There’s a moment in every relationship where you stop looking simply at the romance itself and start paying attention to the ripple effect of how the person you love treats the people around them.
And when you’re a parent, dating goes far deeper than chemistry or companionship; your first priority should always be protecting your child, the one little person who trusts you to choose wisely.
So when she realized the man she’s been building a life with can be sweet to her but cold, dismissive, or outright cruel to her daughter, everything shifted.
Suddenly, the question isn’t about compatibility; it’s about why she is allowing a man to treat her child like this, and that’s exactly the crossroads this mom is standing at.
This 38-year-old woman has spent the last few years dating her 34-year-old boyfriend, and they both have kids from prior relationships.
She has an eight-year-old daughter, and her boyfriend has a four-year-old son. They’re really not on the same page when it comes to parenting, and they frequently disagree on how to discipline their kids.
Not only that, but it seems that her boyfriend hates her daughter for no reason. Her boyfriend whines that his son is too young to know how to do the right things, but her daughter should know everything at her age.
“He’s complained about her on occasions and says that my daughter is disrespectful and that I coddle her too much and that it’s not right that I have to tell her more than once to do something,” she explained.
“I say she’s a kid. My daughter’s dad is in jail and no longer a part of her life, so she craves that fatherly figure and affection. My boyfriend has shared custody of his son with the [baby’s mom], so the dynamic is a little different with the two kids.”
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“My boyfriend has refused to hold her hand or give her affection because he says it’s weird. He would get upset when she brought up old memories involving other male figures in her life and would tell her to go hold their hand instead.”
Over this past weekend, her boyfriend got angry with her daughter after she left her breakfast plate on the table and didn’t pick it up.
Her boyfriend called her daughter a ‘spoiled brat’ and insisted she clean up her plate. Earlier that same day, her boyfriend called her daughter a snitch for alerting him to something his son was doing but shouldn’t have been.
Her daughter started to cry after her boyfriend insulted her, which broke her heart. She demanded to know why her boyfriend was being so cruel to her daughter and asked for an apology, but he said no.
“I kicked him out of my house. He says that I’m too dramatic and that calling someone a spoiled brat isn’t even that bad and that he wants to teach her how to be respectful and to listen to parents,” she continued.
“Am I being too harsh [in] kicking him out of my house?”
I honestly can’t believe that she hasn’t gotten rid of her boyfriend sooner. This man is so clearly terrible, and she’s putting her daughter in a situation that makes it easy for this man to pick on her and berate her.
How crushing this must be to her daughter’s self-esteem. It’s so easy to see that her boyfriend doesn’t like her daughter, so I’m not sure how she can live with herself knowing this.
She needs to hurry up and dump this guy and, in the future, do better. She shouldn’t be bringing trashbag guys like this around her kid, period.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
