Things can get rough when parents pick favorites among their kids.
This father clearly prioritizes his son, and their mother thought it was obvious their daughter feel left out.
Things got out of hand when the mother tried to make their daughter feel included, too.
Check out the full story.
AITA for “playing favorites” and excluding my son from our girls night?
I (41f) have two children, Layla (17f) and Jacob (15m).
I want to clarify that I love them both equally and have always tried to make sure that none of my children felt like I had a favorite child.
My husband (43m) on the other hand very clearly prefers our son.
The husband clearly has a favorite pick.
He was very happy to have a daughter, and a really great dad to her, but it’s clear that he gets along with Jacob more, mainly because they’re both boys and enjoy the same things.
They both love football and baseball, and often go see a match together, or spend weekend playing, or talk about it together etc.
This became more important when Jacob got older and started getting into sports more.
They connect on a different level.
I get that it’s easier for my husband to talk to our son about things they both love, but it’s been making me sad to see our daughter excluded from their conversations or activities together.
My husband doesn’t do a lot of things with Layla.
They sometimes watch movies together, but most of the time it’s either my husband and Jacob doing something just the two of them, or the four of us together.
She wanted the daughter to have similar privileges.
For that reason, I recently decided to start doing things with my daughter, just the two of us. These past 2-3 months we’ve gone to the movies, to the mall, had girls night, went to a bowling alley and many more things.
I can see that it makes my daughter happy, so I thought it was a great thing.
My husband never complained about it, mainly because we mostly did this when the boys were doing something together.
They wanted to go out but things got bad…
A week ago there was an open air projection of Tangled, which has been Layla’s favorite movie since she was maybe 6 or 7, and I had planned on going for weeks.
The problem is, my husband found out 4 days prior that he had to go away for work that same night. He asked me to stay home and said that we could just watch another movie together the three of us.
I said no because this night was important to me and my daughter, and our son also said that he was completely fine staying home alone, and would play video games with his friends.
The husband was upset about the scenario.
My husband didn’t say anything but I could tell it bothered him.
When he came back from his work trip, he got really mad at me and told me he “didn’t believe we actually went and excluded Jacob” and that I was “playing favorites” because I decided to have a night with only Layla.
I told him about how he always spent time with Jacob and asked if he really couldn’t tell how Layla was hurt by that.
They broke into a fight.
He said that I was being ridiculous and that it wasn’t his fault Layla didn’t share any of his interests.
I told him that it was his role as a parent to try to connect with his child and he yelled at me telling me not to give him parenting lessons when I was a bad mother.
He has barely been talking to me since then and is very cold/dry.
She never wanted to have a favorite kid!
I get his point because I always promised myself never to treat my children differently, but at the same time seeing how happy it made my daughter I’m not sure I made the wrong choice.
It might be easy for fathers but mothers can never have a favorite kid.
Let’s find out what the Reddit community thinks about this one.
The husband is being way too unreasonable and this user knows it!
This user knows that if the son didn’t have a problem then there was no problem at all.
This user thinks the husband is the problem!
This user lists a lot of issues with the husband and it is not sounding good.
This user makes complete sense when it comes to parenting.
Why is the dad making such a big deal out of it when he was the one who started playing favorites in the first place?
None of the answers to that questions are very encouraging.
If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.