If you want to be kind to your kids, tell your partner your secrets, past and present.

Telling your partner all your depravities, past and present, long before you even think about having children is the kindest thing you can do to your children.

 

Mischief sharing with, and probably even more importantly, mischief disclosure to, a partner will make you better parents. Many people believe that they don’t need to share everything with their partner.

For example you may have once engaged in a certain sexual experience, it was fun at the time, but it’s not something you want to do again so why reveal it to your partner? Why cause unwanted judgments or insecurities due to something that you once did and are very unlikely to ever do again? Well this is fine if you have no intention of having children with this partner; it isn’t if you have, and the reason can be best explained as follows:

Let’s say you don’t reveal this sexual experience and years later, your child goes through something similar. Your partner goes berserk because he or she cannot fathom why your child would do something so crass, vulgar and unacceptable. You, on the other hand, may react by saying, “sweetheart, aren’t you over reacting? We were all young once” and this sweetheart replies, “what is wrong with you, I can’t believe you’re ok with this? I don’t think I know you sometimes… I wonder if this is your fault? Sometimes I think you encourage this behaviour without even knowing it”. And we all know how such enjoyable exchanges go from there.

I use sexual experience as an example, it could be any such life experience such as stealing sweets from a shop, using swear words, watching a graphic porn movie, or trying recreational drugs. Parents need to be fairly close with their approval/disapproval reactions because the most important lesson to teach a child is that his or her parents are close friends who agree far more than disagree. The child needs to see that the parents trust one another.

Let’s say one parent finds out before the other, The reaction of that parent needs to be an honest revelation on how he or she truly feels. Children don’t want to see dad worried about what mum thinks of dad’s advice or vice versa. They definitely don’t want to see mum saying “what you did isn’t that bad my love, this is what being young is all about. Don’t be so hard on yourself”, while dad’s reaction is, “how could you, I’m so disappointed, I don’t want to talk to you for a month and you are grounded for three”

We always here advice telling parents that they must show a united front to their children. I couldn’t agree more. Well shouldn’t parents unite first? If you wish to portray your level of approval/disapproval intensity regarding a particular topic to the child, you want to count on your partner’s automatic back up the vast majority of the time. Therefore if you want to be a shining example of a loving happy united couple to your children rather than a fearful, emotionally challenged, gutless, fence sitting partner that finds himself or herself thinking, “I better not react until I see what my partner does because the last thing I want is to have a fight or be told off, again, by my partner” or even worse “I better deal with this now before my partner returns and ruins my good work by his or her unpredictable, and often unproductive, input”, then reveal your boundaries by revealing your mischief CV, past and present.

Therefore sharing mischievous experiences or individual mischievous stories is an extremely useful exercise. It will provide insight into our respective views on tricky character defining subjects such as politeness, sexual adventure, level of frankness, level of acceptable human fallibility and many other such opinions that we will one day wish to express to our children without stress. Stress will have a far higher chance of being replaced by joy if we have our partners’ effortless back up the majority of the time. Both partners will appreciate this effortless backup, this effortless cup filler, this effortless high. More importantly, the best lesson you can teach your children is how wonderful it must feel to be able to be 100% your true self at home and be loved for it.

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