James' World 2

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Is building up your co-parent in the eyes of your children part of being a good parent? This question had not occurred to me until recently. Over the past year, as my older son has become a teen, my husband has made it a habit to build me up in my children’s esteem. “Isn’t Mom the best?” he will ask them, rhetorically, when I do ordinary acts of parental service like buying someone new shoes or driving someone somewhere they need to go. “Be nice to Mom!” he will remonstrate when either child tries to give me an attitude.

You might assume that this has pleased me a great deal, but in truth, I haven’t always known what to think about it. At first, I felt ambivalent, like it was playing into a vaguely patriarchal form of mother-worship, “angel of the hearth” and all that. I also felt uncertain when my husband praised me around our sons because I knew I wasn’t returning the favor for him.

When I think about why I was hesitant to gas up my husband around my children, it’s not at all because he didn’t deserve it. It’s because I never witnessed this kind of behavior among adults when I was growing up, and it didn’t feel natural to me. My parents split up when I was young, and they were effortfully amicable, but the dramas of their own lives absorbed them, and they rarely appeared to make deliberate choices about how they communicated to me about each other. What I mostly watched them do, when I was young, was cope.

Meanwhile, I was highly skeptical of all adults. I assumed adult behavior was always in service of a selfish agenda. If either of my parents had ever praised the other to me, I would have suspected something horrible was about to happen — that one of them was on the verge of a nervous breakdown or was about to make a dreadful announcement that would seriously complicate my life. The possibility of thinking, “Dad’s right — Mom really is the best, and I should remember to treat her that way,” was nowhere near my repertoire of possible experiences.

But much to my amazement, my husband’s remarks have made a noticeable difference, and our children have started treating me with more consideration. They thank me often and ask me how my day was. They sincerely appear to see me more clearly as a person who works hard to give them a happy life. It is astonishing to me that all my husband had to do was explain this to them, and remind them to notice it, and they did. I had no idea it could work that simply.

Gassing up your co-parent in front of your children is a loaded act in this era where domestic equality is contested on a granular daily basis, to the degree that who replaces the toilet-paper roll can be a meaningful piece of evidence in a case for who is and is not showing up. If you’re trying to untangle your home life from the norms and expectations that have gagged and bound mothers for centuries, it might seem counterintuitive to make a habit out of shouting out your partner. But creating an equitable home can be counterintuitive in many ways — some of our intuition is, after all, steeped in centuries of bad compromises. I think part of me was equating spousal praise with compensation for unfair labor. But I’ve realized that praise can be as much in the service of equality as in the reinforcement of outmoded roles.

There are so many ways of developing a political consciousness in children that are little more than glorified consumer choices — Little Feminist board books, anyone? —  but teaching by example is what we all aspire to do. A political consciousness begins with noticing the gears that make community work, and I wonder if praising your co-parent is a way of revealing some of that to children, by teaching them to show gratitude for what sustains them. Could praising our co-parents actually, on a micro level, be a political act?

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Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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