Hi all,
[warning: super long post ahead - sorry]
My 2 year old son has always been a mummy's boy, but things are becoming pretty unbearable at the moment. He doesn't want his dad to do anything for him, not wash him or feed him or carry him or even be around him, unless I'm there too. It puts a lot of pressure on me, because the default position is to just let me do everything, to stop the tantrum/crying. Though we also sometimes just let him cry whilst my husband deals with him until he's distracted enough in some way to calm down. But I feel really bad for my husband too. He's finding the rejection really tough, says things like he doesn't understand why his son hates him etc.
All that said, if they are left alone for long enough, once the tantrum is over, he will happily play with his daddy and won't ask for me at all, but getting to that point is stressful. Again, if I'm not around at all and he has to pick between daddy and anyone else, it's daddy all the way. Sometimes he can be super affectionate with him, but once I'm anywhere around it's like my presence means no one else matters to my son at all.
I spend a lot of time speaking positively about my husband to my son, to make him want to spend time with him, but nothing changes. I'm just the default parent as far as he is concerned. All my suggestions to my husband about how to try and deal with him are not well received - he feels that I'm either undermining him or patronising him, when all I'm trying to do is show him more of the things that work for me when dealing with our son. There is a lot of resentment building up between us now because of it. I just don't know how to help/fix this and I'm so tired of feeling like I'm the sole carer for our child.
I know he is a bit more unsettled because his baby brother is due to arrive imminently and we are trying to factor all that in, but I just don't don't how I'm going to cope with a newborn of the first continues this.
I don't know if it's relevant, but he is at nursery (4 days a week) and always very very attached to his key person - he seems to only ever want to be attached to one person at a time, and it gets to the point that he won't even want to eat unless that person is there next to him, which I know makes things difficult at nursery. When he switched class the first time, the adjustment was hard. But now he is fully attached to the new person. He'll be switching up a class again soon and we can already see the same issues, though I've no doubt he'll soon firmly attach himself to the one new key person, to the exclusion of all others.
If you've made it this far, I'd really appreciate any suggestions about how to solve this and / or prevent the same happening with our second child.