Should Parents Gas Each Other Up More?
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Is building up your co-parent in the eyes of your children part of being a good parent? This question had not occurred to me until recently. Over the past year, as my older son has become a teen, my husband has made it a habit to build me up in my children’s esteem. “Isn’t Mom the best?” he will ask them, rhetorically, when I do ordinary acts of parental service like buying someone new shoes or driving someone somewhere they need to go. “Be nice to Mom!” he will remonstrate when either child tries to give me an attitude.
You might assume that this has pleased me a great deal, but in truth I haven’t always known what to think about it. At first I felt ambivalent, like it was playing into a vaguely patriarchal form of mother-worship, “angel of the hearth” and all that. I also felt uncertain when my husband praised me around our sons because I knew I wasn’t returning the favor for him.
When I think about why I was hesitant to gas up my husband around my children, it’s not at all because he didn’t deserve it. It’s because I never witnessed this kind of behavior among adults when I was growing up, and it didn’t feel natural to me. My parents split up when I was young, and they were effortfully amicable, but the dramas of their own lives absorbed them and they rarely appeared to make deliberate choices about how they communicated to me about each other. What I mostly watched them do, when I was young, was cope.
Meanwhile, I was highly skeptical of all adults. I assumed adult behavior was always in service of a selfish agenda. If either of my parents had ever praised the other to me, I would have suspected something horrible was about to happen — that one of them was on the verge of a nervous breakdown or was about to make a dreadful announcement that would seriously complicate my life. The possibility of thinking, “Dad’s right — Mom really is the best, and I should remember to treat her that way,” was nowhere near my repertoire of possible experiences.
But much to my amazement, my husband’s remarks have made a noticeable difference, and our children have started treating me with more consideration. They thank me often and ask me how my day was. They sincerely appear to see me more clearly as a person who works hard to give them a happy life. It is astonishing to me that all my husband had to do was explain this to them, and remind them to notice it, and they did. I had no idea it could work that simply.
Gassing up your co-parent in front of your children is a loaded act in this era where domestic equality is contested on a granular daily basis, to the degree that who replaces the toilet-paper roll can be a meaningful piece of evidence in a case for who is and is not showing up. If you’re trying to untangle your home life from the norms and expectations that have gagged and bound mothers for centuries, it might seem counterintuitive to make a habit out of shouting out your partner. But creating an equitable home can be counterintuitive in many ways — some of our intuition is, after all, steeped in centuries of bad compromises. I think part of me was equating spousal praise with compensation for unfair labor. But I’ve realized that praise can be as much in the service of equality as in the reinforcement of outmoded roles.
There are so many ways of developing a political consciousness in children that are little more than glorified consumer choices — Little Feminist board books, anyone? — but teaching by example is what we all aspire to do. A political consciousness begins with noticing the gears that make community work, and I wonder if praising your co-parent is a way of revealing some of that to children, by teaching them to show gratitude for what sustains them. Could praising our co-parents actually, on a micro level, be a political act?
After putting a call out on Instagram, I heard from about 50 anonymous parents, 75 percent of whom say they deliberately praise their co-parent around their children. Of the 25 percent who said they don’t, most said that it had never occurred to them and that they probably should, come to think of it. I asked people to explain why they make a habit of praising their co-parent, and several themes emerged. Many parents are trying to lead by example in teaching kids the importance of giving and receiving love through words of praise. Others said that building up their co-parent is a long-game strategy to create a strong and resilient bond, in case they hit a rough patch. And some parents do it to try to build a family culture that’s as different as possible from the environment they grew up in. Here are some of my favorite responses:
“I want my kids to know how highly I think of their dad. And I want them to develop a practice of noticing and appreciating what’s good about the people in their family.”
“Kids get such a flat picture of their parents sometimes. We can so easily become the ‘fun’ parent or the ‘mean’ one. I’m the primary caregiver and our 8-year-old sees me and the boundaries and rules I set as simply a source of frustration. So my co-parent will back me up, explain he would do the same thing, then tell our kid why he thinks I’m awesome. It can be something like, ‘Did you know xyz about Mom?’ Which humanizes me from “mean mom” to “regular person” and opens up a new dialogue too.”
“I think my partner does it because we have two sons and he wants them to grow up believing in their mother above all — growing up seeing women as powerful equals. I think I do it because I want the kids to understand that he and I are a team — and by extension, generationally, they are the other team! They will be each other’s person for far longer than we’ll be around.”
“My daughter’s father is the at-home parent. It’s work that is not often recognized. So I remind her that I can only do my job because he’s doing the domestic work.”
“When I notice that my co-parent could be doing more, I don’t want our daughter to notice. I want her to have higher expectations for her own partner in future.”
I am not proud to report that I didn’t immediately return the favor after I realized my husband’s praise for me was rubbing off on my kids in a really nice way. It’s taken me a while to get comfortable with the practice of praising him around my children, and for a while, things were pretty lopsided. My sons, but in particular my teen, unloaded their trash on their dad. I was the lenient, generous one, and Dad was the one with the rules and expectations. Summer was looming, and we could all feel that the vibes were a little off in the house.
In fact, I didn’t totally pick up on the lopsidedness myself — my husband had to tell me. A bunch of people who replied to my survey indicated that they were big on giving praise, but their partner doesn’t reciprocate. “I wish they would!” was a common refrain. To this I say: Ask them for it. I wasn’t holding out for any good reason; I was just oblivious, which is a personality flaw that can be corrected with a bit of patience.
Still, I was weirdly paranoid that my son would be wary of me — that he’d think something was afoot, so I did what any parent does when they’re not sure exactly how to bring up a topic: I waited until we were in the car. While driving, I remarked on how awesome it is to travel with Dad in the summer because he’s so good at planning adventures. I reminded my son how much he appreciates that his dad keeps him safe while also letting him take risks. I asked him to go easy on his dad, that maybe he was a little too hard on him, and that it wasn’t always fair. My son listened intently and agreed. The conversation felt totally natural, and I felt like I’d broken a curse that had been on me. More than anything I’ve done as a parent so far, this was one of the biggest departures from the way I was raised. I wish I’d done it sooner.