To not stop DS disturbing DH when he is wfh?

[Mintelderflower]

DH wfh for three days - Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. He is supposed to be at the office Tuesdays and Fridays but often decides to switch days around last minute.

DS attends nursery for three days a week and I have changed these days to accommodate the days Dh is supposed to be in the office because DS is a bit of a nightmare and keeps wanting to play in the room DH is working from and climbing on DH lap, wanting to go out on the bikes (this is also where the bikes are kept.) When he is taken away he throws massive tantrums (he is 2) and also keeps gravitating back. It’s really tricky. Normally DS days in nursery have to be my work days but currently on maternity leave.

I think I need to say very honestly to DH that I’m not going to keep intervening. If he makes the choice not to go to the office on that day then he isn’t going to get much work done. I don’t want to be an arse about this but I sort of feel I’ve done everything I reasonably can to avoid this issue and now it’s on DH.

@sandyhappypeople thats great. Trust me, that wouldn’t work with DS. When he loses it there is NOTHING you can do. All I can do is try to prevent him harming himself. If I try to talk to him he screams no mummy, no mummy. If I try to touch him he hits me. I could go on, I’m sure you get the idea.

Given the layout of the house the only way DH could not see DS and vice versa is if we are out all day which I have a horrible feeling is going to be what I’m going to have to do soon.

I said coy because you're not fully answering the questions - ironically you just did the same again here! And now that I know it's not him randomly changing his days, it's his employers, it also begs the question as to whether he's allowed to say no to that (probably not). So with the minimal information I still think he's not being unreasonable - he does hybrid working, sometimes his days will change at short notice, that's not him being selfish, it's just the way it is.

Also - my toddlers were not that well behaved! And we have a much smaller house from the sounds of it than you have. I just made sure I had a designated office space that my kids were not allowed in. In fact, they're STILL not allowed in there. Sometimes you need to draw a line, and my line is kids interrupting me while I work - they have the whole rest of the house to be annoying in freely, they can pot off out of my working space!

I’ve read all of your replies OP. Can I check though why DH chooses to work from home? It sounds like it would be easier all round if he was just in the office 5 days a week? It doesn’t sound like you’re benefiting from him being there so why does he keep WFH?

I hear you.

You don't have a DS problem, you have a DH problem.

The fact that more than multiple people are calling you a SAHM says it all.

Op, how does your husband not hear these extreme and prologed tantrums, you are saying your busbnd doesn’t think there is a problem. No normal person can listen to a child screaming as you describe for hours and think it’s not a problem. Even if he’s the worst husband and father ever, just the noise alone would be a problem for most people

i don’t understand how he can listen to something so extreme, and for so long, know his child is distressed, know you are struggling ans say there is no problem and carry on causing it. it’s cruel and abusive.

is he cruel and abusive in other ways?

@GeekyThings I’m not being coy - I said I don’t know .

DH office days are supposed to be set: there is no way if he turned up on those days he would be told you can’t come in. He may be asked to come in extra but that’s not quite the same.

@MummyJ36 in some ways for me it would be but for him it isn’t (the office is a long way from where we live) and so this is where I don’t mind a compromise. I’m just a bit weary of always being the one who bends.

You really are an idiot if you intentionally let your child disturb your husband at work, I'd be so mad at you. He needs to get a lock and you need to parent better. Childcare isn't his department when working, it's yours if you are at home.

Of course it's the same thing. It's ludicrous to try to argue that there's any substantive difference in the day to day roles of a mum with a newborn and a toddler who's a SAHP versus one who's on ML. They will both be dealing with the same proverbial (and literal) shit.

I don’t think people realise at this point I’m sort of past caring if Dh is disturbed or not. I just can’t be dealing with crying and rage and screaming all afternoon. And if that reflects badly on my parenting, I don’t care.

Hallelujah! People seem to be avoiding that you're heavily pregnant, sore and stiff with painful sciatica. He should want to help you solve this by just going into the offive the 3 days he agreed with you.

No, it's not the same thing. A SAHM isn't dealing with pregnancy and then childbirth recovery during mat leave.

I completely get it. You are not entirely free to do as you please with your partner WFH - it's an additional burden, especially is your son is trying to get to him and then getting frustrated/melting down, I completely feel for you.

Just have an honest conversation - listen, I've been coping with it until now but finding it increasingly difficult. Please could you help me with keeping son from getting upset by sticking to when exactly you are going to be out of the house,

What a horrible post. Just horrible, do you not understand the child is having prolonged and extreme tantrums, crying and screaming for hours? That’s unmanageable for most folks.

how her husband thinks it’s not an issue is beyond me.

I think you have two toddlers, Op.

The answer is that h wfh on the days he said he was going to wfh, the very days that you arranged for ds nursery. H can easily do this.

Stop trying to accommodate h’s foolishness. Say one time, ‘I arranged nursery for days you said you wfh. Stick to the schedule you set and you will have no problems. If you change days on a whim, you will have problems. It is that simple. It’s up to you.’

