The Climate You Marry
When Your Common Senses Collide
I grew up in a rural setting with temperate continental climate, and outside was where life happened. Forests were for exploring, seasons were gentle enough to spend your days working outside, and fresh air was just air. My husband grew up in urbanized setting, in hot, semi-arid climate where outside was something you endured between air-conditioned spaces, where the sun wasn’t inviting but intense. Comfort was found in shelter, not exposure. So, according to him, the only way you can truly enjoy spending time outside is if you’re next to a large body of water.
I think kids need to be outside every day. My husband thinks I'm being intense about weather exposure. We're both right. We're both wrong. And we're definitely not talking about the same thing.
I understand spending time outside as a biological necessity, in fact, the longer we stay outside, the more likely we are to absorb the sunlight our bodies need to function well. When I say “we’re going for a hike, come with us,” and my husband doesn’t jump at the idea, I know he’s not being difficult. He’s confused about why I’d voluntarily leave a perfectly comfortable indoor space.
We didn’t anticipate these differences before we had children and this isn’t really about climate. When you parent with someone who had a fundamentally different childhood than you did, common sense is no longer that common. Every seemingly simple decision, like should the kids play outside every day, how much independence is appropriate, what does family time look like, what’s the right response to a scraped knee; becomes a negotiation between two different realities that both feel self-evidently true.
We all carry an invisible map of what childhood should be like. It’s drawn from our own experience, colored in with our parents’ choices. The smell of food cooking when you came home from school. The sound of your mother’s voice calling you in before dark. The feeling of summer freedom and structured routine. The presence or absence of neighbors, extended family, community.
This map feels like objective reality to each of us. Of course children need fresh air daily. Obviously family dinner happens at the table with no screens. Naturally kids should be able to walk to school alone by age eight.
Or: of course children should be inside when it’s hot. Obviously family dinner is a flexible affair where people eat when they’re hungry. Naturally kids need supervision until they’re much older because the world is dangerous.
The problems emerge when you’re co-parenting with someone holding a completely different map, and you both think you’re describing the same territory.
My husband and I have had the “outside” conversation a few times. I advocate for daily outdoor time. He doesn’t quite see what I’m so worked up about. I feel like I’m advocating for something essential. He feels like I’m being a bit intense about weather exposure.
What we’re actually conflicted about is whose version of normal gets to be the family’s normal. How we resolved this one was by reviewing our concrete children’s needs. Both our kids are highly energetic, especially our son who needs multiple hours of outdoor activity daily to stay regulated. When this is not done, it’s really difficult to be around them indoors. So our ideological differences didn’t matter that much when faced with the tangible experience of our children.
When Your Common Sense Contradicts Their Common Sense
Common sense is supposed to be the stuff you don’t have to explain. It’s self-evident. Obvious. The things everyone knows.
Except when you marry someone from a different country, culture, or even just a different kind of family, and you discover that everyone doesn’t know the same things at all.
Your common sense says kids should be a little hungry before dinner so they’ll eat well. Theirs says kids should never be hungry because food security is love. Your common sense says children should learn to entertain themselves. Theirs says childhood boredom should be remedied. Your common sense says some risk is necessary for growth. Theirs says unnecessary risk is negligence. Your common sense says free time is necessary for development of inner life. Thiers says extracurriculars are necessary for a well-rounded, cultured person.
Both of you are drawing from deep wells of experience. Both of you are trying to give your children what you needed, or what you wished you’d had, or what kept you safe, or what made you brave.
And so the simplest, automated decisions become rather complex.
Before children, these differences probably appeared charming. “Oh, how interesting that you grew up doing it that way!” After children, they need to be settled on which way do WE do it now, and what are we teaching them to be normal.
Your assumptions are invisible until they crash into someone else's invisible assumptions. Here is a bit of a framework for how we approach it and how we’re working it out in our family:
-Distinguish this worked for me from this is universal truth. Just because you turned out fine doesn’t mean your way is the only way. You don’t need to prove your childhood was superior, you need to figure out what actually serves these children. Try replacing “Kids need this” with “I grew up with this and I valued it because…” to explore each person’s view. That brings a different feel to the discussion.
