How and when you discipline your children is a deeply personal choice. Every family makes different decisions, and it often causes conflict when one caregiver steps on the other’s toes. Which is why, one man took to Reddit’s AITA thread this week to see if he was being unreasonable for taking an issue with the way his new partner was punishing his children.
‘My ex-wife and I parted shortly after the birth of my nine-year-old daughter, we also have a 12-year-old son together’ the original poster [OP] explained of his family situation. ‘Co-parenting with her is easy, we have 50/50 custody (no courts involved) – they spend a week with me and then a week with her.’
‘My ex-wife and I both agreed on the way we would raise and punish our children should they misbehave,’ he continued. ‘That way the structure is consistent, and we don’t have one parent favoured over the other.’ So far, so good.
But conflict began, as it so often does, when his new partner started changing the way their children were reprimanded: ‘Last week my daughter stole two pockets full of chocolate from a little corner store,’ the OP explained. ‘Whereas my ex and I would have marched her into the store, returned the chocolate to the owner and apologised, my new wife took my children home, sat my daughter at the table and forced her to eat the entire lot by herself, making her brother watch. She continued to make my daughter eat even after she’d complained of belly ache.’
And the man only found out about the problematic punishment after his son told him: ‘I immediately confronted my wife,’ he said. ‘I didn’t appreciate her making my daughter feel sick (she skipped dinner because of her stomach).
‘My wife is extremely upset,’ the OP continued. ‘[She] says I can’t expect her to be married to me and not have a say in how they are raised. I again repeated that how they are raised is up to me and my ex and she should respect and follow those methods.’
The man’s wife then ignored him for a few days, before leaving their home to go and stay with her mum. His wife’s mum then got involved in the argument, telling him he was treating his wife as ‘an unequal parental figure in the house’ leaving him upset and confused. Messy.
In his wife’s absence, things escalated even further. His children began to tell him of all the times their step mum had used her own ‘punishment tactics’, which included making them stand outside in the sun, ripping up their sketchbooks and holding their hands in icy water. Worryingly, the man’s wife saw no problems with her actions when he confronted her.
After a seven-year relationship, you would expect the OP’s current wife to have some influence in their household. But the manner in which she’s been punishing his children seems both intense and secretive. If she wants a say in her stepchildren’s upbringing, that’s a conversation she needs to have with her husband and his children’s mother. Behind their backs, her punishments are problematic, unkind, and have broken trust in their family.
From what the OP said about taking his daughter back to the shop to apologise for her theft that triggered the argument, it seems he prefers a communicative approach (making the children understand what they did wrong and making amends) meanwhile, his partner defaults to physical revenge (eating until they’re sick, freezing their hands, tearing up their work) — which can be traumatising and lead to a myriad of mental health issues.
As one Reddit user wrote: ‘For seven years your now wife understood how things worked and went along with it but now that she's married she thinks she has a say in the discipline of your children? It is super weird that she did that and her form of discipline is abusive and just appalling.’
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