• Major disagreements about safety issues
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Major disagreements about safety issues

Over the past year my husband has been caring for our 4-year-old daughter a couple of days a week while I'm at work. Since that time we have had several major disagreements about basic safety issues. Some examples of decisions he's made that I think aren't appropriate for a 4-year-old are: * Letting her go into the movie theater bathroom alone.
* Leaving her with her 8-year-old cousin (midday) while he runs out for approx 45 minutes.
* Pursuing confrontations with rude (unstable?) strangers while she's with him.

This letter is prompted by a call I received at work yesterday from the gymnastics school telling me that Lea had not yet been picked up (15 minutes after her class was over). It seems my husband got sidetracked in a conversation while at the coffee shop across the street. My anxiety was raised further when the teacher told me that my daughter, tired of waiting, left the building on her own. She was brought back in by a mother who saw her outside by herself (on the sidewalk of a very busy street). The teacher did say it was the first time it has happened (since her enrollment in June).

What do other parents think about this? I am considering scraping together the extra $200/mo to enroll her in preschool full-time where I know she'll be safe. Am I over-reacting?

Having been with a man who put his child's and my safety and happiness about 8th on his list, I deeply empathize and urge you to take whatever steps you can to take care of the child, first and foremost. That was my mantra when going through my divorce, was what was best for my daughter. That helps to scale down the mania/number of issues in your head, and you then know that you're doing the right thing. Sometimes the battle of wills with the spouse becomes the primary issue, and that only clouds things. Arguing with him about his actions in the child's presence can be very harmful also. That's why I brought up whether you live in the same house.

If you can actually find the man "in the act" of endangering the child and get on the phone to Child Protective Services or the police in advance of entrapping him, he can be arrested on the spot. The situations you describe are a little grey, and of course who wants to risk the child's safety just to get him arrested, etc...it's a conundrum for sure.

Your work and personal life will undoubtedly be much better off once you know that your child is safe. The savings in childcare costs are negligible compared to the savings in stress on you and your child. Before I bit the bullet and enrolled my daughter in daycare, I was useless at work, spending 2/3 of the day on the phone "checking in". Not to mention what kind of a person it turned me into, crying and freaking out much of the time. I wish you all the luck and strength in the world.

I am sorry that you have had to deal with this issue, especially since there is already anxiety about leaving your child at home anyway while you go back to work. Nothing is ever simple in this life!

Plus, being late to pick up your daughter because he got involved in a CONVERSATION? It's unbelievable that he didn't even have the shame to make up a plausible excuse like getting stuck in traffic!

If he had only done one of these things once, and then apologized profusely, you could chalk it up to a momentary lapse and forget about it. But the pattern is scary, especially since you imply that he argues with you that you're overreacting. Please, don't wait until your daughter's luck runs out. Don't EVER let this man stay alone with your daughter.

My husband and I also have our disagreements about what is appropriate and what is not. For example, he always wanted to pull our babies behind him in a Burley trailer. I refused on the grounds that no matter how safely he rode his bike, they would not be protected from other drivers on busy Berkeley streets. Luckily, he has so far respected my safety standards. Maybe I'm an extremist. But I think we live in a very complex world filled with pitfalls and dangers. We may be old enough to understand them ourselves, but we ask too much when we expect young children to be able to

I would get several parenting books and share a chapter at a time in a non-threatening atmosphere to discuss these issues. I would also put my daughter into supervised childcare for her safety and to relieve the stress on my fear and on my relationship with my husband. I would also circle the "horror" stories in the paper of children getting hurt or killed when they are not properly supervised...there is at least one a week (a day?). Your husband may not want the job of watching your daughter and he is demonstrating it by doing a poor job in the hopes that you will come up with a better solution...I would definitely get to that better solution for your peace of mind. When time comes to go on vacation, you may need to do something much cheaper because of the added financial strain of this decision but it will be a pain absorbed by all instead of you maintaining this justified fear yourself. Another solution (albeit far-fetched) would be to enroll you daughter in a childcare co-op in which your husband could fulfill the necessary volunteer hours watching the children in an enclosed and supervised manner...maybe he loves playing with kids, doing art projects, reading stories but doesn't like the responsibility of them. Or he could fulfill those hours being the handyman, cook, or custodian at such a co-op.

