hi, i've got an awful situation that keeps coming up and i'd like some other views please.
basically it's like this.
My daughter - 7, who is, to be fair, a bit slack at the homework and room tidying, keeps falling foul of her mum for things like leaving her uniform in a heap. sneaking minutes on the iPad without permission, that kind of thing. all, from my perspective, normal for a 7 year old.
my mrs, is, for the most part a lovely patient kind caring woman but something about her dealings with my Daughter trigger the worst in her. This especially happens during her period. In the interests of balance i have to say that i am not criticising my wife for the why.just the how she deals with it.
This has been happening for the last several months. the mrs does not do this with our son, although he is a bit younger and maybe hasn't got to this stage yet.
So, it goes like this - the child does something like leaving her school gear in a heap my wife starts by asking her to pick it up - the kid is a bit slow on the move and will moan ( all normal, right?) so my wife raises her voice. This does not get the quick response she wants so she starts raising it some more. The Girl starts getting upset. The mrs starts properly shouting cos she is not getting the results she wants. The kid gets more upset. The wife smacks the kid - not abusive, not battering, just a tap really. the kid gets hysterical. the 'thing' that started it is still not done. The wife then starts ranting, shouting about other things that she now notices fall foul of her expectations. the kid is a wreck at this point, heavy sobs, tears streaming. The mrs makes threats about various sanctions she will impose if the 'things' are not done right now. This just makes the child's anguish worse.
Right about here i intervene. I do this because i think that beyond a certain point it is damaging to the kids wellbeing. I intervene by asking my wife to remove herself from the situation and let me deal with it. She resents this enormously and will often turn on me for undermining her - teaching the kid that it's ok to defy mum. I do believe that generally we should present a united front but this keeps happening and i've tried talking to the mrs to explain why i think she needs to adjust her methods. she is utterly unrelenting and unreasonable about this, so i don't know what else i can do, i'm trying to protect the kid.
My reasons are these :
Shouting at a kid is useful, for impact only, it should not be sustained or continuous, ranting at a kid is damaging and will not resolve the situation, it also teaches the kid that ranting is a way to achieve things, it is not. moving the goalposts to rant about other things is not fair and again damaging.
Once a child is crying you are not going to achieve anything through angry words. Continuing to shout at a crying child is pointless and indeed counter productive. Further, For me every time you smack a kid you fail as a parent, there are other ways to get things done.
This is having a seriously debilitating effect on my marriage and the 'D' word has been mentioned - never by me, by the mrs when she turns on me because oft this. She does have, and i hesitate to write it, awful hormonal anger and becomes completely irrational, aggressive and frankly impossible to talk to. she'll rant at me the same way, she'll do the same' finding fault with other things' she does with the child. for me at this point i tell her to eff off. loudly. she hates that of course. thinks its crude and not appropriate. i have to say i am always slow to anger, i always try reason, i always try to calm her down , but i might as well start by telling her to eff off for all the good it does, anything i say, do or don't do just makes her worse.
so what do you think. am i out of order?
what can i do to change this?
your thoughts and advice please.