to ask if I'm being cruel to my children?

[Busybecca]

We have two daughters, aged 4 and 3. DH and I have fallen out tonight after he told me he thought I was cruel to the girls. DH and I differ in that I want to encourage the girls to be independent and he likes to baby them.

He works four days per week 9-5 so he isn't trying to make up for his absence or anything, but it's becoming unbearable when the four of us are together and I think our different approaches are totally unfair on and confusing to the children.

DH will hand feed them. Lift them on and off the toilet and wipe their bums. Put their shoes and clothes on and take them off for them. Put their rubbish in the bin for them. He pretty much does what they say, when they say it or else they're crying and whinging.

DD1 today went on the trampoline at the bottom of the garden then called to be lifted down. I called "use the ladder" but DH went running down the garden to lift her down Later he was upstairs and she came inside and called up to him to come and take her shoes off for her and he did! At tea time I called up to DD2 that tea was ready and she called DH to carry her downstairs, which he did. I asked her to wash her hands and she called him to turn the tap on for her, then to get the soap out for her, then to pass her the towel.

When it's just me and the girls they are fully capable of doing all of the above for themselves and they are happy to do so. When he is here they're whiny, bossy and demanding and I don't enjoy family time at all because of that. They don't listen to DH if he asks them to do anything, they just order him around.

Tonight DD1 said she needed a tissue. She was standing outside the bathroom door, I was washing up and DH was upstairs. I replied 'there's tissue in the bathroom.' She started calling to DH to get her a tissue and Lo and behold he came running downstairs to do so. Then he went in the shower and she sneezed again and was calling at him to fetch her a tissue. I told her she was more than capable of getting it herself and that he couldn't hear her because he was in the shower. She started screaming and crying for him to do it now and after a couple of minutes he got out of the shower to see what the matter was - hence me being called cruel for not getting her a tissue.

It's getting to the stage where they're a total pain in the arse on his first day back to work and I have to 'reset' them to realise they're capable of everything above. The following day they're back to normal and much happier but still DH will go back to being at their beck and call in the evening which just leads to tantrum after tantrum.

AIBU to think we can't go on like this or am I indeed cruel?

[GreenTulips]

"I am right and you are wrong and why can't you just do things my way?"

I think that sums it up

[mathanxiety]

BUT she can't do that unless her DH agrees to make those changes!!

Not so.
There is a bigger picture that many people posting here are missing. Too many people are seeing only the H as the only issue. That is a mistake.

The OP has expressed herself very articulately and thoroughly when describing the really irritating behaviour of her DH and her DCs. (And I agree this behaviour is really poor). I think most people have seen their DH drop the ball in a significant way and/or have seen their children have their 'moments' and have seen days in their family life when you would like to just fast forward to waving them all off to university and clearing out their rooms. It's easy to identify with her feelings of frustration and irritation. But though we might all like to drive the proverbial tank through it all, we know that there are family relationships that have to survive our approach and so we try to figure out the smart way to make changes, even though the knee-jerk way is very tempting.

There is a sequence of changes that needs to happen if things are going to change.

The OP needs to take back control over herself first. She needs to come to grips with her need to be right. She needs to come to grips with her fear of responsibility and her sense that life is unfair.

Then she needs to address the verbal mistreatment of the DH that she is letting the girls get away with. Yes, he is letting them get away with that too. But it is clear that the girls feel secure with the OP and therefore she is the one who needs to model respect and affection for the DH, perhaps in ways I have suggested, as well as anything else she can come up with, and she needs to intervene and address the verbal style and tone they use with DH every single time she sees it, without reference to the goal the girls want to see accomplished.

Telling them to get their own tissue when they are screaming at someone who is in the shower to get it is agreeing with them that the tissue is of supreme importance. Telling them to stop being rude and to stop screaming at daddy is a better approach. It will work if she fobs off their protests that they need a tissue, by reiterating that it does not matter what they want, they must not be rude or scream or shout, rinse and repeat. The actual object of the girls cannot be addressed at all unless they are being civil. You don't have to yell at them or out-decibel them or frighten them into silence.

