agonyaunt | Care & Feeding: "I’m So Sick of Correcting All of My Husband’s Parenting Mistakes"

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Care & Feeding: "I’m So Sick of Correcting All of My Husband’s Parenting Mistakes"

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband is great guy. He loves our two young daughters with all of his heart, he provides for them, and he loves me to death. The problem is that he’s completely incompetent when it comes to common parenting tasks, which constantly leaves me exhausted because I have to clean up all of his mistakes. He makes ponytails wrong, so I have to do them myself. He dresses our daughters in mismatched outfits, so I have to put them in different clothes. He also makes unhealthy snacks for the girls, so I find myself having to constantly tell him what to make and how to make it. Lately he’s not been lifting a finger to help out with my daughters at all. At first he was doing everything wrong and now he’s doing nothing. I’m so frustrated! Please help me reach him.

—Frustrated in Fresno

Dear FiF,

Let me get this straight: You have a great husband who loves you and your daughters, and he provides for them—but after you micromanaged the hell out of him, he lost interest in taking part in parenting tasks, and you’re writing in wondering what happened? Really?!

Maternal gatekeeping is an issue that should be taken very seriously, because I’ve seen my share of marriages and relationships end because of it. To be clear, he doesn’t make ponytails “wrong”—he makes them differently than you. His sense of style for your girls may seem “mismatched” to you, but that’s your opinion, not a fact. Contrary to what you believe, the parenting world doesn’t revolve around your beliefs.

More importantly, your behavior has taken away the joy from parenting he once had. Dads do things differently from moms, and that’s a wonderful thing, because it allows us (dads) to bond with our kids in our own unique ways. For example, when I was growing up, my mom went on a weekend trip to visit some of her relatives and left my brothers and me at home with our dad. When she walked into the house afterward, all three of us were on the floor with empty KFC buckets everywhere watching WWF (now WWE) on our TV. I’ll never forget the look on her face, but she didn’t “correct” my dad or micromanage him—she shook her head and smiled as if to say, “I would never do that, but this is his way of creating memories with the kids, and I appreciate that.”

And guess what? As I sit here almost 35 years after that weekend, it still stands as one of the best memories I have of my dad. Would you want to deprive your kids of similar memories with their dad because you need to have everything done your way? I promise you, as your girls grow older, they won’t give a damn about the messy hairdos or funky clothes; they’ll care that their dad cared enough about them to try. That’s what’s important here.

If you want to empower your man to be a better hairstylist, send him to YouTube to watch some tutorials (that’s how I learned how to style my daughters’ hair), but don’t browbeat him or roll your eyes at his efforts. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself these simple questions: Are my kids safe? Are my kids happy? If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then back the hell up and let him bond with his kids in his own way.

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Kit is growing their hair long in order to have a ponytail "like Daddy", who is the only man and the only long-haired person in the house. But J has been wearing his hair in a single ponytail since he was 18 and has no idea what to do with half-grown-out hair, so X and I step in with what skills we still have from back when we had long hair and did actual hairstyle-like things. When J is the only person available to do Kit's hair, he does it well enough to get it out of their face, which is really all one can ask when the child is five and their hair is an awkward length, fine, and curly. There's a pandemicoup on. Who cares what your kid's hair looks like?

The LW really needs to think about where their sense of "have to" comes from and what standards they're trying to meet and why. Whose approval are they trying to gain with their perfectly dressed and coiffed ~~dolls~~ children who only eat healthy™️ snacks? And why do they care more about that person's approval than about having a good relationship with their husband or letting their kids chill and enjoy life?

head bands are your friend here, easy and low effort, come in cute styles (especially for smoll people) beware the hair in ur face stage, it gets better (but more tangled).

I don't want to sound like I'm doing the "at least he doesn't beat you so you don't get to complain" thing, but oh, LW, no. There are so many soi-disant parents who never want to do anything, so please don't discourage your husband for taking care of the kids in his own style. Before setting out to correct what he's done, consider the difference between harmfully wrong and not how I would do it.

