For Those Struggling with Child-rearing ②: On Conflicts with Your Partner

My husband or wife is uncooperative with child-rearing.
This is very painful. Even though they should be your ally, you end up feeling isolated within your own home.
I hate writing long-winded introductions. So, I will get straight to the conclusion.

“It is impossible to change people.”

What did you think when you saw this?
Many of you probably felt discouraged, thinking, “Not this again.”
You probably thought, “They’re just going to say, ‘Since you can’t change others, you should change yourself,’ aren’t they?”
But, unfortunately,


“It is also impossible to change yourself.”
Yes. It is very unfortunate, but even changing yourself is difficult. If you think about it, you’ll understand.

If it were easy to change yourself, diets wouldn’t fail, and everyone would be a diligent student.

In the first place, a person’s way of thinking, values, and actions are shaped by their life—the various people they have met, their successful experiences, and the failures that made them shed tears.

It is, so to speak, a tower that has been built endlessly since birth. If you want to rebuild it, you have to tear it down first. This is the reason why you cannot change others, or even yourself.

The fact that you are reading this text after reading the title means you have already felt this keenly. It is truly difficult to change others.

I dared to state that it is impossible, but to be precise, others can be changed, and you can change yourself. It is just extremely difficult.

There are many things that cannot be solved by effort alone, and luck or major external forces are also required, so I will not touch upon that here. I assume you are reading this precisely because you cannot ask for help from those around you.

Now, is there nothing we can do? Are we forced to give up?

Actually, there is one thing that is permitted. That is to “understand.”

The basis of human relationships is not “how?” but “why?”. You should not be thinking, “What can I do to make him change?” but rather, “Why does he act that way?”

The quickest way is to ask about your husband’s childhood. What kind of child was he? How was he raised? The hints to the “why” are hidden there.

And what is even more important is to recall your own childhood. People do not understand themselves as well as they think they do.

Child-rearing has no classes or manuals, so people are often greatly influenced by the way they were raised themselves.

What you must be careful about is that it is not simply a matter of tracing the past exactly. It is well known that people who were abused in childhood have a high risk of abusing their own children.

However, people are not that simple. Someone who was dissatisfied with being overprotected might become neglectful.

People shape their own ideal child-rearing by sometimes conforming and sometimes rebelling.

Therefore, there are as many forms of ideal child-rearing as there are people. It would be nice if there were some kind of manual, but there is no such thing. Even in the Reiwa era, there is no established method for child-rearing.

Isn’t that strange? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of people must have raised children by now. Yet, there is no “correct answer” for child-rearing methods.

Of course, there are points that are gaining some consensus, such as that corporal punishment is wrong. However, in the history of humanity, a “correct child-rearing method” has yet to be established.

I have digressed a little, but the ideal way of raising children differs from person to person. You cannot change your partner’s “child-rearing method,” but you can understand their “ideal.”

Also, it is important to understand what makes you angry and what makes you sad. What is the one thing you absolutely cannot forgive? What is it that you desire? Understanding these things is also important.

I have no intention of saying something naive like, “If you talk, you will understand each other.” You have likely ended up at this note precisely because you cannot understand each other even after talking. Even if people cannot understand each other, they can still understand one another.

The situation will not change just because you understand. However, dealing with an unknown monster is completely different from dealing with an alien whose actions you cannot agree with but whose principles of action you can understand.

If you find yourself at a complete dead end in your relationship, please try asking your partner, “What kind of child were you?” That action will be the first step toward turning the monster into an alien.