Are you wondering how to respect your spouse when you don't agree?
I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication,
family relationships all over the world through the lens of self-government
and in this video we're going to be talking about how you can get on the same page with your spouse.
Couples are not on the same page when it comes to their parenting or even many other things in
their lives and it can be very difficult for couples to know how to communicate
when they don't agree about everything. In this video I'm going to talk to you about my story
with me and my husband and when we weren't on the same page and what we did to fix that
and I would like to share with you some things you can do to maintain respectful relationships
even if you don't always agree. For years I've been teaching parenting. In fact since 1999, I never knew
I would teach parenting but after doing treatment foster care for troubled teens for just a little
bit, people started asking me to teach parenting around the world. I was so young and my husband
and I weren't exactly on the same page yet but I said okay, I'll start helping to teach. Well after
years of teaching my husband and I came together and we changed our parenting and our communication
so that we were very unified. It took a lot of work though and people will come to me
all the time even to this day and they will say Nicholeen, I really want to be able to
do the things you teach. I love your videos, I love your classes and books and courses
but my husband just doesn't seem to care or my wife does not want to change her yelling
or whatever it happens to be and so they say what do I do? How can I still respect them and how can I
do this because I don't want to yell or do what she does. How do we get on the same page somehow
and then I tell them you know what? Me and my husband used to not agree about all the parenting
strategies either and really it was because I was being very deliberate in the parenting that I was
doing because I was with the foster children and our children all day long but he was busy building
his business and he was focused on other things. So, he wanted me to just handle it, well that's nice it
shows a lot of confidence in me but I'll tell you what, it was very hard when he would come home and
be short-tempered or lose control when my children were not used to that anymore. Mom did not do that
so what about dad? They started to lose respect for dad actually because he was short-tempered
and I wasn't. I was not trying to get my children to lose respect in their father. I was trying to
increase respect in my relationship with them but because his parenting style was different, he did
end up losing some of their respect and they didn't listen to him very often. They certainly
didn't come to him with any of their problems, they would always come to me and seek my advice first
because I was more reliable, I was more consistent and deliberate but it hurt me to see that he did
not have the same respect from his children and I didn't want to be contributing to that any more
than absolutely necessary. So, what I decided was I would never talk bad about dad, I would never talk
bad about his parenting. I would just say sometimes parents choose to do things differently. We can
show dad and teach dad some of the ways that we do things and maybe he'll be able to learn them
but he isn't here as often with us to learn how to do these things. He hasn't learned them,
he hasn't seen how he can change some of his habits and behaviors and we need to be patient.
So when the children would get upset or frustrated with dad or try to come to me to talk bad about
dad and his parenting, instead I would try to be the voice of compassion, charity and understanding
and I would definitely respect my husband and I would tell them he loves you, he is trying to
help you and correct you. He just doesn't have the same skills that I have but you still need
to listen to what he has to say. This doesn't mean that they truly did increase their respect for him
as much as they respected me but over time when he decided to change his parenting style to match
what I was doing then everything changed for him. In fact many of my children are very deeply
connected to their father at this stage in life and it's beautiful to see. So what were some of
the key things I did to maintain respect? Well number one was I didn't put my husband's change
of heart all on him. I'm a praying person and I prayed regularly. I'm talking daily for probably
about a year and a half that God would intervene somehow and help my husband have a change of heart.
Because I was putting the pressure of the heart change on the Lord to influence my husband, I
knew he had to accept it and take action but that influencing him was on somebody else then I could
remove some of that pressure feeling toward my husband. Another thing I decided to do was not nag.
Not nagging is super important. Just because you know something that somebody else doesn't know
does not mean that you should nag them about what they don't know all the time. This leads me to my
next don't do but before I get to that, I'm going to tell you something to do. Click that subscribe
button. There are so many great videos here on this channel that you are not going to want to
miss that are about relationship development and self-government so click the subscribe button now.
So what else should you not do? You should not compare. Don't compare yourself to your spouse,
that seems almost impossible, right? It's funny that when you're dating somebody or you're in love
with somebody, you look past all the failures but when you're working on a project with them
like raising a child, those differences are glaring and you can't help but start comparing.
Just like you would compare with the neighbor or people at church or at the office, all those other
people you're not as close to. So keep in mind the closeness should decrease the comparisons.
We really shouldn't compare to anybody, it's not healthy but if we could start in our husband and
wife relationship, all the better. So, don't compare. Don't think I'm so good at this and he's not or
she's so good at that and I'm not because that creates distance in your relationship and you
absolutely need to have connection in order to maintain a spirit of gratitude and respect. Make
sure that you have regular talk times together. In our family we do something called meetings.
We have family meetings, couples meetings and individual mentor meetings with our children
each week. I talk about how to conduct these meetings in my TSG parenting course. As part of the
parenting university that we have, we have these journals. This is a couple's meeting journal. It's
a place where my husband and I write down what we talked about during our weekly meeting together.
These weekly meetings are times where you can discuss your relationship, your communication,
how you want to correct each other, how you want to accept each other's corrections,
code words or code language you might want to have so that you can help each other along the way
and you're going to talk about the children, their needs, you're going to talk about
family issues, family trips, things you're going to buy. You're going to problem solve
all the things related to the family. This couple's meeting is the most important of all the meetings.
If your spouse is a little reticent to have another meeting after all the meetings at the
office and the things they do all day long then have your meeting a little bit more
casually at first and then explain that these meetings are really making a difference for you
and for the family and see if you can get them to be a little bit more deliberate and concrete
after the fact. Sometimes a person has to see that something is beneficial before they'll
do it. Also if you could explain to your spouse that when you run a business or start a business,
you have all kinds of meetings all the time. You would never run a business without those meetings.
How silly that you would run this organization called family and never meet to talk about it? Many
people do that and they wish later when they find out about family meetings that they would have
known to have those meetings ahead of time so that they could have conquered some of those problems
that ended up lasting into the next generation. If your spouse does something differently from you,
make sure that you do not let that be your excuse for why you aren't going to be consistent
with your family. Why is it that you are choosing to watch these videos here on this channel
to parent your children using self-government skills and learning how to communicate and help
them have a change of heart? It's because you want something different. You need to be true
to what you know you should be as a parent and a spouse. Sometimes those two things
don't necessarily gel well. When my husband and I did not see eye to eye, I did not stop
the parenting skills and the training that I was using for my children. I didn't stop trying
to control me and be the best version of myself. In fact because I carried on, that actually inspired
him that he could do the same thing too. To be truly inspiring to each other, we need to always be
changing, changing for the better. So, hopefully your husband or wife is changing for the better and
you can appreciate those changes that are being made even if they are more gradual than some of
the changes you've already made for yourself. Stay your course but be open-minded and understanding
about everybody else being on their own journey and then you will be able to look at that person
with reverence and respect. So, to respect someone does mean to revere them, to consider them as a
pertinent person of importance, to even reverence them. So if you truly respect each other then you
will hold each other in important places in your hearts and in your minds, you'll speak kindly about
each other to friends and family members and you will maintain your course with integrity as well.
I think I have more that can help you as you are trying to unify with your spouse and find more
respect there and that is finding purpose in your parenting. So if you've enjoyed this video, click
on my next video which is called finding purpose in your parenting. It will give you some additional
things that you can do to live more purposeful as a parent and to improve all your relationships.