Dad Wonders If He Should Give His Son 'Tough Love' & Kick Him Out For Getting His Girlfriend Pregnant
His gut is telling him tough love isn't the answer, but he thinks his son "needs to learn" to be a man.
Alexander_Safonov / Shutterstock; Nataliya Vatkevich / Canva Parenting is no picnic in the best of times, but when a crisis arises, it becomes even more fraught.
For one dad on Reddit, his parenting crisis has him "at war" with himself, trying to choose between how his mom and dad parented him on one hand, and what his gut is telling him to do on the other.
The dad wondered if he should give his son 'tough love' after getting his girlfriend pregnant.
"Tough love" is a difficult concept to parse. There's a general consensus nowadays that it usually doesn't work, but most of us have been in situations where it has absolutely made all the difference.
When even mental health professionals acknowledge that it's sometimes what is needed, how do you know when it's right or wrong?
In this dad's case, he was both furious and worried about the repercussions of his irresponsible son's actions, but equally tormented about the potential consequences of the tough love approach. It left him stuck precisely in the middle of a parenting tug-of-war.
The dad wanted to kick his 16-year-old son out of the house to force him to grow up and learn to be a man.
"I'm at my wits end with this kid," the dad wrote, going on to describe his son as a "dishonest" and angry "know it all," with a "chip on his shoulder" who "thinks he's way more mature than he actually is."
The one thing the teen did do right, however, was the way he treated his girlfriend, who he's been dating since he was 12 years old. And that's certainly good because they're going to be tied to each other forever given the recent turn their relationship has taken.
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"Given his history, it should surprise absolutely no one, least of all me (yet somehow it does), that she's now pregnant with his child," the dad wrote. "Wanna know the kicker?" he went on to say, "he's excited. They're excited! And I am very VERY angry."
The dad was a teenage father and wondered if he should give his son the tough love his parents gave him.
"I can hardly judge since I was 18 when he was born," the dad went on to say. "Nevertheless, I got the tough love treatment," he wrote. "My parents kicked me out. They said if I wanted to act like a man then I needed to be a man and provide for my family."
But he knew in his heart that his son wasn't remotely ready for any of this. "My son is no man," he wrote. "He's little more than an overgrown toddler." Drastically complicating the matter even further was the fact that his son's girlfriend would "age out of foster care in a couple months."
"Logic tells me I need to send him on his way so he can get up onto his own two feet and do what I did," he wrote. "But also, my heart and gut tells me my baby isn't quite there yet."
Especially given that "it's a different world now" where "life is harder" than when he was 18 himself, he worried that giving his son tough love would "set him up for failure."
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Still, he struggled with the belief that his son "can't learn if I do everything for him," and he had been caught in an internal back and forth. "Basically I'm at war with myself," he wrote.
Experts say 'tough love' can be useful and positive, but there is a line where it becomes detrimental.
It's hard to fathom how "tough love" could possibly be the best foot forward in this situation. We're talking about teenagers, one of whom is in foster care and doesn't even have parents of her own.
Kicking them out to fend for themselves, even with the financial help this dad said he could offer, seems like a recipe for disaster, and psychologists like Dr. Jennifer Hartstein say the long-term impacts of any form of "tough love" parenting should always be the primary consideration.
It's hard to argue that the long-term impacts of this dad kicking his son out would be anything but detrimental. Growing up in chaos is incredibly damaging to a baby's emotional and cognitive development, and this baby is going to have plenty of chaos around it by dint of having teenage parents in the first place.
In our absurd economy and housing market, realities this dad himself acknowledged as being chief among his worries, kicking them out into the world would not be showing them how to grow up. It would be throwing them to the wolves.
One Redditor had a far better idea. Allow the son to stay and the girlfriend to move in, but with several conditions, including finding work, doing well in school, and taking full responsibility for parenting their baby. "After that," the commenter wrote, "if he won't follow the rules and makes bad choices that sabotage their progress, you can kick him out."
It's a tough pill to swallow, but this approach at least gives the son and his girlfriend a chance to learn how to be parents and adults instead of having to learn how to stay alive first.
This is what this dad's gut is telling him anyway. Here's hoping he listens to it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.