You are here

OH doesn't listen when it comes to his son!

Nat73's picture

Does anyone else's other half not listen to you and take the defensive when you try to talk about their kid!?

CLove's picture

OH BOY, did you ask the right question. Yes it is extremely common for the parent of skids to be sitting there and look you in the eye, and defend those shining examples of spawn he co-created. Even while said child is being rude to you, mean to siblings, being lazy, not doing any chores, drinking, doing drugs, partying hard, or whatever, right under Other Half's nose.

This is called Lazy Parenting, Guilty Parenting and Disney Parenting. Take your pick.

What exactly are you trying to talk to OH about? We can start there.

sunshinex's picture

Nope.

DH did when we first started dating, but I pointed out that he doesn't need to parent out of guilt and constantly defend her. I told him it's not going to do any good for her whatsoever if she gets away with everything because her mom and him broke up and he feels bad about it. It took a year or so before he finally understood.

Now he's more strict than me a lot of the time. Sometimes I almost feel like he's the stepparent... it's weird lol. So no, it's not ALWAYS the case for the parent of a skid to defend wrong behaviour.

It's something a lot of them have to get out of, but they don't get out of it by having a spouse come in and pick apart their child. To be honest I had to pretend to be doing it purely out of love for her. Things like "I really want her to be a functioning member of society who understands rules and behaves properly" and stuff like that. I pretended I cared a lot more than I did.

Acratopotes's picture

Lessons learned - never ever talk about the brat, say nothing about the brat...

not your child not your problems.

If I say anything about the brat it's war..

Rags's picture

It is only natural in my experience. Even when presented in a non-confrontational and non-critical fashion bioparents seem to immediately go defensive when the topic of discussion is the kid.

My wife immediately goes to "so, what do you want ME to do about it?" when I bring up a kid or IL clan discussion. My intent of bringing things like this up is not for her to do something about it. My intent is for she and I together to land on our position on the topic and use that as a basis for our joint perspective on moving to the next stage in the conversation with the person we are interfacing with on the topic.

She usually calms down pretty quickly when I make it clear that my intent is to move the discussion forward rather than being critical.