I hope LW listens and that the process of learning knits her, her husband, and their kids more closely together.

Edited 2021-01-19 04:30 (UTC)

Actual parenting mistakes I've seen from parents I know:

Forgetting to feed the children between breakfast and dinner

Same, but one of the children is diabetic

Neglecting to change the diaper between breakfast and dinner

Neglecting to provide a coat or jacket in temperatures when all the other children have one or the other (note: having a jacket and not forcing your small child to wear it is one thing, but not having it at all runs the risk of the school calling child services, ergo, I'm calling it a mistake)

Taking the wrong child home from daycare because tiny tots look the same when they wear each other's jackets and scarves

Letting a young child wander around the Staten Island Ferry and almost losing that child when that child tried to climb out a window (in retrospect, after several of us jumped in to save that child from himself, one of us should've gone with him to tell his parents to watch him better... or, you know, at all)

Letting a child's hair go uncombed for so long that huge mats have to be trimmed out of it... more than three times over the course of as many years.

Refusing to let the other parent be a parent

Not a mistake: Mismatched clothes, sloppy ponytails.

Letting a child's hair go uncombed for so long that huge mats have to be trimmed out of it... more than three times over the course of as many years.

Oh, hi! I was this child.

Eventually a woman at church started brushing my hair every Sunday because my parents never did...

*hugs*

Taking wrong child home from daycare because the kids switch coats and hats is fairly understandable in regions where children become little wet noses sticking out of brightly colored wrappings in winter. Also, that would be great storyline for a picture book! Lots of pics of kids in snowsuits, etc.

Hah! I don't live in that sort of climate, I can definitely see it happening in others, especially if someone's a transplant and didn't know how to differentiate the snowsuit/jacket.

Sure. It's still a mistake that hopefully you don't make more than once.

How much do you want to bet it was the kid who said, “I wanna wear the dinosaur shirt and pink skirt and rainbow socks!” Mom sounds l8ke a control freak.

My mom had a huge problem with them when I was younger - I can't even tell you how many times I was told I had to go change because I looked "like an orphan." Luckily by the time my youngest sister was dressing herself, Mom realized it made more sense to just get clothes that all basically go together anyway so that it wouldn't bother her.

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My six-year-old niece once presented herself to her mother. "Look, Mom, I picked my own outfit!" (Red shirt, green skirt, purple tights.) "That's very nice, dear, but it doesn't match." Niece, huffing and flailing her hands: "Mother! It's not supposed to!"
.

We all know Claudia Kishi was in fact the most unfairly fashionable of the babysitters club (and the Netflix revival really drives it home)

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I... have no reference for that. (When you don't have kids of your own, you miss some of these things.) This incident was 35 years ago, so was babysitter's club a thing back then? I always just thought it was my niece expressing herself.
.

Sadly not; BBC was first published in 1986

I remember insisting I would dress myself one Sunday when it was the day my father had time with me. My mum was like 'ahshiii' but let me get dressed thinking I couldn't do too badly. I proudly marched out the door in my neon orange with pink flower leggings, red jumper and blue trainers like I was a runway model. My mum said 'David...she insisted and it....it really wasn't worth it'.

It was the first time they smiled at each other in two years. Clothes are just coverups for our meatsacks. ^_^.

LW needs to back off, but they're hardly the only one contributing to this problem. Even if your spouse is micromanaging you, the answer is not to STOP PARENTING YOUR CHILDREN. And the disproportionate pressure some people, especially some women, feel to perform socially-acceptable parenting doesn't come from nowhere or go away just because an advice columnist tells them to care less. So like, this is part of the answer, but also the self-reflection

rosefox suggests, and these partners talking to each other about this dynamic and what experiences and beliefs are fueling each of their parts in it, and hopefully working together to step outside of this cycle.

