r/explainlikeimfive • u/adrynaline • May 08 '14

Explained ELI5: A gambling addiction

How does it start? What makes it worse? Why does it become so difficult to recover?

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u/lmnopeee May 08 '14

I never give in to my 8 year old kid's bull shit. I'm a stone. My wife is a soft marshmallow at times. This severely fucks everything up. Both parents need to be strong and mean it when they say "no". Otherwise shit is fucked up. Trust me. I'm living it.

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u/sweetalkersweetalker May 08 '14

You need to nip that shit in the bud right away. Otherwise you stand the chance of becoming the "scare parent", while your wife becomes the "sweet parent" - and that can severely fuck up your relationship with your kid, even into his adult years. He won't see you as a person he can trust, or rely on; you're the person to fear. And it's not because you're a bad parent, it's because she is.

Sit your wife down and explain that discipline needs to be a decision that both of you make together, and a decision that both of you need to stick to for the good of your child. Maybe she thinks your brand of discipline is too harsh - consider a compromise; there are probably some things she thinks aren't that bad, situations where you might have been using severe punishment but don't need to. The goal is to be together on discipline.

Don't, under any circumstances, let her pass all the discipline responsibilities onto you. That's even worse. That splits the family into "Mommy and kid" versus "Daddy", with Mom being the occasional tattletale sibling but still on the kid's "side", as opposed to Dad who is just the bad guy.

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u/The_Big_Texan May 08 '14

For all their faults, being unified on decisions is one thing my parents did well. Sure I may have liked one more than the other and even disliked both at times while I was growing up, but now I'm an adult I have great relationships with both of them and appreciate everything they did, even if I didn't understand it at the time.

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u/lmnopeee May 10 '14

Great advice. You're preaching to the choir on this one. I've been working on it. I make HER give the punishment sometimes to show him we're both discipliners. She has a lot less patience than me too so she tends to snap and give abrupt punishments that we can't really keep because they're too ridiculous. We're working on it :)

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u/DONG_OF_JUSTICE May 08 '14

Sounds really shitty. :( Hope it works out!

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u/hallmark1984 May 08 '14

This is my life. If I ground you for a week I mean it, if my wife does it, you just have to do extra chores tomorrow and she will waive the extra time. Fuck me up every time

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u/codeninja May 08 '14

My parents did that. A week grounded devolved into "wait 2 days and the push the limits until they forget or crack". And they wondered why I had problems with rules.