I dislike LW
Dear Annie: My husband and I have a 6-year-old daughter, "Eliza," and we recently have not been seeing eye to eye in terms of how to handle discipline. For example, last week, when she refused to put her toys away after playing with them, I told her she couldn't watch TV until it was done. She threw a fit, and instead of backing me up, my husband told her it was OK and helped her put the toys away himself. Another time, when she talked back to me at the dinner table, I asked her to apologize, but he interrupted and said she was just expressing herself.
These situations leave me feeling undermined and like I'm the only one enforcing rules. I don't want her to feel she can pit us against each other, and I have also noticed myself getting more and more resentful when he takes her side over mine. I just think we need to be consistent, but I don't know if it's possible when our views on discipline seem fundamentally different. -- Feeling Like the Bad Cop
Dear Bad Cop: Try talking to your husband during a calm moment when your daughter isn't around, and make sure you start the conversation by acknowledging you both want what's best for her. Then, work together to create a basic set of rules you both agree to follow. Consistency is key.
Parenting is a team sport, and when kids see their parents supporting each other, they feel more secure -- and more likely to cooperate.
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These situations leave me feeling undermined and like I'm the only one enforcing rules. I don't want her to feel she can pit us against each other, and I have also noticed myself getting more and more resentful when he takes her side over mine. I just think we need to be consistent, but I don't know if it's possible when our views on discipline seem fundamentally different. -- Feeling Like the Bad Cop
Dear Bad Cop: Try talking to your husband during a calm moment when your daughter isn't around, and make sure you start the conversation by acknowledging you both want what's best for her. Then, work together to create a basic set of rules you both agree to follow. Consistency is key.
Parenting is a team sport, and when kids see their parents supporting each other, they feel more secure -- and more likely to cooperate.
Link
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Most people are willing and able to be reasonable about this sort of thing with their kids. Some people aren't.
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LW's child clearly is not at that stage - or if she is on other days, she wasn't then. That's another frustrating and baffling thing about kids, the way they can be totally capable of doing something today and then amazingly unable to do it or articulate why tomorrow.
If it's gotten to the point of "throwing a fit" then somebody in the room, preferably the adult, needs to pull back and ask what went wrong. Which doesn't mean just giving in on the subject but it does mean asking if your child needs more assistance than you expected.
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Oh, so much this. My 12 year old still has times when she just can't and can't say why. Hell, so do I, though the trouble with being an adult is sometimes you just have to. If LW expects consistency from her child, she and child have a lot of unhappy times still to come.
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The second is so vague as to be utterly useless - unless we know who said what to whom we don't know if LW or Husband is more correct in their understanding of Daughter's behavior, if she was "talking back" or just "expressing herself" and, moreover, if asking for an apology was a reasonable course of action.
But that still leaves the first one!
Let me look at the sequence of events here. First, LW asked Daughter to pick up the toys and said "No TV until it's done", then Daughter "threw a fit", and finally Husband helped Daughter pick up the toys and presumably nobody watched TV until it was done.
And this is what LW calls "undermining".
The kid is six. Six year olds often need help managing their emotions and they also need help with chores. People generally frame "tantrums" and "fits" as manipulative behavior, but in my experience it's much more likely to be the result of being overwhelmed.
Importantly, you can't punish your kid out of them, and you can't really punish them into tidiness either. What you can do is help your child. Which Husband did! He didn't say "It's okay, you can watch TV and I'll clean up".
(And I do notice that LW doesn't seem concerned that they might be undermining his parenting, but people never are concerned about that, are they.)
LW is right that they need to be consistent. However, what they're wrong about is that consistency will not mean that what LW says goes.
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Importantly, you can't punish your kid out of them, and you can't really punish them into tidiness either. What you can do is help your child. Which Husband did! He didn't say "It's okay, you can watch TV and I'll clean up".
This sort of thing is what makes neurodivergent people reluctant to ask for help (and therefore to solve problems in ways that may seem eccentric or circuitous): https://gehayi.tumblr.com/post/768633527244865536/im-somewhere-on-the-spectrum-i-know-for-a-fact
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...well shit.
(of course I wouldn't ask for help; I was told to Do Thing, and so if I couldn't it was my fault, and embarrassing, and there were so many other things people who weren't me just magically knew...)
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Oh, and if you did ask for help, you were being a big baby who just wanted attention.
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Oh well said!
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