What To Do When H Puts You Down In Front Of Kids?

I feel most men don't have patience to teach children. In my case as my husband had interest in cooking I took his help there and never let him teach children.

 

Silent treatment is a passive aggressive behavior to control and enforce his authority. Its a cruel and abusive behavior.

What he expect you to do is to go after him, pleade and boost his ego. A normal adult should communicate his thoughts instead of treating kids this way. What you have to do is not give the reaction he is looking for. Your dd too.

Tell DD that its not about her. No need to worry about it. Her dad has anger issue, so may take time to cool down. You can be honest with DD, its a childish behavior and not acceptable.

You may spend more time with her, help her with studies and cheer her up. If your husband is ok now, ask her behave as normal as if nothing happened even if your dh dont respond to her. Live as usual. Be happy and busy. Take your kids out and enjoy. Let him sit there and sulk.

Never ask her to go after him and plead. His anger is towards you.Tell her he may take sometime to cool down, so she should focus on her studies and be happy as usual. If your dd has any routine thing like giving hug, saying good night etc...ask her to continue it as usual. She has to show his tantrumns dont go inside her.

How long its going on?
You also did a mistake. You reacted to your dh in front of DD, that was not a good idea. Avoid conflicts in front of kids. He might have felt insulted. I am not supporting his screaming or yelling. You could have handled it in a peaceful way or conveyed it later. I also, dont like my spouse to interface between me and kids. But if there is abuse, no other way.

May be you can convey the same to him and appolagize for interfering, especially in front DD. But never say he can give silent treatment to you or anyone. You can say, your intention was to help DD, and you didn't expect this outburst. If he want he can or be silent as long as he want, when he is ready he can talk normal. But you consider this treatment to DD as unacceptable and its abuse. You also have to acknowledge to him your mistske of insulting him infront of DD. But if he still continue his silence, you cant do anything other than moving on as unsual.

If your husband has anger issues he should go for anger management treatment. Its not a good idea to ask him to teach your DD, if he is not ready to do it a proper way. I understand that your intentions were good and you need help from him with kids. But as you know his behavior, avoid conflicts. Dont fight infront of kids. Walk away if you are angry. Give time for him and you to cool down.

What you have to do is allow him to sulk as long as he wants. Dont even acknowledge that he is there sulking. Enjoy with kids and be happy. Just treat him like a kid with problems. Even after conveying your thoughts, if he continue the same, ignore it, treat him as usual and behave as if nothing happened or exist. Your problem is not with him, but his behavior.

As you are facing the same issue for a long time, this old post may be useful.
Ego, Temper and Moodiness - Fatal Combination

 

You can start teaching your DD some tools to cope with these verbal assaults. Don’t put your DH down to her but try to equip her independently. Kids are smart. She will figure him out.

 

These rules should be a sticky.

@Rihana has said it perfectly. Normally, I would suggest apologizing for your behavior, but it will only encourage his sulking. You don't want to establish that silent treatment is a good way to get you to introspect. So ride this storm out and follow RihJi's pointers in the future.

His silent treatment of your DD is emotional abuse. Don't let it hang like a cloud over your household. Act normal with your child. Ignore his sulking. Let him sort out his relationship with his daughter.

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@snehalJoshi Your daughter was crying hysterically and your husband had lost his sense of perspective and yelling at her. In such situation how could you not intervene? You needed to break up the scene because it sounds like your husband was out of control and wasn’t going to stop on his own any time soon. Especially if he has an anger problem and goes out of control, you have to intervene on your daughter’s behalf and it is a good thing you did.
In my opinion you did the right thing in going in, asking him to stop and asking him to leave. Especially since your daughter was clearly in distress this was the right thing to do. I really don’t think this was a situation where your daughter and spouse could have worked it out between them because he was clearly being unreasonable and had no understanding of her grade level.
The rest of what was said was subjective. You did right by explaining that we should appreciate what she did get right but even then he wasn’t ready to listen or agree with you. No matter how diplomatic one is in asking an angry spouse to stop and leave the room it inevitably gets into arguments and them angrily demanding to know why and refusing to move unless you reply so I really don’t see how you in that situation could have avoided answering him as you did. I wouldn’t beat myself up too much about what you said to him.

In future, if you get into such situations, instead of replying him, turn your attention to your daughter and focus on calming her down, pick her up and take her physically out of the room. Just ignore his angry questions if he becomes too angry explain again about her grade level and how he is expecting too much from her. Or just say ‘yeah it was a mistake asking you to teach her, I didn’t realize you will take this route.’ And leave it at that.

 

@snehalJoshi
The reason I am urging you to continue to intervene is because a lot of Indian parents have some kind of complex about the level of math taught in our schools. A lot of Indian dads especially feel somehow (and wrongly) as if they were extremely good at Math or that they studied some very high level of Math in their Indian schools and look down on the Math taught here. (I can tell you lots of stories re this) Problem is when as adults we look back we mostly remember the last 2-3 years of high school where yeah you studied trig and calculus etc etc but at elementary level that was not the case!! But they can’t be bothered to remember that!
What your H was doing by making up his own questions to quiz your daughter is indicative of this same trend. That’s why I feel you did absolutely right in discouraging him though maybe word usage was not ideal. Please continue to discourage him in future also. This tendency to prematurely test kids on higher concepts and judge them, maybe even teaching them a different way to solve etc ends up confusing the kids a lot! And actually even the way we were taught to solve some concepts 20-30 years back is now taught differently! But many parents don’t realize that. And the kids get confused on how to answer in the tests and the teachers won’t give credit for a question solved in a different way sometimes because they want the child to learn the method the class was taught because it builds on some other higher concepts they will teach later.
Edit: yeah I said dads and stand by it - run into lots of former engg student now dads who think no end of their math capabilities!!

 

A DH was confining his parents to a corner in his spacious home. While his spouse was full of compassion, DH was insisting that his aged parents to be fed in those metal plates dedicated for them.

His son of six years was wondering why his dad not allowing grand parents to dinning table to have their food. He felt this was ill treatment but he couldn’t help.

One fine morning, these two old parents expired. After their expiry, DH Was trying to dispose of articles used by his parents.

As DH was watching, The boy too saw a buyer weighing the metal food - plates used by his grand parents. He grabbed those plates and said he wanted it. DH asked him “ what for”.

To DH & his mom’s astonishment, the boy responded, “ I need these plates to serve food to you & mom when you both turn old” .