Dad Asks If He's Wrong For Calling Wife 'Lazy' For Feeding Kids Junk Food While Pregnant
He didn't appreciate her effort. She didn't appreciate being insulted.
Cottonbro Studio & Anna Shvets / Pexels A dad wrote to the Reddit subreddit s/AmITheA–hole about a disagreement between him and his wife, surrounding meals she made for their daughters, ages 5 and 7.
The man explained that, up until recently, he was the main cook in their household, and his daughters “have never been picky about food since I used to cook all their meals and never introduced them to junk food.”
The dad asked if he was wrong for calling his pregnant wife ‘lazy’ for feeding their kids junk food.
As he explained in his post, his wife was expecting their third child. When he wrote to Reddit, she was 20 weeks pregnant.
While he usually cooked their meals, he’d been assigned to a work project that led him to work 70 hours a week. He wanted to hire a cook, as his wife was experiencing “severe pregnancy symptoms,” but she was against the idea— she wanted to try her hand at cooking, and wasn’t wild about the idea of a stranger in their home.
The dad agreed to their new plan of action and said that “for the first month or so, she cooked pretty diligently for the kids and both of us as well. However, after that, she reduced the quality of the meals.”
“She started making easy-to-cook foods for the kids; she also started giving them junk foods as snacks,” the frustrated father stated.
He assumed her waning efforts in the kitchen were due to pregnancy nausea, and then he made “an elaborate meal for the family” which his kids refused to eat “because they wanted the usual buttered noodles.”
Photo : Cottonbro Studio / Pexels
He then told his wife he’d resume cooking, “because the kids are getting spoiled from eating junk food all the time.” His wife got angry and told him “She’s trying her hardest and [he] should be more appreciative.”
“I told her no one forced her to cook and I had already suggested hiring a cook but she was the one who refused,” the man said.
The husband and wife kept quarreling. “She said that I don't understand her discomfort with having a cook and that hiring one was out of the question. She also told me that I can cook all meals if I think it is so easy to feed the kids healthy food. I told her that I would do just that,” he explained.
So the dad took on cooking again, preparing various foods, including fruit salad, chicken stir fry, and vegetable pasta sauce. He froze the meals and reheated them for their kids throughout the week.
Photo : Jane Doan / Pexels
“My wife told me the food tastes good but it's stale food so she doesn't think it's any better than what she used to cook for the family,” he stated. “I told her at least I was putting effort into the meals unlike her who was using the kids' picky behavior as an excuse to be lazy.”
His wife got mad at the accusation that her cooking was lazy, insisting the kids were picky on their own accord.
A majority of Redditors agreed that he wasn’t necessarily the a–hole, as he’d offered a solution to meal prep that his wife didn’t take, though most said that calling her lazy while she’s going through a difficult pregnancy wasn’t the nicest thing he could have said. Most people on the comment thread gave the verdict that “Everyone Sucks Here.”
“Both of you are stressed for different reasons,” said one person. “There's no need to take it out on each other. Kids absolutely have food preferences that spontaneously appear, disappear, and come back in different forms at that age.”
"You're dismissive of your wife's honest effort, while she's unappreciative of the work that you put in to prep all the meals,” stated someone else.
One woman came to the comments to offer her version of context, explaining, “When I was pregnant/postpartum I was SUPER sensitive to any implications I wasn't nurturing properly... Probably she doesn't want to admit she was falling short because, man, those hormones make you feel BAD if you can't feed your kids properly.”
The dad agreed with a suggestion one person made, which was to manage cooking meals as a team by splitting the labor throughout the week. “Always remember, you’re a team, you win or lose together,” the commenter said. “Neither of you can win alone.”
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers parenting issues, pop culture analysis, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.