Co-parenting is difficult at the best of times, but throw new relationships into the mix and it can make for some tricky situations.
A 35-year-old woman has taken to the internet to ask for advice, after she was involved with a co-parenting run-in.
She’s been with her 32-year-old boyfriend for one year, and while she has no children, he shares a four-year-old son with his ex.
“My boyfriend fetches his son every weekend,” she explained on reddit. “He has recently introduced me to his son. We get along really well. He’s sweet and very talkative. I have helped raise my nieces and nephews, so I think that I am good with kids. I don’t believe in hitting kids. We talk things through. This has been my approach with my boyfriend’s son too.”
She explained that, like any typical pre-schooler, her boyfriend’s son is into everything.
“He is always up to something, taking things apart or pressing buttons, but that’s because he’s curious. I always speak to him calmly and have started explaining things to him. So now, he asks me questions like, ‘What does this do?’ ‘What is this?’, and we explore things together (less things being broken).
“I recently received a call from the mother of my boyfriend’s son, asking me to stop using all these ‘new age phrases’ on her child. She said that my ‘funny things’ are interfering with her parenting style.
“Apparently the boy said, ‘Don’t shout mummy. Speak soft like Auntie’. He also said ‘Ok take a deep breath mummy’ whenever she would raise her voice at him. At first I told her that I wasn’t trying to interfere with her parenting style, but that that is how I deal with children.
“She told me to ‘Go make my own kids and then teach them sh*t’. That hurt me and I told her that maybe her parenting style needs an update.
“Now, she refuses to let the child be around me. She is starting to refuse my boyfriend access to his son, because of my interference. My friend thinks that I shouldn’t have told her that her parenting needs an update and let my boyfriend handle this instead. I feel terrible. Am I the a**hole?”
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