impose their rules or parenting styles on her children. If her kids are misbehaving or want something, she wants to be told so she can handle it her way.

The event that brought this to light was a family reunion at a beach house in Nags Head, a happy trip to celebrate our parents' 40th anniversary. At the time, my daughter was seven and my son nearly four. My sister's daughters were six and four, and my sister was four months pregnant. Our four kids ran around in a happy pack.

So when my six-year-old niece asked if she could stay with my husband and our son at the pool instead of going to the beach, he thought he was doing something nice. But because it wasn't cleared with my sister first (she informed us in no uncertain terms that she would not have let her daughter stay at the pool), she was livid. We had no right to change her family plans, she screamed at me. We were never to make any decisions for her children without consulting her first. From them on, we didn't get my nieces a glass of juice without asking my sister first.

For many months afterward, I replayed this incident in my mind. Was I imposing too much of my own parenting style on her children? Was she overreacting? Eventually, my sister apologized and all was forgiven. But on a recent business trip to her hometown, I made sure to tread lightly with her children -- even when her girls were swinging golf clubs in the dining room while their little brother crawled on the floor. I calmly picked up the baby, asked my sister if the girls should be doing that and let her take care of it.

What's your parenting philosophy? Are you a village or an island? How do you balance parenting styles in a multi-family environment? Have different styles ever broken up a friendship? What's your advice on handling different approaches to parenting in the same family, neighborhood or community group?

Diana Beckmann lives with her family in Washington, D.C.

By Leslie Morgan Steiner |  March 11, 2008; 7:00 AM ET  | Category:  Guest Blogs
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