Agreed Parenting

I am thankful that Jared and I agree on major issues when it comes to parenting.  There are so many choices these days when it comes to raising children and, while I'm sure we'll stumble in the future, we have had very similar thoughts about these important decisions thus far.  I realize that each family needs to make decisions that are the best for their family.  Parents must come to an agreement on what they are personally most comfortable with and I don't mean for this to be preachy or a means to enforce our decisions on anyone else.  However, I came across this story on Pinterest and it reinforced for me one of the important conversations we've had in the Meabon household.

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"When I was about twenty years old, I met an old pastor's wife who told me that when she was 

young and had her first child, she didn't believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. 

"But one day when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking--the first in his life. And she told him he would have to go outside and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. 

"He said to her, 'Mama, I couldn't find a switch, but here's a rock you can throw at me.' All of the sudden a mother understood how the situation felt from the child's point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. 

"The mother took the boy onto her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. Because violence begins in the nursery--one can raise children into violence." 

~From a peace prize acceptance speech given by Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking