Why Parents Disagree and What You Can Do About It: How to Raise Great Kids while You Strengthen Your Marriage, by Dr. Ron Taffel with Roberta Israeloff. New York: Avon Books, 1994. 255 pages. $10.
How often have you felt overwhelmed by your endless lists or frustrated about the level of your partners’ participation? What about fathers who are expected to participate more than their dads did but feel nothing they do meets their partners’ standards? Have you ever wondered why it is so challenging for us, moms and dads, to agree on how to discipline children? Issues like these revolve around gender differences. Given the proliferation of books about motherhood and fatherhood on bookstore shelves, it is surprising that so few books specifically tackle how gender differences and parental role expectations impact families. Here is a book that aims to fill that gap.
Readers of McCall’s magazine will recognize the author, Dr. Ron Taffel, as the columnist of “The Confident Parent.” Taffel, a therapist and family educator, believes that parental disagreement is the most common underlying cause of disruption of the parenting team. His 25 years of experience working with families shows up in the book’s graceful combination of optimism that self-defeating cycles of conflict can be broken, and realism about the difficulty of change in the face of the range of challenges pressing in on families every day. The good news, he assures us, is that even small changes can have a ripple effect, improving both the cohesiveness of the parenting team and the marriage partnership.
The book is intensely practical and compelling. Taffel discusses a range of issues that cause conflict between parents, including family participation, discipline, sibling struggles, communication patterns, spoiling, and letting go. In each case he makes use of every-day accounts of real-life situations, analyzes the underlying causes, and shows how conflict is often precipitated or exacerbated by gender assumptions. The profundity of the book lies partly in the directness with which these complex issues are handled; it is a case of simplicity without over-simplification.
The book helps us become more aware of our own gender biases and is an excellent starting point for understanding the opposite sex. The author’s gender is a crucial component of this book. I found myself much more receptive to hearing and understanding what it is like for fathers after he established his credibility with a sensitive, balanced account of the burdens facing mothers. The book is also valuable for its concrete strategies for reducing women’s endless lists of family tasks, increasing men’s participation, and nourishing the parenting relationship. Moreover, readers will appreciate the insights into gender differences in communication, the advice on detecting warning signals in a relationship, and the light the book casts on our own family relationships.