One thing that I as a parent feel very strongly about is discipline which covers a huge basis.  I feel if my children is disciplined from a young age it will empower them to handle a lot situasions later on in life. 

I'm married now for 8 years

and we've have 2 kids.  My daughter (11), however, is from my first marraige and my second husband adopted her.  We have a son (7) together.  I disciplined my daughter and my new husband accepted/agreed with the discipline system, but when it was time to start disciplining our son my husband was reluctant to discipline him.  Which resulted in him never disciplining him and now 7 years down the line we have a huge problem on our hands.  Our son got used to always getting his way with Daddy (funny enough though when daddy wasn't around he accepted my ways???) and now that daddy can see that he needs to be disciplined our son seems confused.

I guess the advice I would like to share with you is to start from a young age to set boundaries for your children and if they step outside those boundaries they need to now that it's not acceptable.  Also that your NO has to be NO!!! 

We've started a new way on which all of us agreed on.  We do believe in a smack on the bum when deserved, but we also believe that our kids must realize why they are being punished and it's not always necessary to smack them.  They're both at an age where we can start taking away prevelidges/grounding, etc. 

I can already see the change in especially our son's behaviour - although he still takes a chance whenever he can, but it's a huge improvement.  We do spend a lot of quality time with both our kids and what we've found the kids just love is to have "a family meeting" where we all discuss each other's day.  It seems that they feel important and sometimes stuff comes out that we we're aware of and we are all calm and in a good mood and can discuss the issue and give advice.  Our daughter even gave our son some advice the other night!  We've also made a set of house rules and each child got a copy to put up in their rooms and another in the kitchen so that we can be reminded in case we forget.  It's not an army-style set of rules, but mostly how we treat each other, respect each other, etc.  My son came home one day with 2 of his friends and asked if he could show them "our house rules".

Parenting ain't easy or fun sometimes, but if your partner is willing to bite the bullet with you and you show your kids that after all you do respect them - their attitude will change as well.

Good luck