What Behaviors Are Not Tolerated From a Spouse Towards Children? A Parent’s Honest Reflection
The Saturday morning started normal enough. Legos covered the living room rug, our son was building something with intense concentration, and my husband Mark stood at the kitchen doorway with his coffee mug. “I said put them away before breakfast,” he said, his voice climbing. “Why do you never listen? I’m tired of repeating myself.”
My son’s shoulders crept up toward his ears. He didn’t look at his dad. He just started scooping the bricks into the bin with quick, mechanical motions, a kind of practiced obedience that made my stomach drop.
When Mark left the room, I sat down next to our son. “Hey,” I said softly. He didn’t look up. “You’re not in trouble. But you do need to finish cleaning up.” He nodded, still not meeting my eyes. I didn’t push it. The moment passed, breakfast happened, everyone moved on—but I kept replaying that phrase in my head.
“Why do you never listen.”
It wasn’t the volume that bothered me. I’ve yelled before. Plenty of parents in our neighborhood have yelled, and nobody hides it that well. It was the permanence of the wording. Mark wasn’t expressing frustration about a behavior; he was telling our son what kind of person he is. There’s a difference between “you left your Legos out” and “you never listen.” One asks for a change. The other describes a flaw as if it’s carved in stone.
That’s one of the first red lines I told Mark about, and it took him a while to see it. He’d shrug and say, “I’m not calling him a bad kid. I’m just saying I’m annoyed.” But kids don’t parse nuance well. A seven-year-old hears “you never” and files it under “facts about me.” Over time, those little phrases stack up. They become the voice inside your head that says you’re careless, you’re selfish, you’re not enough. I didn’t want that voice coming from my husband, of all people.
Another behavior I won’t tolerate is the silent treatment. This one came up on a different afternoon, after a long week when Mark was exhausted from work. Our daughter, who is five, wanted to show him a drawing she made. She stood next to his chair, holding the paper up, chattering about the rainbow and her friend. Mark just stared at his phone, giving her nothing—no look, no sound, not even a “not now.” His face was blank. After a minute she stopped talking, set the drawing on the armrest, and walked away quietly.
I followed her into her room and gave her a hug. She didn’t cry—that’s the part that bothered me most. She’d already absorbed the expectation that when Daddy’s tired, you vanish. Later that night, I brought it up with Mark. “You don’t have to look at the drawing,” I said. “But you have to say something. You can’t just pretend she isn’t there.” He sighed and said he didn’t even realize he’d done it.
I believe him. But intent didn’t matter much to our daughter, and it doesn’t matter much to the brain of a child. For kids, an adult going blank is almost worse than an adult being angry. Anger tells the child they exist in the room. Silence tells them they don’t.
The third thing I put on the list was using the kids as emotional shields in our marriage. This one’s subtler. We went through a rough patch a couple years ago, and I caught myself drifting into certain patterns—like asking our son to check on his dad after Mark and I had a disagreement. “Go see if Daddy’s okay,” I’d say. Or I’d tell the kids, “Keep it a bit quiet tonight. Dad’s got a lot on his mind.”
It took a friend calling me out at a coffee shop to see what I was doing. She said, “You’re training your kids to manage his emotions.” I bristled at first. But she was right. A child’s brain is not equipped to carry a parent’s emotional state. When we load that onto them, even gently, we’re teaching them that they’re responsible for fixing and monitoring grown-ups. That’s a heavy thing to carry into adulthood.
So that became a rule: the kids are not allowed to be our go-betweens. If Mark and I have a problem, we talk to each other—in low voices, behind closed doors if needed—but we don’t send the children in as scouts, and we don’t expect them to adjust their behavior to buffer his mood. They get to be kids.
And the last behavior that I refuse to accept, the one that took me the longest to name, is mocking big feelings. Mark is a “solver” by nature. When our son cries over a scrape that barely broke skin, Mark says “you’re okay” with a raised eyebrow, and the kid immediately wipes his eyes trying not to look silly. When our daughter is upset that her toast is cut incorrectly, Mark says “we’ll fix it” in a tone that implies the problem is her, not the toast.
I understand the instinct. It’s uncomfortable to watch smaller people cry over things that seem small to you. But when we tell a kid “you’re okay” while they’re clearly not, we’re teaching them to distrust their own emotional responses. They learn to hide. They learn that the way they feel is wrong. I had to pull Mark aside one evening and say, “Even when you think it’s ridiculous, you have to let her be upset. You don’t have to fix it. You just have to acknowledge it.”
The phrase we use now is from a parenting workshop the school hosted last fall: “I see you’re frustrated.” It sounds simple, but Mark still stumbles over it sometimes. He wants to offer solutions. I remind him that words of acknowledgment do way more than a solution ever will.
What makes all of this tricky is that there is no objectively perfect parent spouse. And I’m not claiming I’ve been flawless. I’ve snapped. I’ve said things in the heat of a tantrum that I regret. The line isn’t about a single incident—it’s about the pattern. What I can’t tolerate in this house is a habitual way of speaking to children that treats them as problems rather than people.
We got into an argument about it once, Mark and I. He said I was being too protective, that he was just raising our kids the same way his dad raised him. I told him that’s exactly why I was being protective. He went quiet. He knew his dad used fear as a tool. We both watched how it shaped him into an adult who can’t ask for help.
We agreed on some ground rules, and we taped them to the inside of our pantry door. Not to be dramatic—we were honestly just trying to remember. The rules are simple: no character insults, no ignoring when the kids speak, no quiet treatment, no sending the kids to check on the other parent, and no laughing at a kid for feeling something. We also added a line about physical roughness—not full-on anger, just the low-grade grabbing and pulling and squeezing that adults do without noticing. Our daughter once flinched when Mark reached for her arm, and that moment alone nearly undid him.
I can’t say we’ve stuck to every rule. The other evening, Mark raised his voice at our son for not putting his shoes away for the fifth time, and he said “what’s wrong with you?” before I could even react. Our son looked at me. I looked at Mark. A beat passed. Mark took a breath, crouched down, and said, “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m annoyed, but I shouldn’t have said it like that.” Our son nodded. The shoes went in the closet. It wasn’t a perfect moment, but it was a repair.
That’s the part I want to remember: it’s not about never messing up. It’s about what happens after. Kids don’t need perfect parents. They need parents who can say “I got that wrong” without making it the child’s job to forgive them. And the spouse part is about the two of us staying on the same team, even when we don’t agree on what “wrong” looks like in real time.
We’re still working on it. Some weeks feel like progress. Other weeks I wonder if we’ve changed anything at all. But I know what I’ll tolerate and what I won’t, and I get clearer on that with each season. The lines are there because the people inside them matter most.
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