You may, as a prospective parent, have had the wisdom and foresight to sit down with your prospective co-parent fully to discuss your attitudes to parenting. There must out there be a mother and a father whose views on every conceivable aspect of bringing up baby dovetail in perfect harmony. I abhor those people as I do perfection in anything. After all to err is human.
There is, without question, one part of parenting more likely to sow discord and dissent than any other and that is discipline. The first year of your baby's life will bring many (many (many)) trials and tribulations. One tiny consolation is that discipline will almost certainly not be on the agenda unless your name is on a social services agenda somewhere. Even the most addled and sleep deprived parent of a newborn knows that you can't chastise a baby.
But a moment will come and for the first and only time in your child's hopefully long life it will be a wondrous moment because 'now is naughty new'. Baby milestones as marked in public are fiendishly dull: who cares when a baby sits up, what's so interesting about 'dada', he slept through the night - big deal! Nobody marks, still less celebrates, baby's first hypocrisy, earliest effort at deception or any of the manifold failings that really constitute what is to be human.
It is perhaps not by chance that it is in the 13th month of my child's life that I have witnessed an incipient bent for rule breaking. Of course he has no conception of rules or that they are made for breaking but recently when he provoked a scolding from his mother for 'too much teeth' when getting his daily dose of the good stuff I caught him in a grin that said he knew. It was a grin I knew too as I have worn it countless times in my life when getting a well deserved telling off and the conspiratorial glint in his eye told that he knew on what side of the discipline fence 'dada' is on.
Absurdly there was a time in my life when I thought that as paterfamilias I would be responsible for discipline along with failing to put up shelves, failing to change tyres on the car and failing in any way to be the man my wife thought she had married. Then I remembered that my wife is German and that I am not in charge of anything.
Something you don't really understand about disciplining a child until you have to do it is what a performative process it is. In most countries in Europe the age of criminal responsibility for children is 14, for us it's 10 to satisfy the especially English urge to start blaming others as soon as we possibly can. In no country is it 3 or even 2 and yet pointlessly in playgrounds across the land parents patiently explain to their child why grabbing is wrong and sharing is right. The children haven't got a clue, it is a waste of everybody's time and breath. But of course it's not being done for the child's benefit it is all a pantomime for the other child's parent that you know the difference between right and wrong. It would be much simpler just to say that to the other parent and let the kids get on with it until they're old enough to reason (which in the case of some children is around the age of 40).
Anyway I am looking forward to many years of breeding sedition, sowing subversion and fomenting rebellion and I will leave the unter Strafe stellen to my wife.
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