Wife Calls Her Husband The 'Biggest Disappointment' In Her Life After He Can't Put Their Kids To Bed
An argument about co-sleeping their kids turned into a realization of bigger problems.
Irene Kripak, Frame Stock Footage / Shutterstock A man on Reddit sought some parenting and relationship advice after issues he and his wife had been having with their kids resulted in her calling him the “biggest disappointment” in her life.
The man explained that they have a 4-year-old and an 18-month-old and have been arguing over a “co-sleeping” routine with their children. They both had different ideas on what they wanted to do, but ultimately landed on the wife’s idea, which eventually backfired on her when their kids grew dependent on her to fall asleep.
She called her husband the ‘biggest disappointment’ in her life because he couldn’t put their kids to bed.
“After a couple [of] years, I gave in and the compromise was we’d get a bed big enough and put it in the kids' room,” the man wrote to the “r/Parenting” forum on Reddit. “My wife would sleep in there and I’d sleep in our room. Obviously, we would spend quality time in our room and if the kids cried wife would go over and sleep with them. So it’s my wife and two kids in a king and I sleep alone. We are all perfectly happy with this relationship.”
That’s what is called co-sleeping — put simply, it’s just sleeping in the same bed as your baby. After adopting this co-sleeping strategy, the man claims that their children became “extremely dependent” on their mom’s physical presence — they needed her to be there in order to sleep.
Photo: Reddit
According to James McKenna, Ph.D., an anthropologist specializing in infancy and development and director of the mother/baby behavioral sleep laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, the location in which you sleep is less important when it comes to a baby's development. "Location is not as important as relationships — how parents build attachment and love," he said, via Parents.com. Judging by the way things turned out for this couple, it might not have been the best route to take.
“This would cause issues when my wife wanted to go out at night with friends and [the] kids wouldn’t sleep with me,” he explains. “We’ve argued a lot and gotten into some bad fights when I can’t get them down and she has to come back home.”
He reveals that “This is a huge reason I did not want to co-sleep the kids,” adding that “I did not want to create this dependence and I wanted freedom at night. But my wife believed it was beneficial so she did it.”
Eventually, their older daughter was able to fall asleep with dad so mom could go out at night, but they didn't account for what happened when their older daughter got sick and needed her mom to come home after going out.
The man explains that at the start of the night, mom put the kids to bed before going out to celebrate a friend’s birthday, but their younger daughter wakes up with a fever. He decided that they would hang out downstairs and wait for mom to come home, but she was nowhere to be found despite the restaurant already closing. “I got upset and told her how could you not tell me how late [you're] staying out and give me a heads up? Not ask me for permission but tell me. Our daughter was getting really warm and at this point was up over an hour.”
Photo: Reddit
Naturally, he would want to know how long she was going to be out or if any of the plans changed so he could figure out what to do with their daughter, but she came home furious, wondering why he couldn’t take care of a sick kid.
“I explained to her they wouldn’t sleep with me and if I had a heads up I would’ve known differently you weren’t coming and tried something else,” he wrote. During their argument, she lost it when he said that he was doing her a favor since, and that’s when she called him “the biggest disappointment in her life and a lot of effed up things.”
The AAP strongly advises against parents bed-sharing with infants, according to Parents.com — this kind of sleep crutch is one of the many reasons. Instead, they strongly recommend room-sharing if parents are concerned with keeping a physical closeness to their child. “Of course, I know I should watch my kids but for years I told her not to co-sleep the kids because this would happen and I do not want to live like this and she pushed for it,” he said.
He might not have known this at the time of writing the post, but this touched on a small point that everyone seemed to bring up that had less to do with how they've decided to teach their kids to sleep — they shouldn’t be living like that.
“Y’all have been drifting apart for a lonnnnng time. You’re not sharing a bed. You communicate by text and you communicate incompletely,” the top comment read.
“What your wife said was out of line but I think these problems have been brewing for a long time. I’d ask what she wants and if she wants to work on the marriage, it’s counseling time.”
It seems like they have much larger problems than co-sleeping, and there are things they need to work on as a couple before they can tackle their children’s sleeping habits.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.