Good luck...I am sure you will get lots of responses on this topic.

At the same time, I am concerned that your husband is showing such poor judgment. Perhaps he is just overly optimistic about his child's maturity and the kindness of strangers, but you also state that he gets into arguments with unstable people. Reading between the lines, I wonder whether you are concerned about his behavior in general. My sister-in-law also exhibited "poor judgment" in a number of situations while caring for her three children, resulting in many trips to the emergency room. We paid for a childproofer to come to their home, but the accidents continued. We now know that she was drinking, smoking dope, and popping pills, and her mental condition, which we thought was just "irresponsible" and "self-centered" has now deteriorated to the point that she has been hospitalized. She no longer even pretends to take an interest in her children's well-being. I hope that things are not so wrong with your husband, but it does sound like at the very least you might need some marriage counseling. Please continue to keep your child's safety as your first priority. Unfortunately my brother did not, choosing instead to protect his wife while his children were hurt, both emotionally and physically. Best wishes to you in your caring for your child.

Two years ago on the Clark Kerr campus, I encountered a weeping 10-year-old girl whose mother was late picking her up from gymnastics. I found her teacher, the mom drove up a minute later, then I got in my car and burst into tears.

Please spend the money for preschool!

When my daughter was about 4, we had gone to Mr. Mopps and I was putting the packages in the backseat of my two-door car, which was right outside the store. My daughter was standing on the sidewalk waiting to get into the car when I was finished with the packages. I turned around to help her into the car, and she was drinking from a paper cup I hadn't given her! I snatched it away from her and saw the contents appeared to be orange juice. "Where did you get this?" I demanded. She replied, "Oh, that man gave it to me," and pointed to a man who was already at the corner waiting to cross the street.

I ran over to the man and started yelling at him. He was totally casual about the situation. "It's just some orange juice I didn't want, so I gave it to her," he said. I couldn't believe how naive he was! He actually had the attitude that I was the odd one for getting so upset. And, of course, my child took it without a qualm, even after all the times we had told her not to take things from strangers. Luckily it was *just* orange juice. . .

First of all, starting today, I've enrolled my daughter in an extra day of preschool a week (4 instead of 3) and arranged to work from home on the fifth day. Your responses encouraged me to have more confidence in what I believed was the right level of care for her and I REALLY appreciate that.

For those who asked - my husband and I are living together and have availed ourselves of couples counseling (although we aren't currently going) because of some of these differences. My husband truly doesn't see the problem with some of these things, although he agrees with others. For instance, he saw the folly in confronting, rather than ignoring, the rudeness of a stranger, but didn't see what was so wrong when he left our daughter with her 8 YO cousin. However, he's an honest guy and keeps his promises. Therefore, when he agrees these things won't happen again, I believe him. The problem is, I never know what NEW instance will come up that I haven't forseen that might put my daughter in danger. So needless to say, I'm much more comfortable with my new childcare arrangements.

Something has been bothering me, though, about the responses. They all seem to be from mothers. All are not identified, so I'm not certain, but all that identified themselves said they were mothers. Were any of the responses from men? What do other fathers think? I'd like to know as would my husband. He's always let me make major decisions for our daughter, so he's not objecting to the new arrangement, but he does feel a little like he "failed" and would like to know how other men feel.

Thanks again.

However, since you ask...

Both my kids are bright, engaging, and self-assured, but neither is capable of handling the situations described in the original posting. My kids don't go to the bathroom alone, are never cared for by other kids, and are never, ever left alone on city streets. I just can't imagine how a parent could let such a thing happen.

I get tired of being accosted on city streets, too, but I don't engage in confrontations, with or without my kids. You can't argue with the sort of person who gets in your face on the sidewalk. There's just no way to win. The only time I've broken that rule was when an overly-affectionate passerby stopped, talked to, and tried to hold my older child. I interposed myself between them and got as physically threatening as I needed to to stop the situation. This was an older woman who likely meant no harm, but was astonishingly naive in trying to touch a strange kid on the street.

