Partner accidentally hurt child

[Sccrumb]

My partner accidentally hurt our child. It led to a big injury for them. He kept blaming our child. They are 3 nearly 4. In my eyes he kept nagging our child all day and wound the child up. It all came to head at bed time. I left them alone for two seconds and our child had hurt him physically and he accidentally hurt them back by reflex.

We are meant to be getting married soon. We live together and also have an older DC and baby. I can't look at him the same despite the fact I know he would never deliberately hurt our children. It was such a scary injury and I couldn't sleep from fear that our child would go downhill over night. He on the other hand, slept quite soundly.

What do I do? Help me. My head is a mess and I'm extremely hormonal being pp.

How do you fling your leg out from a reflex? You fling your leg out to kick whatever has hurt you. Thats what happened - he kicked your DC because your DC hurt him. He's dangerous.

Your child got hurt because of your partner. It may well have been an accident but the additional info about your partner's anger puts doubt on that and you clearly don't know if you can trust him. He is also minimising hurting the child when any normal person would be distraught by causing an injury in a child. Please don't marry him and please don't leave your children with him unsupervised. I grew up with this kind of anger, protect yourself and your child from it.

Nah mate, your partner kicked your child and is now downplaying it.

“Reflex” my arse.

I imagine the vagueness is actually because if you stated your child's actual injury, you know full well what the reactions would be.

Incidentally I don’t have anything to do with either of my parents anymore so you may want to think about how your children will feel about you if you enable this for the rest of their childhoods

OP, you can’t spend your days placating and calming down your partner, keeping your children from annoying him, and worrying every second if they are going to be hurt or worse when he can’t or won’t control his anger.

If your child has any type of serious injury, you should have taken them to emergency. It is not ok to just watch and see how they are - you know it is serious because you are specifically watching them, but you aren’t a doctor and therefore they are in danger of having a hidden issue only a medic can determine.

If your instincts were to take your child to emergency, and you didn’t because he wouldn’t let you or he minimised the incident, you and your children are unsafe and you aren’t protecting them.

You have 2 options here :-

1. Do nothing and let your child live in fear that this will happen again. You will also live in fear that your child will tell a teacher that he got kicked.
2. Be a decent parent, protect your child and get rid of the abusive prick.

It was not an accident. Your DH could not calm his anger after being consistently told to do so all day. Child hurt DH and he kicked the child hard enough to send him flying. This is not a normal reaction to being hurt. Not if he was kicked in the balls, nor anything else. This is him failing to control his own anger. Failing to control his anger which results in him lashing out to a child. Failure to control his anger which results in his child being significantly injured.

Your DH is the problem and you are both minimising this. If he didn’t have anger issues the child would not be hurt. I have never in my life lashed out at my young child and caused them injury. Not when they headbutt me and burst my lip wide open, nor smacked me in an existing injury.

My response when injured was to be injured, not retaliate. You know, like a normal fucking person.

I think you are making excuses by calling it a reflex. It sounds more like retaliation. He has anger that he doesn't have under control but I wouldn't call this a reflex.

And that is a massive problem op. He cannot control his anger. He has hurt a child because of his anger. He cannot see that this is a problem. He blames a very young child. He is abusive. No excuse.

Stomping around in anger all day is in itself very damaging to children. Reacting to the point you injure a child? Seriously? That needs urgent action by you. How great of an injury would it have to be before you can accept that this is abuse?

He is not safe to be around children. Please don't downplay this. It was not an accident. Has your child been checked out at hospital / clinic? Get them seen and be honest about what happened. They'll get the child the right help.

So you did seek medical attention then - it has taken you a long time to mention that.

This means that a safeguarding concern will be raised and you will be contacted by your health visitor, social services or GP. Do not play down what happened to them - next time your partner could kill your child.

A reflex kick is very weak, and he'd need to have been hit just below the knee.

You are minimising what is happening in your house. You do realise that this will come out and your son will say something about what happened and it will be escalated and will be out of your hands. I really hope you do the right thing and if you are frightened to you do need to ring the police.

Your DP hurt your child in a fit of temper - that is the ONLY thing that matters.

He needs to leave your house now. You need to do a Claire's Law request on him.

You need to protect your DC, all of them, from this man before he hurts them again. He has crossed the line and now he has done it once, he will do it again.

This "medical person" has a legal obligation to report the injury - unless you did not tell them the truth about how the injury was caused...???

I feel like a lot of you are projecting from your experiences of actual abusive parents.

I DO believe my partner did not mean to hurt out child.

I DO believe he should have had a better hold on his anger prior to the injury.

I DO think it's possible he acted our from instinct giving how bad DC hurt partner. But NO it doesn't make our child at fault. That's were I DONT agree with him and his reaction to blame them

My problem lies in that if he had calmed himself down throughout the day maybe things would have played out different.

But he did not lay hands on our child. He did not strangle him. He did not lash out and thrash him down.

I'm sorry to everyone who has experienced that but this is not what he did.

Is this a family friend or relative? Seriously take him to hospital. I wouldn’t take someone who may not be in the right field as being correct. However as you are minimising your boyfriend’s behaviour, you can’t be bothered really can you?

This is very vague. WHO medical that hasn’t reported this to social services?

If DC has a serious injury then take him to get treatment.

And if you're avoiding doing that, ask yourself why.

And ask yourself why your partner isn't mortified over his 'reflex' causing his DC to fall back and seriously hurt himself.

To give context, my DH would be very upset if he accidentally hurt his DC. He would not be blaming his child, or arguing about it, or sleeping through whilst I stayed up to monitor my child due to nature of injury.

Your partner's reaction is very worrying.

Wow , get that bully out your house!
This is not a 1 off incident and will happen again. How dare he hurt a child, protect your son

Reading this I would say he did lash out. Reflex my arse.

Your child has a serious injury
Then you get medical help asap
Otherwise you are as much to blame .
The school will seeon Monday and call social services anyway

I worked with hundreds of children, many with challenging behaviour, and never once hurt any of them out of reflex.
You came here asking for advice, but do not want to accept it.
I truly hope you find the strength to put your children first. They can’t do it for themselves. You obviously don’t have to listen to strangers on the internet but PLEASE listen to what they are saying. They need you.

Was this a friend or did you rake him to hospital? I just wonder with you saying you are keeping an eye on him and he appears to be fine

‘We had someone medical check him over’ is very odd phrasing - sounds like another family member or friend with some medical training has been asked to look at the child at their request to keep this as low profile. This poor child.