-Look for the fear underneath. Most parenting disagreements are driven by fear. When I insist on outdoor time, I’m afraid my children will grow up disconnected from nature and themselves, trapped in artificial environments, unable to be alone with their thoughts. When my husband resists, he’s afraid they’ll learn that comfort is shameful, that struggling through unnecessary discomfort is virtuous, that their needs don’t matter. Both fears are worth taking seriously. Recognizing your fears is a necessary step to reconciling them.
-Experiment and observe. Your children are not you. They are growing up in a different place and time. They might need something completely different from what either of you needed. Sometimes the answer is they need a bit of both. Sometimes it’s neither, they need a third thing you didn’t anticipate. Be willing to be wrong about what you thought you knew.
-Take turns leading. You can’t really negotiate every single decision from scratch, you’d never get anything else done. Sometimes you have to say: “This one matters more to you, so we’ll do it your way. That one matters more to me, so we’ll do it my way.” And then you revisit it if it’s not working. But you must trust your priorities will get their turn. If one person’s map always wins, then you’re outvoting your partner.
What Happens When We Don’t Do This Work Consciously
When we refuse to examine our invisible maps, when we insist our common sense is the only common sense, the consequences compound:
-The marriage suffers. Every small decision becomes a power struggle. Resentment builds. You argue like lawyers, each presenting your case for why your childhood template should win.
-The children receive mixed messages. They learn that parents fundamentally disagree about what matters. Not in a healthy way of people having different perspectives, but in a confusing way of having to choose which parent to follow. This gives way for kids to learn to play parents against each other, or worse, to internalize that there’s something wrong with them for not fitting into either parent’s vision of a good child.
-We’ll miss who our children are. When you’re busy trying to recreate your childhood or prevent your childhood, you won’t see the reality of a child in front of you.
-We lose the opportunity for something better. Because even when we're working from the same map, we're often trying to redraw it entirely. When two different childhoods collide and especially if you want something different for your kids, you have the chance to build something that takes the best from both and discard what didn’t work. But only if you’re willing to look at both maps instead of fighting about which one is right.
Questioning what feels self-evident and holding multiple perspectives and fears at once is hard. The alternative is harder: raising children caught between two incompatible visions, in a marriage strained by conflicts about whose past gets to determine the children’s future.
When we do this work well, we demonstrate that loving someone includes the willingness to question things you thought you knew. In the end, our kids won't remember who won the outdoor debate. They'll remember whether we argued about it with contempt or curiosity.
I'd love to hear about the invisible maps you're navigating. Maybe it's about food, sleep, risk, affection, money, time alone, what counts as clean enough, or what family gathering even means. What conflict exists between the childhood you had and the childhood you want for your children?
I’m deeply grateful to everyone who reads, reflects, and supports these posts. Thank you for being here.
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This is great! My partner and I both attended awful controlling Catholic schools followed by a brand new engineering school at which students were encouraged to take part in reinventing engineering education. An unusual combination of experiences that conveniently resulted in us forming incredibly well-aligned ideas regarding education but inconveniently makes it harder to connect with other homeschoolers essentially none of whom had that set of experiences.
I love this. My husband and I grew up very differently, and in addition I got two “bonus” kids that he was already raising when we met. We both appreciate and respect the culture each of us came from (and, in his case, built with his previous partner), because we love the people who emerged from it.
It does take open conversations, though, for sure, and give-and-take. One recent Halloween season when he was swamped with work, I tentatively proposed buying costumes - he got a pained look but agreed, surrendering (for that year anyway) the family tradition of homemade costumes that he’d honored every year up until then. And I know any extracurricular activity that demands a lot of parental time commitment (performing arts, team sports, competitive anything) will be a tough sell, formative as those were to my own development.
One delicate edge right now is that both of the older kids, now in their 20s, are struggling. While we puzzle through how best to support them, it throws uncomfortable questions into the mix: is this the result of earlier parenting decisions? A product of the culture and circumstances they were raised in - including introducing me into the mix? What does that imply for how we should approach raising our youngest now?