Relationship Reflection

Relationships are important because we can have fun together, support each other and learn together. I have positive relationships with several Japanese mothers.  The factors that contributed to developing and maintaining these relationships are that we have common backgrounds and common interests.  We are Japanese women living in the U.S., we have children who are similar ages, we are concerned with our children’s bilingual education, we sometimes want to have fun together without children, and so on.  I think it is important to have similar standards for disciplining children and similar personalities. A challenge I have experienced are that it is hard to keep motivated to maintain the relationships when we have very different standards for discipline.  I lost my motivation to maintain a relationship with a friend who did not watch her child in the park, let her child do violent actions to other friends and let the child do things that are not allowed such as cutting through somebody’s yard.  I was stressed for a long time with this relationship because I didn’t know if I was being too strict or caring too much about small details. But I found out that it is better to be with people with similar values when it comes to raising a child because it is too important.

My experiences with relationships with a lot of mothers allow me to understand each parent has different ways of raising children. They will also lead me to have occasions to promote parent-parent relationships and I will try to solve issues with relationships between children because I understand that parents care about peers’ influences as much as teacher’s teaching skills.