Fathers and Favoritism
In this series, our Resident Sage responds to challenges readers are grappling with in their lives. All stories are anonymized for privacy.
My husband (M44) and I (F46) have two sons, Ari (12) and Zane (10), who have two very different personalities. Our eldest son, Ari, is sweet and very gentle; most people would describe him as polite and well-mannered. Our other son, Zane, is the exact opposite; he is a ball of physical energy, extremely rambunctious, and prone to mischief-making.
The problem I have is that my husband favors Zane over Ari, and Zane has become ungovernable. When Zane gets into trouble, his father either dismisses it or encourages it, never doing anything to correct or discipline our son. My husband has called Ari a “sissy” and “too girly” because he is sensitive and has several friends who are girls. Contrast this to our younger son, who my husband says, “will get girls, because girls like bad boys.”
Both sides of our family have witnessed Zane’s unapologetically bad behavior and his father’s support of it, which both sets of grandparents have privately brought up with us as a concern. When Zane acts up in public – for example, throwing sand at someone at the beach – we have to apologize to the people who end up as collateral damage (even his older brother will apologize on his behalf). When Zane misbehaves in front of extended family, I try to get him to apologize for himself but my husband thinks family should be understanding and doesn’t have to be offered an apology. My husband will not allow anyone to discipline Zane, and because he knows he has his father’s protection, Zane does whatever he wants.
Most troublingly, their father’s favoritism is obvious to both Ari and Zane. For example, Zane once punched Ari in the stomach, which neither boy realized I witnessed. Ari then returned the blow and punched Zane in the stomach, who went running to his father, full of accusations and tears. My husband began to scold Ari as Ari pleaded his case, then I interceded and told my husband I saw the whole thing happen: Zane hit Ari first, and Ari was not the one who started the fight. Still, their father blamed Ari and said he should take responsibility as the older brother. This resulted in a huge fight between my husband and me (not an unusual occurrence, if I’m being honest).
So my question is, how do I get my son Zane to behave, especially when his father defends his bad behavior and protects him from consequences?
Zane is not the root of the problem, he is just a child who is behaving in a way that he has been allowed and encouraged to behave. The real question is, why does your husband allow and encourage this behavior? This is a tough and possibly painful question to examine.
You mention that you and your husband often fight, but you don’t say what the source of your friction is. Sometimes what happens is children see their parents fight and “learn” that this is the way that families interact. When the constant fighting between you and your husband never gets resolved, the kids get sucked into your high-conflict environment and mirror your behaviors. One clue that this is normal to your husband is that he does not expect Zane to apologize to family members when he’s done something wrong, but he will apologize on Zane’s behalf to others in public. It seems that, to your husband, it’s not necessary to apologize to family members but you should ask forgiveness from strangers.
Another possibility is that your husband is living vicariously through Zane to feel the freedom of not exercising the self-control he must as an adult. Because your husband knows he’s not socially allowed to behave badly – whether within or outside of the family unit – he allows it in his son because Zane is “just a kid” and people have to be more patient with a young child.
An even more difficult scenario is if your husband is acting out his conflict with you through the children, with Zane as his stand-in and Ari as yours (notice that your husband characterizes Zane as being masculine with the potential to attract female attention, while he characterizes Ari as being prototypically feminine). In this case, this isn’t a problem with the kids, this is a problem that’s being projected onto the kids. Your husband likely knows that he has inconsistent standards for the two boys’ behavior and that physical violence by either boy should not be condoned. Is it possible he might be using Zane as an avatar to allow himself to “win” an altercation by proxy since, in such cases, he also gets to be the judge?
No matter what, the first step to solving your family’s dynamic is for you and your husband to do some self-examination. In particular, what are your husband’s personal frustrations that might lead him to condone Zane’s bad behavior? If your husband’s parents have commented on his lax approach to discipline, this parenting style isn’t something that he learned from his native family.
Next you need to take a look at your relationship together with your husband and identify the source of your friction. When you first began your relationship, you and your husband had a vision for the life that you would build and share together; you were of the same mind. At some point during the course of your relationship, reality fell out of sync with your expectations, and you haven’t been able to reconcile the differences as a couple, thus your ongoing fighting.
If you are constantly bickering about things and not coming to any resolutions, you are fighting without awareness, which will never lead to you moving forward in a productive way. Functional confrontation, which I usually recommend for resolving conflicts without fighting, will be very difficult because each of you has to gain awareness of what is driving you from the level of your Snake Brain. In other words, what Alarm Emotions have you not yet acknowledged? You can’t confront the problem in a productive way if you cannot talk about the deep-seated reasons for your feelings.
You need to start with self-examination, together. I know this sounds like an oxymoron, so you and your husband must be non-judgmental as you look inside yourselves. Be willing to acknowledge your pain points and boundaries to each other. You must listen to each other with compassion and openness, because at the moment you’re caught in a pattern of conflict that you continue to repeat, and the reason is that you don’t know what you’re fighting about. Each of you needs to come back to the feelings you had for each other at the start of your relationship.
Once you have reset with each other, the next time you have a conflict, instead of going toe-to-toe in battle with your husband, tell him when what he says or does hurts you, and refuse to engage with him until he acknowledges his part in the hurt that he caused. Instead of (metaphorically) hitting back, or pretending to be unbothered, stop him in his tracks by saying, “Ouch, that hurts.” Violence should not be accepted, especially when it’s between the kids. But both kids need to be presented with a model of parents who stop and apologize when they hurt the other, because you are their examples for how to interact in the world.
Once you and your husband are able to implement functional confrontation and negotiate future disagreements in a constructive way, this new approach will permeate to the kids and Zane’s behavior will be reined in – even if only because the judge will no longer be biased.
-E