But mostly: Dads do things differently from moms, and that’s a wonderful thing????? Men are destined to serve their kids fast food in cardboard buckets and then leave those buckets on the floor! It's inherent to their gender! There's no changing it and even if there were, it's The Way Things Should Be. SURE.

Edited 2021-01-19 06:29 (UTC)

Yeah, the gender-essentialism here bugged me a lot. There’s also no acknowledgement of the fact that, given prevailing gender essentialist norms, if the kids go out in public with messy hair the mom is going to be the one getting judged and potentially receiving catty remarks from other parents. That doesn’t make messy hair a parenting crime, but it may explain why it bugs the mom more than the dad.

This is one of those letters that’s so one-sides that it reads to me as though it were written by the dad in an effort to gather ammunition against the mom, FWIW.

There’s also no acknowledgement of the fact that, given prevailing gender essentialist norms, if the kids go out in public with messy hair the mom is going to be the one getting judged and potentially receiving catty remarks from other parents.

We don't know how old the kids are, but I find that if they're just old enough there's a great comfort in pins that say "I did my own hair today!" and "I dressed myself today!"

YES! I have been trying to explain that to my spouse for thirteen goddamn years! He can make messy pigtails, and everyone will say, "Aww! He does his daughter's hair!" quickly followed by "what kind of mother allowed her daughter to go out like that?"

I'd like to "yes, and" this one: yes, micromanaging is bad, AND a lot of men feign incompetence at household tasks to get their female partners to do those tasks for them -- including their parenting. Neither is very healthy.

That is a very good point.

I mean, I respect that everyone including C&F is reading this straight (as it were), but I confess that I wondered if these were just the concrete things LW could lay hold of to convey that hubby is one of those guys who do everything wrong in order to get out of doing anything at all.

Yeah, there is that. I admit to falling into the "straight" reading (as it were, heh) because I've been the person told "That shirt doesn't go with those pants!" as if it were the end of the world. And I'm really wondering about the 'healthy' vs 'unhealthy' snacks, come to think -- is he giving the children cheese or candy? But then a lot of people use "unhealthy" to mean "high calorie" but kids need calories (we all do but that's another discussion). And so on.

I wondered a little, but honestly, the 'makes unhealthy snacks" thing put me pretty firmly on the dad's side, in two ways:

Firstly, if you're trying to get out of anything at all, you don't make snacks; you either tell them to wait for Mom to make a meal, or you just tell them where the candy jar is. Making snacks = putting in real effort to do something for the kids. (I mean, I suppose I could visualize a relationship where he passive-aggressively puts in extra effort to make the kinds of snacks he knows she hates, but that seems pretty far beyond where this letter is in even the worst possible reading.)

Secondly, if you're restricting your kids' eating in a way your co-parent isn't fully onboard with, that's a warning sign all on its own.

Honestly, I tend to think "men feigning incompetence to get out of doing things" is a way over-estimated problem. It's generally more likely to be a) achieving total incompetence because you're super insecure about not being good at the thing; b) not doing the thing to a certain standard because you resent being forced to do it to someone else's standard; c) not doing the thing because you don't think the thing needs to be done at all; d) not paying enough attention to understand how/that the thing is being done; e) interpreting criticism of how the husband does the thing as an expression of pride in how the wife does it better, because that's how it worked with their parents. Or situations like this, where one partner does things to their standard and the other decides that means malicious incompetence.

Maybe I am just oversensitive to this because I was the kid who was always accused of being lazy (it was never because I was lazy) but imputing laziness to someone else is hardly ever correct or helpful. None of those are healthy either but they all give a better starting place than 'they are lying because they are lazy.'

I hear you. I can see it as thoughtlessness and/or socialization rather than purposeful.

Also the snack thing *did* put my back up. ffs, LW, at least he's feeding them occasionally.

I'm probably at the other extreme because I've lived with people (not all men) who played the incompetence game while resenting and resisting any type of communication (no matter how carefully phrased or I-sentenced) about why a certain standard of cleanliness was important to someone in the household. In at least one man it was absolutely premeditated incompetence alongside malice and sexism, and I recognize I have a lot of damage from that.

