Now that you are parenting together, you will notice he does some things differently than you expected. One of the reasons is that the rules or guidelines that we each grew up with are so ingrained that they seem obvious to us. It isn’t until we start clashing with someone else’s obvious guidelines that we realize how many legitimate ways there are to do the same thing.
I’ll give you a holiday example. This year I got what I wanted for Christmas (early) and this is how I did it: I told my husband and son what I wanted for Christmas, a stainless steel colander. I told them this weeks early and they seemed to make a note of it. Then yesterday I brought it up with my son again. He had no recollection of my saying that I wanted it, nor did he even remember what a colander was. So I put colander on the shopping list. I was shopping with my husband. Together we bought a colander at a reasonable price. Now I have one!
The culture clash in this example is that in my family, we let people know some of the things we were hoping to get as gifts and that helped people get us something that we wanted. In my husband’s family, you had to think of a gift on your own, the thought was what counted, not how on-target you were. Now I have adapted by knowing that what I would like to have, I get in the normal courses of events, not as a gift.
There is no right or wrong way to do holidays or gift-giving. Whether it feels right or not is based on our family culture. When you are able to put your expectations into words and discuss your culture, you can decide together which traditions to choose or how to blend them. The key is not to make emotional assessments based on supposing they know what feels right to you. That is why talking about it helps.
Tags: family culture, parenting culture