The approach where the OP told them to get their own tissue only addresses the OP's emotional need not to have anyone depend on her. It ignores the need the girls have for solid boundaries. The lack of solid boundaries is terrifying for children and it feeds a vicious circle where the children seek boundaries (by means of extremely irritating and bad behaviour such as that of the girls) and the parents won't set them in place. Children need solid boundaries in order to feel secure.

The DH here will enjoy a much more pleasant time with the girls when they have been trained not to go ballistic or whinge. It may well convince him that his approach was right all along but that doesn't matter (because having people agree that you are right and the other person was wrong is not something that adults realistically should expect out of life). In the normal course of events, when children are being led into greater independence, and emotionally supported along that journey, they will tell the person 'assisting' more than necessary that they are able to do it themselves.

The OP can as I have said fold her arms and say it is all DH's fault and the circus can continue. Or she can engage in the emotional work of being a parent.

[GreenTulips]

So what's you are saying is that DH isn't allowed to behave like a door mat and it all OPs fault and she needs to fix it - welcome to equality

Maths I'm going to leave you to your 'I'm right approach' because you are just like the DH and very irritating

[mathanxiety]

What I am saying is that there are two small children caught up in this conflict that both parents have contributed to, and because of that it doesn't matter whose fault it is or who is right.

The only thing that matters is how soon can it be fixed. Is the OP going to wait for her DH to do that? Or is she going to put the best interests of the girls ahead of her desire to be proved right?

[RiverTam]

Equality? Well, maybe if the OP cared to engage with the thread she's started a bit more, and provide more context and information, then we might have equal amounts of info about both sides and be better able to advise. As it is, the OP is refusing to provide anything other than 'I'm right, he's wrong'. Which, as math has explained very clearly, is of no help to anyone, least of all these two little girls.

[Busybecca]

How will things improve if I tell them off for rudeness but DH continues to allow and respond to it?

[RiverTam]

Sigh. No-one can tell you that anymore than math already has without you providing some context. So, again, has your DH always been like this with them? How were things when they were babies? Is there anything going on with your DH that could be why he thinks he should do all this stuff for them? Without knowing more about how he's thinking it's almost impossible to say.

And you teach you DDs that it doesn't matter if someone helps them over and above what might be needed, they never shriek their orders through the house. math has already explained how you could have handled the tissue situation, have you read that?

[RiverTam]

Basically, if your DH wants to, as you see it, be treated like a doormat, that's up to him. You can still teach your DDs that they don't get to treat him like a doormat, as that's what's important to you, and, indeed, to them.

[squizita]

So what's you are saying is that DH isn't allowed to behave like a door mat and it all OPs fault and she needs to fix it - welcome to equality

Emotional and intellectual labour. It doesn't matter who does things, but society expects mum to be 'fixer'. Society expects her to do the boring stuff and then rewards dad for being cute/soft.

A lot of this situation smacks of this kind of ideology being acted out by the family, mum needs to be sensible but is fair game for being called harsh and boring for it ...

[mathanxiety]

Are your children so completely unbothered by you that you expect them to ignore you when you teach them how not to talk to their dad?

How did you manage to teach them to speak respectfully to you? Did you correct them when they tried bossing you? Did you ask them to use quiet/indoor voices and say please and thank you?

This isn't an abstract question of equality or what society expects.
Everyone brings strengths and weaknesses to the role of parenting. We are not all created equal. Some parents are great with small children and hopeless with teens. Some are good at the practical organisation that keeps a house ticking over so everyone can eat and wear clean clothes but not so good at the kissing of bruised knees.

The parent in whom the children have the most confidence and who has already experienced some success in teaching respectful behaviour has already (correctly imo) identified herself here, so I am suggesting that she is the one who could turn this around if she tried to approach it differently and took on the poor behaviour. Handling the emotional work may not be her strength, but it seems to me that the H is trying to compensate for her focus on her strong point by means of babying, which he sees as emotional support.

