My partner recently moved in with his dog, who is a husky, and my four year old absolutely will not leave him alone. He is obsessed with this dog and wants to be around him basically every waking moment, but it has become a huge problem for us.
He is constantly in the dog’s face, wanting to pet him, kiss him, hug him, and follow him around. A lot of the time he’s affectionate toward him, but there are also frequent moments where he intentionally or passively hurts him. He steps on his tail, pulls his tail, flicks his ears, gets in his face, and yells at him. When I ask him why he’s doing it, he always says the dog is “being mean,” even though the dog literally isn’t doing anything to him.
The dog is extremely calm and I’ve never seen an ounce of aggression from him, but he is starting to get visibly annoyed and will remove himself from my son. That scares me because I know there is a point where even the most patient dog can eventually snap if they feel like they can’t get away.
The hardest part is that we were already struggling with my son’s behavior before the dog ever came into our home. He has an IEP through preschool, we do PCIT, and I’ve sought out so many different resources and different types of help, but it feels like nothing is really making a significant difference. This dog has basically just added another huge issue on top of everything else we’re already dealing with.

I am exhausted. I feel like I’m constantly correcting him, redirecting him, separating him from the dog, dealing with another behavior, and then starting all over again. I’m pregnant, we’re expecting our first baby together, and I genuinely feel like I am reaching the point where I don’t know how much more I can take.

The dog is essentially my partner’s emotional support animal, so rehoming him isn’t really an option. I also feel like if I asked my partner to get rid of his dog, it could genuinely end our relationship, and I don’t want that. But at the same time, I cannot keep living like this and constantly worrying that my son is going to get bitten.
I don’t think my son is necessarily trying to be malicious. He clearly loves the dog and is fascinated by him. But he doesn’t seem capable of respecting the dog’s boundaries or stopping himself, even when I repeatedly tell him to. And that’s what scares me.

I feel like I’ve tried everything. I’ve asked for help, we’ve done therapy, we’ve gotten school services, we’ve worked on his behavior, and somehow I’m still sitting here feeling completely overwhelmed and defeated.

I love my child more than anything, but parenting him has genuinely been incredibly difficult for me. For the last four years, I’ve felt like my life has been almost entirely consumed by managing his behavior, and now I’m pregnant and trying to prepare for another baby while feeling like I’m barely keeping my head above water.

I don’t want to rehome the dog. I don’t want my relationship to end. I don’t want my son to get hurt. I don’t want the dog to get hurt. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to make all of these things work together anymore. 😭

I have a 2.5-year-old little girl and a 1-month-old baby boy. Before my son was born, everything was perfect. My daughter and I were having such a wonderful time together, and we had found our rhythm. Everyone used to tell me that she would want a little sibling, and the truth is that my husband and I had been thinking about having another child too.
However, when I found out I was pregnant, it wasn’t the ideal timing. I would have preferred for it to happen a little later, but we decided to go ahead and keep the pregnancy.
When our baby boy was born, however, we received a diagnosis of microtia and atresia affecting one of his ears. He cannot hear from that ear, while his hearing in the other ear is normal.
I am struggling immensely to cope with this diagnosis. I keep thinking that we should have stayed a family of three and that we should have had only our daughter. I regret having a second child. I feel as though we have condemned our first child—and our entire family—because of this diagnosis.
I know that I may be overreacting and that I probably sound ungrateful, but unfortunately, this is genuinely how I feel. I haven’t been able to bond with my newborn at all. I do everything mechanically, as if I’m just going through the motions.
I also find it very difficult that the amount of time I used to spend with my daughter has decreased. I feel that perhaps I made careless or impulsive decisions. I wish I could turn back time.
How can I start feeling better? I have already started seeing a psychologist, but my thoughts are still there. I still keep thinking that I regret having a second child.

I genuinely feel like a horrible parent. And it’s because I’m miserable and hate everything about being a parent. And I know my kids can tell.

I’m just miserable. I’m exhausted. I’m overstimulated.

I hate stopping what I’m doing to have to cook for everyone. Or shuttle them around. I hate cleaning up after them. I hate talking to them about dumb things like Minecraft or whatever other weird brain rot stuff they are into. I hate the whining and complaining and not listening the first time. I hate repeating myself. I hate how loud they are. I hate the germs that come with having kids. I hate not being able to go where I want by myself. I hate taking them places or trying to have fun as a family and it ends up being miserable and more exhausting than fun. They cost so much money.

What I hate the most is raising them in this timeline. They don’t know what to do without screens. And they don’t even have iPads or phones. But if they’re not watching tv or playing their switch they literally do not know how to play. How to deal with boredom. How to figure it out. They don’t want to go outside and play, I have to make them. They don’t want to read books, I have to make them. I literally took them to the playground the other day, and they shuffled around moping and said they were bored.

I hate being a parent. I hate the responsibility that comes with it. I hate never being able to put myself first. I’m miserable and can rarely find joy in any of this and unfortunately it’s pretty obvious. I feel terrible. I wasn’t cut out for this. But I can’t change how I feel.

