A fork in the parenting road
Over the years, I’ve noticed that my daughter behaves differently when she’s at her mom’s compared to when she’s with me. Even at my house, if her mom decides to swing by to drop something off, the daughter’s behavior is different while mom is here. In my daughter case, she is less playful, more formal. This is especially true when she has just come back from mom’s house. I’ve even notice a bit of claw in her interactions with me as soon as she arrives. But eventually, they retract when she realizes her environment is daddy’s house. My ex and I are two different people; more different now since the divorce. It’s not a stretch to imagine that our daughter has to navigate the mine-fields of a still simmering proxy war in a shared custody situation.
I don’t really know what my ex’s parenting style is. But after years of failed coordination and co-parenting attempts, I gave up working with her and parent as though she wasn’t in the picture.
Being a guy, I tend to parent at the macro level and give logic and common sense a wide berth. These are the very things that I know neutralizes my ex’s emotional approach. It’s not to say that she’s the sensitive type; but when it comes to matters dealing with our daughter, her feelings are the first to bubble up while my default is to seek alternative coping approaches. Since our daughter spends more time with me, she has an opportunity to see the way I manage my emotions, my self and indirectly other people. She sees it, she gets it and is empowered with this knowledge. So while I manage the macro level, she has pretty much free reign of the micro level in her day-to-day approach to things as I let her make a lot of decision that are age appropriate.
The parenting style must change as she changes; not be rigid and tied to rules that are no longer suitable as she makes inevitable transitions.
I won’t contrast this with what life at my ex-wife’s house is like simply because I’m not there and it’s not fair to assume the opposite. But what I do know is that my daughter tells me that her mom cuddles better and I surmise that there is a lot of emotional bonding that takes place between mother and daughter. I also know that between the two parents, I am usually the first to encourage or allow our daughter to do things first. She ditched her car and eventually rode in the front seat of my car first. She was first to take public transit to school and back home on her own during my custody weeks. She was allowed to stay at home by herself while I went to pick up a pizza in the neighborhood. I gave her a house key and cell phone. These small but significant milestones were all endorsements of my daughter’s maturity and trust that we have built together over the past decade. My daughter knows hers and my boundaries very well and she feels free to expand her autonomy and self-determination within a changing parent/child relationship. In fact, compared to her peers, she enjoys relatively more independence. This I try to support steadily and age-appropriately. Essentially, my parenting style changed as she changes.
It’s like playing a board game at home, when she wins, she knows I didn’t throw the game and her victory was earned. Perhaps that’s why my daughter pushes the boundaries with me a lot more. She knows that if a frontier opens even just a tiny bit, it didn’t come at a cost of losing something else. She has nothing to prove to me and knows she won’t get reprimanded for pushing boundaries. Rather, the opposite is true. My daughter won’t get in trouble for failure; she gets an earful from me for not trying. At the double digit marker, her waning childhood has given rise to nascent adolescence. The parenting approach must adapt to help her with the metamorphosis; not be rigid and tied to rules that are no longer suitable as she makes inevitable transitions.