Let him get mad, let him get frustrated, do not stop son at all. Don’t even say anything when h rages which he will. Let him fully see what his own choices have brought him. Then he’ll stick to his set days MAYBE!

Stay at home mums have more babies, so yes they do deal with this. The first or even the second isn’t always the last

I used too see kids on my team calls at work and they would gey shooed away or told off. Made my heart sink, as an adult you know they're busy and it won't be forever but children don't think like this. I wouldn't want my husband to wfh. Just seems cruel if you have an alternative at 2 years old.

It’s clear to me from the thread that some people believe a woman someone who is not working deserves a stressful life and the man person working needs to be left alone.

Yes, I think there's an element of this. And also no recognition at all that you have thought carefully and tactically about how to prevent this problem, and your DH is completely sabotaging that. We all try to manage our kids' environment in order to give ourselves and them the best possible chance of making good choices - then you have more attention and emotional energy to focus on the stuff that really needs to be dealt with. Basically you've tried hard to avoid the war, and now people are telling you that you're taking the wrong approach to the battles.

It's analogous to trying to give your toddler only healthy food and then having DH eat crisps and chocolate in front of him. Yes, you can say no, those are only for Daddy. Yes, in an ideal world the toddler would take that for an answer. Yes, you'd have to manage the tantrum and use distraction or rewards or discipline or whatever. But why on earth would you put yourself in that position?!

Everyone squabbling about whether I’m a SAHP or not is really not the point here.

I don’t think that the thread is going to be particularly helpful, like a lot of people maybe I do worry about my parenting and the ‘just tell him no, just put boundaries in place’ are so stressful when you’re struggling massively as it is. As for being called an idiot, seriously 🙄

I'll have to remember this on the next thread a SAHM claims that working mothers have no idea what it's like.

I genuinely don't understand this.

You are heavily pregnant with a toddler going through the terrible twos and your DH should be bending over backwards to make your life easier.

Just tell him, you are too heavily pregnant to deal with the tantrum DH causes (because it is his presence that is causing this) and he can ONLY work from home on the days that DS is in nursery.

It's a non-negotiable. If he isn't on your side and actively trying to make your life easier when you are physically creating his child, what kind of partner is he?

I never understand the replies on threads like this. They always seem to favour the person wfh (often by choice) rather than the person using the home as, you know, a home.

It seems that you've been more than reasonable by arranging DS's nursery days to coincide with with DH's wfh days. And yes, if DH chooses to wfh on other days, it shouldn't be to your detriment.

Boundaries are all well and good (and they will pay off eventually) but like everything with toddlers, they develop at their own pace. I was fortunate in that my own DD wasn't bothered by DH wfh, but, if I had to tell her not to throw her own toys to the dog one more time at that age I was gonna burst. A few months later and she got the boundary I was trying to enforce, not because of consistency but because she suddenly was old enough to actually get it.

I would say to your DH "look I get that you might sometimes have to change your wfh days for meetings or whatever, and that's fine but it would be nice to have a bit of heads up because it's an absolute pain for me because DS just doesn't get it at the minute and I feel so stressed, maybe in a few more months once he's settled with the new baby he'll be a bit more chill and you can decide to not go into the office just because you can't be arsed then" 😂

Which part of 'during mat leave' did you not understand?

Don’t go out all day just to deal with it if you’re in pain and it’s awful.

do what’s easiest for you

Don’t take son out and exhaust yourself. Let him aggravate the hades out of your husband. That will teach him to wfh on the days he said he would.

But he must calm down eventually? Some times it takes my DD a while to come out of a tantrum when she is so overwhelmed with emotion, but I absolutely refuse to engage until she does, and if she starts to screech at me, I have this little noise that I interrupt with like ah! ah! (we've got dogs.. it's a total dog parent noise I'm not going to lie!) I don't try and touch her I just stand there or kneel in front of her, SHE has to decide to calm herself down to be heard.

If I'm being honest I actually started doing this because I really don't like the screeching/hitting/tantrumming, and really that's all the arsenal toddlers have so I've tried to find the quickest way to end it when it happens, it seems to work as she's now got the message that if she screeches and shouts at me or hits me she gets nothing out of me until she calms down, it still takes her a while sometimes though! You need to be super consistent though. My DH doesn't do what I do, he kind of lets it run it's course and ignores (as in walks off), but I would say it's more intense and it takes her a LOT longer to calm down with him and nothing ever seems to be 'resolved' that way, but I leave him to it, as it's the way he prefers to deal with it.

You do need a physical barrier though to stop DS getting to DH otherwise it's pointless, I thought you said the outside annexe has a door? Why can't he shut himself in?

This all sounds pretty awful OP.

My DH WFH 2 days but is upstairs out of view/earshot.

Your 2yo sounds unusually tricky but some just are - kids are hard work.

If you can’t put up curtains to hide DH in the garden office or have him work upstairs away from you all then I think asking him to go to the office more is perfectly reasonable.