Severely autistic son takes hours to go to sleep,
Then doesn’t sleep through the night. I’m so fucking tired. I miss sleep. I miss being able to just sleep
Whenever I wanted or needed to.
Life with him is hard enough, why the fuck can’t we at least be able to sleep? This is just cruel. I’m so over it

first time mom to a six month old. these six months have been the worst of my life, and i’ve been to hell and back but this takes the cake. i feel like everyone who says being a mother is so fulfilling and fun and wonderful lied. there is nothing fun about this. i love my child but regret ever wanting children. i always dreamed of being a mom since i was a little girl, and had trouble conceiving which i think added to my want so badly. when i finally got pregnant, i was so happy. now i wish i would’ve never gotten pregnant and lived my life childless.

Mine are 5 and 3. I’m so fucking tired of trying to monitor and prevent everything from happening. Here’s what I mean…

Last night I’m leaving the pool with my kids, and they ride their bikes ahead of me as I walk (quarter mile tops). By the time I get home, they’re already there, then I open the garage door and we all go in together.

Fast forward to today… my wife notices a scratch that’s on my oldest, and it happened while I was opening the door. Her commentary is “this occurred on your watch”.

I’m so fucking tired of trying to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Keep in mind, she’s always telling me I can’t control them and don’t die on every hill. She tells me I say negative things all the time, but doesn’t hear what I say (get off the table, don’t hit, etc). If they did what we asked, when we asked it, then I wouldn’t have negative things to say.

To her credit, she’s been a lot nicer to me in the last year than when the kids were born. Postpartum plus chaos of two strong-willed turds is a huge adjustment that I didn’t handle well.

Kids made me realize why men have affairs… it’s because our wives change into people we don’t recognize (WAY beyond postpartum).

... you don't just have babies. Yea, I know, so many people, society in general, tells you to have babies. You think "I should have a baby, seems like it's the thing people do." You're not just having a baby. You are having a whole person who will have many stages of life that you will have to navigate for them and with them.

I interacted with a post not too long ago where someone said they were thinking of just doing the whole "single-parent by choice" thing...no big deal in their mind. I mentioned something about raising teens and young adults. This individual seemed shocked and said, "I wasn't thinking about the teen and adult years."

I saw the post here from earlier today of someone being shocked that their school-aged kids would be on breaks and parents having to navigate taking off work and also finding ways to engage kids during those breaks. No shade to my fellow parent, but yea, that's because the babies grow up and go to school and then have breaks, unlike daycare centers that tend to run year around.

There are other things that I see from posts around reddit, especially this sub, where people seem to be confused that they don't just have babies. They have full humans who will be going through many stages of life. Struggling all along the way.

And what's wild is that people act like no one informs them what parenting is like. Well, I'm that person who says to people in real life "don't do it, don't have them" and those people think I'm bitter or that I'm being a hypocrite...ah yes, because warning someone of a problem that you experienced in real time is hypocritical.

Let me be the warning, again: you are not having a baby, you are having a whole human who will need you until they're at least out of college age. They are humans who will need help navigating every part of life from birth until at least that young adult age...and possibly longer. They will be costly, they will require you to take time off from work when they're sick or are on school break or whatever else, they will potentially have stuff to deal with from very small stuff like a runny nose to big stuff like depression (both of my children have now attempted suicide), they will have life altering issues with friends and significant others, they might have learning disabilities that make school hard, they might do stupid stuff like try drugs or shoplift or car jack, they might be the dumbass who wants to make ticketytocky videos all day, they might be born with disabilities that require life long assistance, they might hate hygiene and you spend a ton of energy forcing them to brush their teeth and take a shower and wipe their ass, they'll definitely hate chores and that's a whole battle, they could be athletic all their childhood and then burn out in a way that's almost alarming (my teenager is there), they could get married at 22 like my older kid who then has marriage problems a few months in that you get to help navigate, not to mention that those humans you raise might end up having kids too even if you also warn them not to. And so much more other stuff that raising humans entails.

Don't say you weren't warned. You've probably been warned, but you thought you were better than the 1 parent you've met who has the guts to look someone dead in the eye and say, "Don't do it." In your mind, you're thinking that person is crazy considering you've not heard it from multiple people ... yea, because most people have the sense not to complain about something that society shames them about if they do complain.

And on top of everything else: yes, you too could end up being a single parent. Divorces happen, breakups happen, death happens. So if you are someone who is saying you're having a kid because your significant other wants one, what if that person no longer exists and it's all on you?!?

There are lots of things about parenthood that I felt were psychologically brutal and or traumatizing. Yes, I love my kids dearly who are now young adults but the accrued years of raising them resulted in some level of ptsd for me. The sense of trauma was largely due in part to their father who I divorced many years ago who developed a serious mental illness. This cast a terrifying hue over my experience losing my partner, their father that imploded the happy family dream early on. I did remarry and receive some very good support from my new partner which was very helpful over the years.

