Why I Told My Husband to Stop Nagging Our Children
And to let me do it instead.
The sound of a chair scraping backwards and a door opening sends the dog into a frenzy of tail-wagging. A hush falls over the rest of the house - as if it is holding its breath. My husband emerges, a bear waking from its winter hibernation. He leaves behind his cocoon of phone calls, video meetings, presentations and stacks of folders in search of sustenance and a brief respite from the business world. And from a safe distance, my daughters and I wait…
Last March, like many families, we turned our dining room into an office so my husband could work from home during the pandemic. We are now in our third lockdown and, nearly a year on, the table we used to share meals at continues to be spread with laptops, thick documents, and strewn stationery.
To start with it was fun having everyone at home. The girls enjoyed sharing their homeschooling activities with their dad. They would go and present him with their latest crafty creations or tell him amazing facts they had learned.
In the first few weeks work was pretty quiet for us both, (I am a home-educator and photographer, my husband works in the waste industry) and we relished the extra time we were spending together. We set a timer to go off each hour, and we would meet up in the kitchen to twirl an activity spinner I made from an old Twister board. It had lots of silly activities to get us moving. Would we get ‘Show everyone your best silly walk’? Or maybe this time it would ‘Play follow-the-leader’! There was lots of goofiness and giggles.
Ten months on and my husband’s (pretty large) workload has returned to pre-pandemic levels. His departures from his home-office are now few and far between. Some days he is holed up in there for twelve hours (don’t get me started on work-life balance, that is a post for another day). His phone rarely stops and as he talks he paces a track around the table perimeter or stares vacantly out of the window.
Of course, he still has to leave his cave periodically throughout the day; he still needs to eat, drink and pee. But I recently started to notice a change in how that played out. When we first became home-bound his dips back into family life were met with excitement from us all, whereas now it seemed the dog was the only one to greet them with any enthusiasm. What had happened?
Previously, when my husband was out of the house from dawn til dusk, he rarely witnessed the utter chaos of a lived-in family home harbouring small humans. The messes of play, the craft dregs, the discarded bowls, hairbrushes, and socks. Wet towels left on bathroom floors. Biscuit wrappers discarded inches from a bin. Piles of laundry waiting to be put away.
Often by the time he returned the house had been restored to some small degree of order. Empty toilet rolls had been replaced, toys had been picked up, sofa cushion dens had been dismantled and reclaimed for their intended use. Very little evidence remained of the day’s disorder, and he was too tired to notice anything that hadn’t been seen to.
In the past year, this all changed. During his little excursions into the rest of the house, he started to notice the abandoned items not yet picked up, and the dirty dishes which hadn’t quite made it to the dishwasher. He started sighing at the sight of a full bin or a floor that needed to be washed. Lights left on in rooms, no longer occupied, visibly raised his blood-pressure.
Frequently now, his appearance was accompanied by a call to one daughter or the other to pick something up, put something away, turn off a light or clear up a mess. There would be tuts and muttering. Phrases from his own father’s mouth would be spat out, as so often happens in moments of tiredness and frustration.
“You treat this house like a hotel.”
“Your room is a pigsty.”
“I don’t buy you nice things to have you treated them like that, money doesn’t grow on trees you know.”
I could see our daughters starting to avoid their dad. I noticed the half-hidden eye-rolls at yet another telling off about their sloppiness. It made me sad. Their father-daughter relationships were being harmed. So I told him to stop.
Our children are 12 and 10 and I believe they are plenty old enough to be active members of a household. I encourage them to help out around the house. I expect them to clear up after themselves, to put their own stuff away, and I will often ask them to help with age-appropriate chores. But they are still children and they are easily distracted. They forget stuff. They have different priorities. They often see mess in a very different way to adults. It is easy for constant reminders and requests to slip into unremitting nagging. And my husband was allowing this nagging to take over every interaction he was having with his children.
There have been various psychological studies that have looked at the impact of positive-to-negative interaction ratios on relationships. In other words, how often we are nice to another person, compared to how often our exchanges are less than sweetness and light, can make or break how that relationship develops. Although an exact value given for the optimum ratio, called the Losada Ratio, has been largely discredited, many child mental health specialists continue to recommend a ratio of at least 5:1 between parent and child. So five “yays” to every “doh” if you will. Sounds pretty reasonable don’t you think?
As a home educator (my children don’t go to school even in non-pandemic times) I spend A LOT of time with my daughters. We learn together, craft together, play together, bake together, watch TV together. We regularly irritate each other and bicker over silly things, but we also mess about and hug and giggle. Sometimes I get snappy when I see them not pulling their weight, and yes, occasionally there is a bit of yelling. But I would say that most of the time we get on pretty well and there are certainly more highs than lows. And this is where the grumpy bear comes back in.
My husband’s exchanges with his girls didn’t meet the magic number. They didn’t come anywhere close. In fact, he was getting almost a 100% nag rate. And it showed. It showed in the eye rolls, the stomping feet, the slammed doors. Things were pretty grim, so I decided that I needed to become the bad guy. My ratio with the girls was probably at least 10:1, I felt I had a bit of room to maneuver. So I told him to give it all to me. To offload the bad bits. If they needed to be reminded to pick up, I’d do it. If they had to be spoken to about a bad habit they had gotten into, it was on me. If a sibling fight needed sorting, yes, me again.
I don’t relish confrontation, and it isn’t that I feel the need to be some kind of martyr, I just want to save the daddy-daughter bond from irreparable damage. It doesn’t need to be forever, but for now, I want him to be the good guy.
I can already see a shift. Yesterday, during a ten-minute break between conference calls I asked him to ignore the pancake-making mess in the kitchen and go and join the girls for a bit of hula hooping, I knew they would find it hilarious. He did, and they did! So while I quietly wiped up the spilled batter, I reveled in the happy shrieks and giggles that wafted through the house. And when the girls tumbled in ten minutes later full of smiles, they happily mucked in with loading the dishwasher, with not an eye-roll in sight. Maybe being the bad guy isn’t going to be so tough after all!