There is an emotional element in bringing up children to independence. Ideally both parents would understand that and contribute equally to all aspects of the endeavour, but when you have an imbalance that has given rise to such extreme misbehaviour that it is no fun to take the children anywhere, and resentment between the parents has reached the point where they are using adjectives like cruel on the one hand and hoping to bang the other over the head with proof of how wrong they are on the other, a screeching halt is urgently needed.

[Busybecca]

I did admonish her for shouting and screaming at DH to get out of the shower but as usual it fell on deaf ears because they know he'll respond to it. He tended to admire them as babies but not really get involved.

[Busybecca]

Math, it was his suggestion to wait upstairs and hear how my mornings go because he simply didn't believe it could be done without moaning and stress.

[mathanxiety]

Tonight DD1 said she needed a tissue. She was standing outside the bathroom door, I was washing up and DH was upstairs. I replied 'there's tissue in the bathroom.' She started calling to DH to get her a tissue and Lo and behold he came running downstairs to do so. Then he went in the shower and she sneezed again and was calling at him to fetch her a tissue. I told her she was more than capable of getting it herself and that he couldn't hear her because he was in the shower.
Your account of the tissue incident reveals details on
(1) telling her to get her own tissue and
(2) the remark that dad couldn't hear her.
There is no mention of a stand alone admonition for shouting and screaming. What you reported there shows a focus only on the aim she had of getting the tissue plus a falling back on your own focus (getting things for herself).

There's no point me telling them rudeness won't get them anywhere when DH is hovering to complete whatever rude order was given.
That is again focusing on the objective of the child and not on the screaming. You have to completely ignore whatever it is that they are screaming for. It doesn't matter what it is and the fact that they can easily reach it themselves is immaterial. Don't be tempted to fall back on your own strength, which is teaching them to achieve their objectives themselves. You are teaching them something entirely different here - to be polite and to speak respectfully to their dad. Don't confuse them with different teaching objectives.

'Rudeness won't get you anywhere' focuses on what they want to get, and it is not the same at all as making it a point of principle that 'in our home we speak politely in our indoor voices and we always say please and thank you'.

When we discussed things last week, I said to stay in bed and listen to how school/nursery mornings go when he isn't there.
It is not clear from this that he was the one who suggested he would wait upstairs to hear how your mornings go. It seems to me from your earlier post that you had suggested he stay in bed and listen.

[mathanxiety]

• and if a DD asks to have 100% assistance on the loo politely and quietly and says please, then that is fine, and her dad can help her.

[allthingslipsticks]

YNAB. He's not acting like their dad, he's acting like their manservant

[allthingslipsticks]

Sorry, should have wrote YANBU

[lelapaletute]

mathanxiety and RiverTam you have both been spectacularly patronising to the OP (especially you, math, with your needlessly didactic essays on how to parent perfectly and partner devotedly whilst completely abdicating any expectations you yourself might have for reasonable support and compromise from your partner,or the practical considerations of not having all day every day to pander to unreasonable demands of two small children, or to constantly rebuild the boundaries that her DH keeps knocking down, whilst presumably running a household, possibly working, and maybe, just maybe, having a life of her own from time to time.

But no. When she became a mother, OP had apparently forgone her right to respect and cooperation from her partner, to any aspirations to equal parenting based on fairness, logic and evidence of what actually works, and must instead prostrate herself to demonstrate to her children how to love and respect their father (apparently him modelling to them how to love and respect her is optional since she has doing a good job if it by herself). So effectively, she gets to parent 2 children and one adult. Without, heaven forefend, doing anything so immature as feel aggrieved.

You are frankly either barking, taking the piss, or a holy angel sent down to earth as an example to the rest of us sinners. Or are doing a PhD in child psychology and it's gone to your head a bit.

[mathanxiety]

I take it you don't agree with my useful suggestions then...

