The TV shows I watch typically consist of various sporting events, movies, and The Office. However, several days ago I found myself watching two episodes of a show called WifeSwap.
The concept is pretty straightforward. Two families with different styles of living trade the wife/mother of their family for a two-week period. For the first week, the women live by the rules and customs of their new families and each of them assumes the household role of the wife they are replacing. For the second week, the women subject their new families to the rules they use in their own households, and their new husbands and children are forced to follow along. At the end of the two weeks, the couples reunite and together talk about what they observed, experienced, and learned.
Although I couldn’t help but think that some of the show might have been staged, I found the episodes very entertaining and informative. It was great to see different styles of parenting and different philosophies on life.
Each show taught many lessons. Here are three that stuck out to me:
1) Be thankful for what you have – We recently celebrated Thanksgiving. This show is a great reminder for us to be thankful for what we have. After their experiences on the show, all family members were more appreciative of what they have. Certain families were taught by their new wife/mother the importance of appreciating what they have and other families realized how special their wife/mother was because they were not fans of their new “wife”. Either way, all participants in the show ended their experience more appreciative of their lifestyle and the people who are involved in it. Sometimes in life it takes a specific event like Thanksgiving or participation in WifeSwap for us to start appreciating all the great things in our life. You don’t wait for that event to occur – be thankful for what you have.
2) What We Resist Persists – I have heard many times that what we resist persists. Nothing changes until it is fully accepted. That is why an alcoholic cannot begin to fully solve his problem until he admits that he is an alcoholic. The more he resists alcoholism, the more it will persist in his life. In this show, all family members, at first, resisted the new rules that they were to live by. After realizing that this resistance was only making things more difficult and magnifying the problems, they decided to embrace the change and learn what they could from it. It was this attitude that helped each person on the show learn valuable lessons. If something is holding you back in life, embracing it and learning from it, rather than resisting it, will help you break through it.
3) Sometimes there is more than one way to achieve a desired outcome – On the two shows that I watched it was clear that all four families felt that their way of life was the right way. They had chosen specific strategies for raising children because they thought those strategies were most reflective of their values and would be most likely to produce a “successful” family. What every family learned from participating in the show is that people define “success” differently and that there are many different strategies to creating a “successful” household. It is important to be confident in your vision of success, to be willing to make adjustments along the way, and to remember that you don’t need to do things exactly like other people in order to be successful.
As a side note, I also learned that what appeared to be trashy television show actually had something to offer. I guess we shouldn’t “judge a book by its cover.”
