A Woman's Mom Raised Concerns About How Her Husband Treats Their Daughter—She Thought It Was Normal But Now She's Questioning Everything
She doesn't think her husband did the wrong thing, but her mom's reaction is making her doubt everything.
fizkes / Shutterstock / via Canva Pro One mom on Reddit wasn’t sure about how she should respond to something that her mother told her. She thought maybe she was in the wrong, so she went onto Reddit’s “r/Parenting” subreddit to search for advice on what she should do and whether or not her mom was right.
She and her husband have been having a hard time dealing with their two-and-a-half-year-old child — who she refers to as "2.5" throughout the post — since she has reached a “hitting phase,” but her mom doesn’t like how her husband has been treating her in response.
Her mom said hearing him raise his voice to their daughter was ‘triggering’ and ‘abusive.’
She says it all started when her parents were visiting and saw them trying to get their daughter ready for daycare. She didn’t want to get dressed, so “we gave her options for clothing and the option to dress herself, but we ended up having to chase her around the house and dress her.”
This was when she explained how her daughter was currently going through her hitting phase, and when she started hitting her husband, he reacted by putting her “in a bear hug until she would take deep breaths with him.”
The entire time, she claims that her daughter was screaming. Visibly frustrated, her husband raised his voice a little while maintaining his bear hug, saying things like “stop kicking me, I can't let you kick me, I will let you go when you stop trying to hurt me.”
“A few times my mom tried to intervene,” she wrote in the post. “She doesn't like conflict, so she tried to make it fun (made 2.5's shoes dance around saying they wanted her to put them on). 2.5 threw them down the stairs and tried to hit my mom.”
After all that fighting, they were able to get the grumpy little tot out of the house and to the daycare — it was on the way back when her mom talked to her about her husband’s reaction.
She suggested that he should take a break from his daughter whenever he’s getting frustrated.
She writes, “my mom told me I needed to tell my husband to take a break when he's getting frustrated. That his tone of voice reminded her of her own father (who was physically abusive).”
Her mother is drawing from the sensations she felt as a child and equating the situation she witnessed with those same feelings, to the point where “she had to leave the room while this confrontation was going down because it was triggering for her.”
Her daughter’s grandma is insinuating that her husband was being abusive and told her that, as the girl's mom, she shouldn’t “just stand by” like her mother did when she was being abused.
“I don't know how to react to this,” she writes. “My husband has anxiety and depression. He's on medication and in therapy. These tantrums are difficult for both of us but especially challenging for him, and he's learning how to deal with them better every day.”
Despite these challenges that he faces, she claims that he is “constantly strategizing” ways to calm her down, never calls her name or withholds affection, and emphasizes that “he's NEVER hit our daughter, never even come close.”
In fact, Healthline supports the idea of physically restraining your child so they aren’t allowed to hit anyone, writing: “If you feel your child is out of control, or that being physically secure helps to calm them down, this could be an option for you.”
“You may also want to speak calmly to them, letting them know that you’re holding them because you can’t allow them to hurt anyone.”
Despite that, her mom’s words made her ‘doubt her perception of her life.’
“Hearing my own mother insinuate that my husband is abusing my child and I'm not standing up for her is making me doubt my perception of my life. Am I in the wrong here?” she wrote at the end of her post, looking for help.
While Healthline does say that physically restraining your child is an option, they explain it more thoroughly to ensure you’re doing it correctly.
“Physically restraining your toddler should not be painful to them in any way, but rather like a calm and firm hug that prevents them from hitting themselves or others,” they wrote, which sounds exactly like she said when she referred to it as a “bear hug.”
They also warn that “If your toddler reacts negatively to being restrained, it may be more effective to consider one of the following options instead.”
The bear hug was effective since he was able to eventually calm her down and get her daughter to take deep breaths with him, so this mom should have nothing to worry about — her mother just had a trauma response and reacted with more emotional weight than any objective parent would.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.