While people like you encourage the OP to stand on her rights and indulge in the satisfaction of knowing that she is right, there are two very unhappy little girls living in this home who are being exposed to conflict between the parents, and are very likely aware that they are the focus of the conflict.

That is too much to leave on their shoulders.

Being 3 and 4 they do not understand that behaviour modification on their part might be a very positive step back from the collapse of the parental relationship. The adult they most respect can decide to train them as effectively as she has trained them in other areas or she can fold her arms and watch the train wreck unfold and complain that life is unfair.

Life is indeed unfair. Most people suck that up and do their best for their children regardless.

[lelapaletute]

Ffs. I haven't actually said what the OP should do. She didn't actually come here asking what she should do. She came asking if she was unreasonable to think she was not cruel to her children as her husband had (cruelly) said to avoid facing up to the deficiencies in his own parenting style. She came here to relieve her frustration and hurt feelings. What I don't understand is why her emotional needs (which you are very big on in the case of the husband and more reasonably the children) are the only ones which should be given no houseroom whatsoever, not even so far as allowing her a therapeutic whinge on Mumsnet before pulling on her big girl pants and trying to sort out her daughter's problems with no support from the husband whose behaviour (and it is HIS behaviour, which is unhelpful and unsustainable) is causing them such confusion and upset. You have inferred a vast amount about the OP for which you have no basis, such as insisting she has an issue with her children relying on her emotionally (because she encourages them to be independent physically), that she has contempt for her husband in general rather than irritation with him on this one matter, and that it is therefore her fault that her children act up for the husband rather than his for encouraging them to do so by rewarding the bad behaviour. You put all the onus on the OP to solve the entire problem simply because you seem to believe she can, single-handed. You give no consideration to whether that might not foster a real, deep-seated resentment of her husband more generally in their relationship that could be far more damaging in the long term than dealing in a mutually satisfactory way with their disagreement and presenting a united front to the children. Again, her emotions are the only ones you think require no validation or accomodation, despite the fact THERE ARE TWO ADULTS IN THIS FAMILY and she is perfectly entitled to expect and need kindness, fairness and compromise from her DH as much as he is from her. Putting the weight of responsibility so heavily on one person in a family to solve everything for everyone is scapegoating the OP, infantilism if the DH, and gives the message to two impressionable young girls that it is the woman's role to take on all the emotional labour in a relationship and 'suck up' inequality and unkindness because "life isn't fair".

I actually think some (some) of your points are valid re the harmfulness to the girls of seeing their parents at odds. But it takes two partners to repair a breakdown in a relationship in a healthy and sustainable way, it cannot be done unilaterally by one party, unless it is your contention that the OP should put up with any bad behaviour the husband dishes out "for the sake of the children", and go round the houses to accommodate it and prevent it having any consequences for him or their children, rather than standing up for herself when she is in the right and encouraging him to take some parental responsibility.

Basically I wonder what it is you have against the OP that gives you such superhuman expectations of her whilst deeming any expectations of the husband 'contempt'.

[TheStoic]

Basically I wonder what it is you have against the OP that gives you such superhuman expectations of her whilst deeming any expectations of the husband 'contempt'.

I was wondering that myself. The posts have been very strange. Hectoring, at the very least.

[mathanxiety]

Everything I have suggested about the dynamic operating here has been inferred from reading the OP's posts.

You for your part have inferred from the OP's posts that she is a bit player in an eternal drama where men sail through family life without a care in the world and women get all the mental and emotional work of it dumped on them. Maybe you have some sort of axe to grind here on that score and maybe this is why that particular narrative jumped out at you?

The OP and I have engaged in an exchange of posts that I hope has been of use to the OP.

I hope this particular post of mine came across as sympathetic. (Maybe you missed it?)
The OP has expressed herself very articulately and thoroughly when describing the really irritating behaviour of her DH and her DCs. (And I agree this behaviour is really poor). I think most people have seen their DH drop the ball in a significant way and/or have seen their children have their 'moments' and have seen days in their family life when you would like to just fast forward to waving them all off to university and clearing out their rooms. It's easy to identify with her feelings of frustration and irritation. But though we might all like to drive the proverbial tank through it all, we know that there are family relationships that have to survive our approach and so we try to figure out the smart way to make changes, even though the knee-jerk way is very tempting.

