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conulyDear Care and Feeding,
My husband and I have been married for 16 years. He is a hardworking professional and we are raising two daughters (ages 7 and 10) who are smart and sweet. For the most part, he is a loving and thoughtful guy, but we keep hitting a wall when it comes to our kids and media. We have very different points of view on media consumption as a whole and, specifically, what’s appropriate for our kids to see. If I had it my way, we wouldn’t even have a TV in our living room; my husband, on the other hand, has to have the biggest TV with the most amazing sound bar, etc. While I err on the side of caution, he doesn’t see anything wrong with a little sex, violence, and gore. He claims, “it’s nothing.”
My kids claim otherwise. Whenever they see something (however brief) that disturbs them, they tell me about it. For instance, they saw one moment of a preview for a scary movie, and the images were enough to spook my younger daughter for weeks. Most recently, my older daughter saw an old Western where a group of men grab a woman from a wagon, tear her blouse, expose her breast, and throw her to the ground. My daughter told me—with my husband present—that what she had seen had bothered her and that she couldn’t get it out of her head. My husband said, “It was nothing, she didn’t see anything, I turned it off.” My daughter and I talked about how it was just a movie, etc., but that kind of talk rings hollow when the topic revolves around the very real issue of sexual violence, not a make-believe psychotic clown in a sewer.
When I brought this up to my husband privately, he accused our 10-year-old of being “calculating” and doing this to “get him in trouble.” Of course, this led to a fight and him sleeping downstairs. I want him to protect our girls from this kind of stuff for as long as possible, but when I say this to him, he gets enraged at the suggestion that he doesn’t “take care of” his kids. He thinks because he works hard and makes a good living, that’s sufficient. Am I overreacting or being overprotective (both of which he accuses me of)?
—Protective Mama
( Read more... )
My husband and I have been married for 16 years. He is a hardworking professional and we are raising two daughters (ages 7 and 10) who are smart and sweet. For the most part, he is a loving and thoughtful guy, but we keep hitting a wall when it comes to our kids and media. We have very different points of view on media consumption as a whole and, specifically, what’s appropriate for our kids to see. If I had it my way, we wouldn’t even have a TV in our living room; my husband, on the other hand, has to have the biggest TV with the most amazing sound bar, etc. While I err on the side of caution, he doesn’t see anything wrong with a little sex, violence, and gore. He claims, “it’s nothing.”
My kids claim otherwise. Whenever they see something (however brief) that disturbs them, they tell me about it. For instance, they saw one moment of a preview for a scary movie, and the images were enough to spook my younger daughter for weeks. Most recently, my older daughter saw an old Western where a group of men grab a woman from a wagon, tear her blouse, expose her breast, and throw her to the ground. My daughter told me—with my husband present—that what she had seen had bothered her and that she couldn’t get it out of her head. My husband said, “It was nothing, she didn’t see anything, I turned it off.” My daughter and I talked about how it was just a movie, etc., but that kind of talk rings hollow when the topic revolves around the very real issue of sexual violence, not a make-believe psychotic clown in a sewer.
When I brought this up to my husband privately, he accused our 10-year-old of being “calculating” and doing this to “get him in trouble.” Of course, this led to a fight and him sleeping downstairs. I want him to protect our girls from this kind of stuff for as long as possible, but when I say this to him, he gets enraged at the suggestion that he doesn’t “take care of” his kids. He thinks because he works hard and makes a good living, that’s sufficient. Am I overreacting or being overprotective (both of which he accuses me of)?
—Protective Mama
( Read more... )