I like to hang out in coffee bars, work odd hours, and concentrate on stuff I enjoy. When it's time to take care of the kids, though, all that stuff gets put away. You need to do the same thing. Mostly, this is a reasonable world with decent people who care about one another. Sometimes, though, it's not. You need to ask yourself: What if I come back from the coffee shop, and my four-year-old is gone? You don't even want to imagine what evil things could happen to her, or how terrified she would be.

You're the guy who's in charge. You don't get to screw up.

On a more moderate note, there's room for disagreement on what's safe. We won't let our 15-year-old daughter walk alone at night, or our 9-year-old son walk alone just about any time--but we're bringing them up right next to a major seismic hazard, so our commitment to safety could be reasonably called into question. Similarly, the wisdom or folly of leaving the kid with an 8-year-old (I wouldn't do it) would depend to a degree on the 8-year-old (I've known some who were more dependable than some 18-year-olds), how long s/he was left in charge, what backup was available, and what the alternatives were.

If your husband feels like he's failed, and your kid's already four years old, I simultaneously hope it's not the first time he's felt that way, and hope he's not beating himself up too badly. Kids don't come with instructions. Parents make mistakes. You try to avoid the catastrophic ones, and learn from the rest (which implies that you notice yourself making them!).

As far as safety goes, I favor erring on the side of paranoia. If I had to choose, I'd rather have a kid who had to be walked across the street to register for college than a kid with a lovely tombstone.

As a now very experienced dad, I agree with the general consensus of the posts, but not the level of hysteria in some, which only reflects the absurd level of hysteria in our society that is simply not supported by the truly infrequent occurrence of kidnapping and/or molestation by strangers (the overwhelming majority of child abduction cases are by estranged parents and most molestation cases are by family or friends of the family). Of course if it's your kid that it happens to, statistical infrequency doesn't matter, but I don't see these people who are so panicked about strangers and public bathrooms not driving their kids around in cars . . .

That said, I do still agree that the father was displaying a fairly careless attitude that his childrearing partner should certainly be calling him on, with one exception. It was the school/program that made the grievous error in letting your kid wander out to the sidewalk, not your husband for being late. True, he shouldn't have been late, but he's still not the one who put your daughter at risk and in that one case really shouldn't be the object of your main complaint.

Also, despite your husband's mistakes, I fully empathize with him because I know I screwed up in ways I didn't have a clue were screw-ups when I was a more inexperienced dad (not to say that I don't still screw up now, but at least I tend to recognize it pretty instantly). When this happened, I felt really crappy and was very defensive about it because I knew I was trying very hard to be a good and responsible dad. Men in this society tend not to be as well-versed as women when first starting on how to go about being a parent (and with an only or eldest child, you are always a new parent for that age). We can learn, but typically we are starting with far less understanding and forethought than women have of what it takes to be a parent and what kids need emotionally and physically. Plus, to make it worse, we have our damn male pride about being right, even about things we know nothing about.

Fathers & kids might be better served by men attending broader-focused parenting classes instead of birthing classes, where in large part men's attendance only fosters the false illusion that someone as inexperienced as the new mother can be anything more than emotional support in a first delivery. And boys need to be raised more aware of parenting by bringing them more into the care of siblings, encouraging family role playing games, and continuing to discuss parenting issues with them even after they've grown but not yet had kids. Mothers & grown daughters will fairly typically discuss child rearing issues even if no grandchildren are even yet on the horizon, yet we men tend to not talk to our sons about what it's like to be a parent until they've actually got a crying kid in their hands.

Given your husband's denial of his inattentiveness to your child's safety, I think you had no choice but to opt for other care. I would suggest, however, that you try to be kind about his inexperience rather than critical, and that you continue to allow situations where he is responsible for your daughter on his own. He's never going to learn otherwise and your daughter will be the poorer for never having had times alone with dad. Good luck.