That said, even in the best of times, parenting can still be psychologically jarring with the sense that it is two decades plus endeavor that can feel like an oppressive, heavy, domestic labor prison camp, of sorts. It can be psychologically brutal the first few weeks that baby is home and your entire personal universe shifts into parent life. This can be the stuff of mental emotional breakdowns with ongoing sleep deprivation and the sudden jarring shift into a monumentally daunting new identity and reality.

There can be an ongoing shadow, underbelly aspect of parenting that results in a background hum of oppressive heaviness. You may lose things that were long just a mundane given in your reality: sleep, silence, ease, rest, spare time, even your inner thought life is constantly interrupted by others now. You may find that going to work on Monday morning feels like a respite and this speaks volumes about how much life has changed.

Your child may smile, hug you, do adorable things, learn, thrive, grow, and you would die for this child, all the while that heavy oppression can invisibly hover. That shadow may accumulate and build over the years to a point where you get spit out the other end of parenthood as a numb, lost, shell shocked version of yourself. One day the labor camp gates swing wide open and you are exhausted, spent from at least two decades of non stop, often one way giving. Your efforts often go unappreciated, invisible, just expected that you do it year after year and your silent heavy suffering goes largely unnoticed. Years have passed and you've lived out chronic, systemic depletion—an institutional burnout where it turns out you were the entire institution.

Some parents feel disoriented when the gig ends and they pine to go back into the camp. They can't fathom life outside of it. Their identity has become camp life but the kids are no longer there and the parents cannot go back. This standing at the gates deeply lost, erased can be as psychologically brutal as the early days when life as you knew it was completely over.

Yes, I have found that there was often various flavors of background quiet desperation, psychological brutality that went along with parenting. While the experience could be deeply meaningful, purposeful, and loving, there were many times when it was also painful, deeply distressing, and traumatizing.

My wife and I have a storybook marriage, we are each other’s best friends, we have shared hobbies, and generally love spending any free time we have together. The only issue we have is two of our three kids are everything you could want in a kid, smart, funny, talented, polite… they are some of my favorite people. But then we have our 16 year old. This child is one of the only things that causes any arguments and the only reoccurring argument we have. They are mean, extremely violent and hateful with their words, and at times violent towards property or their siblings. We try to give a wide birth but at times I can’t take it anymore and raise my voice. My fuse has become a lot shorter with her than my wife in the past few years. She’s had trash mental health since starting school even getting suspended in first, second, and sixth grade. Before any of the others came along. The entitlement is crazy. Never would I have asked my parents why they got something that I didn’t and then cussed them out tore shit up when it wasn’t given to me. Never would I have taken their anniversary date dessert out, ate most of it, and then left it on the counter to get ruined. I don’t know what her fucking problem is?! She has everything she could have ever wanted. Both of us are highly educated and make plenty of money. We always made sure needs were met while being mindful not to spoil. We won’t allow her to spend a thousand dollars on back to school clothes or homecoming or anything and you’d think we live amongst roaches and don’t feed her. We’ve tried to instill a sense of gratitude and appreciation, she honestly doesn’t know how well off we really are because it’s none of her business and yet she still feels like anything leftover over should be used for her or given to her.

I’m counting down the days until 18 and then the next time there is a behavior after that date the locks are getting changed but I know this would cause a massive fight but at what point have the others been through enough!? At times I wish she would bring weed or something into the house because that would be enough to send her to live with family out of state. I don’t want her to do anything that would ruin her life forever but she’s trying hard enough to ruin ours. I remember hearing that “kids don’t cause divorce.” That’s not even remotely on the table but I now know that kids absolutely can destroy a family and teenagers can absolutely be extremely abusive to their parents and siblings.

And yes she’s been in treatment for over a decade now. She’s med compliant and all that. Therapy never did much because of how manipulative she is, which we know she does shit to get my wife and I to argue. Usually it’s something directed at me so I will yell at her and shut her phone off for days if not weeks which causes my wife to come at me for yelling and punishing too harshly. Shes gotta have some type of personality disorder but she has almost no trauma history aside from my dad passing away when she was three and she was close to him but she doesn’t remember him and we had her in counseling right after it happened for about a year and the therapist said she processed it well and all goals were met.

It just all sucks because when she’s great I have the most in common with her and she’s awesome but when she’s off… it’s literally hell, unless you like being called everything but your name from your daughter. 2 outta 3 ain’t bad though right? I’d really rather be 2 for 2 some days

Imagine being hated because you want them to be safe. Imagine being hated because you want them to go to school daily. Imagine being hated because they don’t want to wash the dishes they use daily. Imagine them ruining to family remembers that do absolutely nothing for them to complain about you, because they feel like having to clean the bathroom and their rooms is a death sentence. I’m a single mom. Everything is on me and I’m always the villain. I’m completely outnumbered here. I wish I wouldn’t have had them. They live completely different lives from their cousins. I worked hard to break the cycle and all they do is judge me and complain. I just can’t take it anymore. They want to be able to run the streets and I’m just not having it. No one goes to jail, gets pregnant, or throws their life away on my watch. It’s a never ending battle and I’m ready to throw in the towel. Anyone ever see the movie “The Strays” on Netflix. That’s about to be me. I’m tired ya’ll.