“Just wait till your dad gets home” was one of my mother’s favourite sayings.
Unfortunately “I’ll give you something to cry about” was one of my father’s, so you can imagine the joy surrounding our home at about 6pm on the bad days.
This is when my dad would walk in the door after a long day at work to punish his children for some misdemeanour he hadn’t even known existed as he parked his car in the driveway five minutes earlier.
And we weren’t alone. It turns out thousands of other mums had spent their days trying to get their children to listen to them, and when they had used every weapon in their arsenal they brought out the big one “wait until your dad gets home”, the implication being that dad will deal with it.
Dad whose voice was much louder, whose presence was for more threatening and whose punishment would be far more successful.
Clearly it was a terrible deal for dads and only served to cement the stereotype that men are more effective disciplinarians, and even worse that they are to be feared while women are weaker and less able to handle difficult situations.
It’s been a long time since I was even tempted to use that threat, my child is a teen and there’s more chance that I’d have to wait for him to be home instead of him waiting for his dad to get home.
Parenting teens is a whole different ball game from parenting toddlers although the similarities that do exist are startlingly similar. There’s a reason they call three year olds “threenagers” and a reason they call teenagers “toddlers on steroids with tantrums that could put your worst nightmare diva to shame,” even though maybe it’s just me that calls them that.
And while threats don’t work very well on teens it turns out that having the male partner shouting at them doesn’t work so well either.
Child and Family Blog, who work to bridge the gap between the worlds of research and policy making, recently conducted research wherein they filmed 500 adolescents talking separately with both their mum and dad at home.
Both parents showed similar levels of warmth and verbal hostility to their teenagers so there were no erroneous results arising from lack of warmth. What they found was that the same parental behaviours had considerably different effects, depending on which parent was involved.
When the father showed hostility by shouting, being critical, showing disapproval or rejecting what the adolescent was saying, the teenager’s behaviour toward everybody, both family members and strangers, tended to become worse. The same thing didn’t happen when the mothers were hostile.
This has certainly given me food for thought.
Sometimes when my husband shouts at our son, or shows general irritation towards his (sometimes very explicit teenage) conduct, the over protective mother in me rears her lion’s head. I have a huge yearning to jump in and smooth things over, create harmony and assure my son he is loved and treasured.
I even find myself making excuses for his behaviour. This would probably be frowned on by most reasonable people and identified as very unsupportive. Does it help that I acknowledge that?
Funnily enough when I yell at him or get annoyed with his sometimes very er, typical teenage behaviour I feel quite justified in shouting and I never worry for a second that he won’t feel loved because I know where my anger is coming from. I guess I feel more in control.
And while I acknowledge that not allowing my husband to express his frustration or discipline our child in the way he sees fit, is unfair at least and as unconstructive as it is unsupportive, at least I have some research to back me up and allow me to do all the shouting.