I hope what I have posted on this thread will be of use to the two small girls who are caught up in this situation. They are victims here.

[NoSquirrels]

OP you have 2 DC very close in age & same sex. Me too. When DC2 was born I felt I didn't have the luxury of "babying" - I needed DC1 to be more independent sooner than if I'd had a larger age gap. Time stretched, one pair of hands etc. You get into a rhythm and it's hard to see someone F it up.

I also found though there was a fair amounts of sibling jealousy and reverting to babyish behaviour on some things when we needed to assist the youngest and the eldest thought it "wasn't fair". Daddy carrying them downstairs to breakfast & tantrums resulting strikes a chord...
Is DH trying to "treat them fairly" and unwittingly creating this bad dynamic - perhaps he feels a bit guilty that DD1 is no longer the baby and he's allowing her to dictate based on that.

Fwiw, I felt a bit sad when DC2 reached the age DC1 had been when their sibling was born, as I realised quite how much I'd expected of a very small person. And then of course DC2 grows up quicker with the example of their big sib to follow, so sometimes it's hard to step back and see that actually they ARE very small still. As PPs have said, times passes all too soon.

Your trampoline and dressing example - totally get it, but instead of insisting that there's a blanket rule (if you can't get up & down yourself you can't bounce) then it needs to be more about timing : Mummy can't help you right now as I'm cooking tea so why don't you play on something else until I can help if you can't get up. Then they'll probably get up anyway but you're not refusing because it's a rule, it's situation-specific.

My DH is like you - very invested in fostering independence to the extent I think he misses sometimes the emotional need behind the request e.g. Just because you can read your own book doesn't mean the bedtime story is now ticked off the list, just because you can carry your own school bag doesn't mean sometimes it's nice to have the burden taken off, just because you can put your shoes in doesn't mean once in a while it's not appropriate to assist. Entrenched positions are no fun, and small people often have an emotional not practical need behind their actions. For instance, my DHs tree climbing rule is much like your trampoline rule: if you can't get up then you're not big enough to climb. I am more on the "look, put your foot here, I'll give you a boost" camp, so they learn. I have had to bite my tongue in some instances where I think he's picking the wrong battles, and try not to undermine his authority if he's decided to take a (to my mind arbitrary) stand on something he thinks they should do themselves, and he's had to accept that I will not "toe the line" and enforce all his "rules" in his absence. It can be frustrating for both of us, but we try to back each other, mediate where appropriate and crucially discuss in private later without blame.

I too would be hacked off with your DHs behaviour- and how it made the DDs behave - but I do think there might be something helpful in stepping back and trying to remove your annoyance with DH from it and discover the root of why he feels he has to do this, and why you are so committed to him not babying them at all.

[GreenTulips]

hope this particular post of mine came across as sympathetic

Not even half an ounce - you come across as 'my way or no way' just like her DH -

In you opinion she is being cruel to her children for not either doing as DH says or telling them off for their whining -

The kids will now see Mom telling them off for dad not doing their wishes - so she looks more of the bad guy - and dad is allowed to call mum names for not doing their wishes

As for OP 'winning' she isn't - she has two capable kids who turn into demanding whining kids when dads around and quite capable and happy relaxed kids when he's not

HE is the problem and unless he changes and accepts his kids are capable of the basics and looks to help them through the next stages then nothing will change

[mathanxiety]

The post wasn't addressed to you and the OP didn't comment on it...

I have advised the OP to tell them off for their whining and I have made it very clear that the telling off should focus on that, and the screaming, etc., and not for what they are screaming about. I have gone over that several times.

I don't think you are reading my posts at all.

[mathanxiety]

A very insightful post, NoSquirrels.