Oh, there are definitely men who do it in a premeditated deliberate way because it's "women's work" and they shouldn't have to do it, but with that kind of person the sexism and malice is usually clearly visible in other ways too, in my experience, and that doesn't sound like LW's guy. And even the the problem is usually sexism, not laziness.

(And there are definitely a lot of men who are thoughtless about it because of unconscious ingrained sexism, where they don't even realize it's a thing because they've never been expected to put in the effort when a woman's around, but in that case presenting it as "you're deliberately faking incompetence because you're lazy" is usually not accurate enough to be helpful. Often it's "you're deliberately faking incompetence because you feel deeply uncomfortable with the task" or "you're deliberately faking incompetence because you're stuck in learned helplessness" and those are very different starting places.)

But I have been in the situation where one person in the household is insisting on their standard of cleanliness, and refusing any form of communication or negotiation about why that doesn't work for other people in the household, and assigning malicious motives to anyone who doesn't immediately fold to their requirements.

And I'm not saying that's what you are doing! It's probably, as usual, somewhere in between in most cases. But that's the damage I come from.

I particularly recognize in myself that when someone is insisting that a shared space (or sometimes even a non-shared space) be kept to their standards without compromise, I will immediately get messier not in an attempt to force them to do more work, but in an unconscious attempt to exert some control over the space I live in. This is not good! But insisting I'm doing it because I'm a lazy slob is not going to help with the communication problems. (It's going to result in me no longer using the shared space at all.)

My own funny story: For years, kiddo wore dresses, the kind with the matching under...things. The child would not wear jeans or pants for love or money. So we put her in thick tights under the dresses and panties. Keep in mind: this was mostly aesthetic choice in cold weather; in summer, it was mostly to avoid diaper flashes.

I came back from the bathroom to find her in her dress and tights, with her butt looking...lumpy. Investigation revealed that he had put the little panties under the tights.

After I laughed for about five minutes, I redressed and explained why,that was pretty much the only time I "corrected" him. Yeah, I had to work hard to sit on my hands (the tiredness helped), especially when she hit prescool years (he'd taught at one). I have two much younger siblings, and babysat a LOT. I'm also a fixer by nature, so not bolting out of bed when a heard a fuss took work. (And of course, I got scolded by my mom and sister for not just doing it myself.)

I do have an actual argument, here: LW,you will be judged for just about anything to do with your child, up to and including things that happen when you're not there. I would suggest making a list, and then figure out which ones are really important. I forget where I heard it, but the truth is: pizza every night for a month is not going to kill your kid, especially if you can get them to try toppings. Leaving a baby under at least six months with a sharp-conered coffee table? That you draw a line in the sand over. And you also listen when Dad drafts one of his own. Maybe it's a line you object to, but getting it out in the open will help.

Look, LW, have you considered that having someone even trying to do stuff is not all that common and maybe you should just get over yourself and have a nice cuppa with your feet up?

As a father myself, I don't entirely agree with this response. It does sound like LW's constant corrections are over the top, but I don't think Dad is in the clear. The columnist focused on Mom (LW), so I'll focus on Dad.

Co-parenting does not mean Mom does things her way and Dad his. Co-parenting means both parents come to agreement on some basics and commit to hitting the baseline.

This doesn't mean everyone has to do everything. Each parent can have his/her specialization. My wife does our daughter's hair, about which she has specific opinions. I cook our family's dinners, which I do better. But I can put my daughter's hair in an acceptable ponytail that will hold for at least a few hours, and my wife can put dinner on the table if I'm away (which hasn't happened in a year because of the pandemic, but maybe one day).

Parents can and will do things differently, but neither has license to half-ass everything. If Dad is unwilling to listen to what Mom thinks is best for their daughters or change anything about his approach, he's not being a wonderful co-parent.

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Care & Feeding: "I’m So Sick of Correcting All of My Husband’s Parenting Mistakes"

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