Dear Dr. Debbie,
I have a complaint about my husband. He rarely has anything positive to say about or to our twelve-year-old son. Granted my husband works hard and joins in family activities on weekends (that I organize), but of the four children, two school-age girls and a much younger boy, it seems the twelve-year-old struggles to get affirmations and support.
Noticing Unfair Treatment
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Dear N.U.F.,
In families with more than one parent or more than one child, there are multiple parent-child relationships going on.
Your observations suggest that whatever is behind Dad’s negativity toward one child is not at play in his relationships with the other children. There are possible causes.
Timing
Parents are at different places in their life journeys when each child enters the family. If your twelve-year-old is the oldest, maybe the new role of fatherhood coincided with facing the reality of financial responsibility and financial challenge whether you cut back on your earnings or the family added childcare costs to the budget. And or adjusting to parenting, especially nighttime wakenings, impaired your husband’s abilities to manage work tasks, causing daily frustrations on the job, jeopardizing job security, and potentially affecting career advancement.There may have been a strain on the marriage relationship at this time for all the reasons above.
While that was twelve years ago, and hopefully the family is otherwise functioning well now, stresses present at the beginning of Dad’s first parent-child relationship could be coloring the pair’s ongoing dynamics. Test this theory, if he’s open to it, with some supportive conversation with your husband about your shared parenting journey through all four children.
Personality Clashes
Children have personalities. As do parents. While you get to choose your friends, presumably by how much you enjoy their company and admire who they are, you don’t get to audition family members before accepting them into your life. True, parents play a significant part in shaping a child’s behavior and to some extent their interests, however there may be aspects to the parent’s or child’s personalities that just don’t work for the two of them. For example, if one is physically active, socially outgoing, and deeply philosophical, he may not enjoy spending time with someone who prefers to be sedentary, away from crowds, and scientifically rational.
In a relationship where there isn’t much common ground, it would be important for the two of them to compromise to more happily co-exist. For example, if the parent is tidy and the child is much less concerned with physical order, the child’s room becomes the space where parents turn a blind eye except to demand that dirty laundry and remnants of snacking be removed on a regular basis by the occupant. The rest of the house requires adhering closer to the tidy parent’s standards.
Father-Son Dynamics
A recent report from Pew Research on mother father differences in discipline says that, “Mothers are far more likely than fathers to describe themselves as overprotective and to say they give in to their children too quickly.” And that “23% of fathers (vs. 18% of mothers) say they criticize their children too much.”
Typically fathers are more likely to have stricter standards on children’s behavior than mothers, which, if not addressed, often lead to mothers overcompensating with increased nurturing and protectiveness. Discuss this with your husband and try to meet closer to the middle about your expectations for your son’s behavior and closer to equalizing how much support each of you provides him.
Replaying a Past (Negative) Parent-Child Dynamic
Are they too much alike? Does Junior evoke memories of Dad’s father harping on him about flaws and blunders? Nobody likes that. And generally children don’t intentionally set out to annoy their parents. (You’re not quite into the teen years yet!)
Sometimes parenting challenges release the buried emotions of one’s childhood self. A build up of harsh criticism from his father (and or mother) may have created a state of Toxic Stress in Dad’s developing brain –the brain he now uses to parent his own child. Instead of staying calm and empathizing with the child in the present, Dad takes on the frustrations of his own parent in the past. As a child, he couldn’t fix the problem when his parent was upset with him, so now he’s doubly upset – with the child in front of him, and acompanied a re-triggering of ever-ready stress hormones, with the errant child (that was him) in the past.
If you can’t draw your husband into conversation about what you are observing, and possible explanations to determine a course of action, and if your son is handling it okay, hold these theories in mind for a future conversation with your son.
In a few short years, your son will need to break away from his parents to become an independent adult. Part of this process involves taking a critical look at the parenting he recieved.
Dr. Debbie
Deborah Wood, Ph.D. is a child development specialist and founding director of Chesapeake Children’s Museum.
The museum is open daily from 10 am to 4 pm. Online reservations are available or call: 410-990-1993. Each Thursday there is a guided nature walk at 10:30 am. Art and Story Times with Mrs. Spears are on Monday mornings at 10:30 am.
Read more of Dr. Wood’s Good Parenting columns by clicking here.
