We do it exactly the same in all accounts—context is important and kids are perfectly capable of distinguishing those from a very early age on (and I had many discussions with relatives, who doubted that).
One thing to add to the “who supersedes who” when multiple adults are present: We had the additional problem, that my wife and I do have different styles of parenting as well and while we tried our best to harmonize them, there are some edge cases, where we handle things differently. This lead (and still leads) to some stress, because if both parents are present, every situation with the kids is more … noisy? The kids express more energy? IMHO, this is due to the problem of context: which parents’ context to follow now? So from the kids’ view the situations’ context is ambiguous.
We introduced the rule, that if one parent starts to … parent and starts solving a situation, the other parent must shut up and not intervene at all. The parent who started handling a situation also finishes. If the other parent disagrees on how this situation is handled, they still shut up and we sit down later without the kids, talk about it and try to harmonize our approaches.
That greatly reduced the stress with (and in) the kids—they (and we) have a predictable context to follow and are less stressed from the context being ambiguous.
We do it exactly the same in all accounts—context is important and kids are perfectly capable of distinguishing those from a very early age on (and I had many discussions with relatives, who doubted that).
One thing to add to the “who supersedes who” when multiple adults are present: We had the additional problem, that my wife and I do have different styles of parenting as well and while we tried our best to harmonize them, there are some edge cases, where we handle things differently. This lead (and still leads) to some stress, because if both parents are present, every situation with the kids is more … noisy? The kids express more energy? IMHO, this is due to the problem of context: which parents’ context to follow now? So from the kids’ view the situations’ context is ambiguous.
We introduced the rule, that if one parent starts to … parent and starts solving a situation, the other parent must shut up and not intervene at all. The parent who started handling a situation also finishes. If the other parent disagrees on how this situation is handled, they still shut up and we sit down later without the kids, talk about it and try to harmonize our approaches.
That greatly reduced the stress with (and in) the kids—they (and we) have a predictable context to follow and are less stressed from the context being ambiguous.
The “one person parenting at a time” rule sounds like a good approach! We do something similar.