Hellobee

Over the past year, I’ve struggled with the “Mommy Preference”: the intense preference that Charlie has developed at times for his mommy when he is doing any of his daily rituals:

• Drinking his morning bottle
• Reading a book together
• Dropping him off at daycare
• Picking him up from daycare
• Taking his evening bath together
• Drinking his evening bottle
• Waking up in the middle of the night

Now I can understand wanting your mommy when you’re not feeling well… but it’s just depressing when your kid wakes up at 4:30 am and you trudge out of bed to get him, and the first thing you hear is, “No Daddy, I want Mommy!”  Charlie’s Mommy Preference has really flared up twice: first when he was around 11 months, and then around a year later when baby Olive arrived; he got jealous of all the time that Mommy spent with Olive, and that put him seriously onto Team Mommy. This occurred even though I was Charlie’s primary caretaker at the time.  It was very demoralizing.

So over the past few months, I’ve been forced to develop a set of techniques to regain Charlie’s love and get him back on Team Daddy.  Ahem, ok that’s an important point: parental preference doesn’t necessarily mean your LO loves one parent more. But sometimes it’s hard to remember that!

Armed with these techniques, any rejected dads out there should hopefully have a better shot at conquering the Mommy Preference!

1. Pick a daily ritual, and own it

It took me a while not to take rejection personally. But over time, I learned that kids LOVE routine in their daily rituals. If Mommy usually gives Charlie his daily bath, he is going to want his mom to do it every time. That’s not necessarily a mommy preference; it’s a preference for a specific routine.

So how do you overcome that? We had luck picking one daily ritual, and phasing in a new routine for it. Here are three phases that have worked for us at the Bee home:

Phase 1: Be in the room together: After Charlie got sick, he REALLY preferred for his mom to give him his daily bath. Sometimes he didn’t even want me in the room!  I think my presence was a sign to him that his routine would be disrupted.  So for Phase 1, we let Bee do the baths but I was just in the room until he got used to that. I would just brush my teeth and do random other things, while Mommy gave Charlie a bath.

Phase 2: Do the ritual together: After a few days, Charlie got more used to having me in the room. So Bee and I would do the baths together.

Phase 3: Do the ritual alone: Finally, it was time for me to give Charlie his bath alone. I had done this for months and months before, so it wasn’t like it was anything new. But that was before the sudden Mommy Preference.  Sure enough, when the bath started, he asked for mommy. So I lied to him and said, “Mommy is coming soon!” (Well it wasn’t a total lie, because if he melted down then Mommy probably would have had to come!) He seemed satisfied with that answer, and the bath proceeded. Soon he got engrossed with his bath toys, and he forgot that mommy wasn’t there for the bath.

One final note: I have found that it’s important to own your daily ritual 100%. If you’re giving your LO a daily bath, you have to give that bath every single day. Consistency makes a big difference.

2. Pretend that your LO’s Mommy Preference reflects a lack of skill on your part

Charlie used to prefer to play with his mommy in the mornings. I thought it was just a standard Mommy Preference, and told myself I wasn’t to blame. Then one day, Bee pointed out that I was passively entertaining Charlie with YouTube and toys, whereas she was actively engaging him in his imaginary world. He had transitioned to a world of imaginative play, and I had totally missed it!

After that, I decided to embrace that Charlie’s preference might just be his oh-so-subtle way of telling me that I had no skillz as a dad – at least when it came to active imaginative play. So I started actively developing those skills, and found that it made a huge difference.

Charlie loves it when I enter his imaginary world, and we play together with him inside his imagination. Here are the top ways I’ve learned to do that:

* Drawing Together: I will take a sheet of paper, and draw together with Charlie. I draw his favorite characters (Barney, Elmo), trace his hands with crayons (which he LOVES), and draw his favorite things for him so he can identify them (cars, helicopters, fire trucks, etc.). I also encourage him to draw and color, and talk about what he’s drawing and coloring.  He can’t get enough of this type of imaginative play together.

* Identifying Things: Charlie loves to identify things, so I do things with him where he can actively identify things. For example, we will watch this Freddy Mercury/Google animation together and he loves to shout out things as they appear (Tiger! Car! Jump! Hat! Hand!). Or he has flashcards, and we will go through them together while he’s sitting in my lap. Or we will read a book, but rather than focus on the story, we will identify things in the pictures. He gets SOO excited when he identifies something correctly, so doing this together allows that excitement to rub off on his relationship with dad.

* Reading Books: With just a few tricks, I’ve had luck at greatly deepening my bond with Charlie while reading books. First off, I always sit in Charlie’s favorite chair and have him pick out a book to bring to me. He loves that feeling of control, even if he’s choosing from three books that I’ve pre-selected. Then we have a ritual where he sits down on my lap and then we both lie back together. That physical intimacy really helps create a magical environment for us to enjoy the book together.

The other thing I do is slightly change the words of the books to reflect Charlie’s favorite things. For example, we read The Wonderful Pumpkin many times a week. The first page has two bears eating honey together. Charlie doesn’t know what honey is, but he loves soup. So I change the words so that the bears are eating SOUP and with a SPOON (Charlie loves utensils). That makes that page so much more enjoyable for him. I make these changes each and every time we read the story, so that he has consistency. Charlie literally shouts SOUP now every time we open The Wonderful Pumpkin to the first page… it’s awesome and his excitement and smile melts my heart.

One note: Charlie has always enjoyed it when I roughhouse with him, but I’ve learned to ease off on that. I don’t think it creates the sort of bond with him that I’ve been able to create with him by entering his imaginary world and playing in it. And no matter how much I carry him around the house like I’m a horsey, he always wants more horsey and frankly it’s just exhausting. So I’ve cut back on that, and found our relationship deepening as we spend that time doing these other activities together.

3. Get a lot of alone time, and create rituals together

Probably the best way to break a Mommy preference is to get some alone time. It works even better if you can create a new ritual that you do together.

When it was nicer out in the spring and summer, I would take Charlie with me to a nearby cafe here in Brooklyn. After walking there together, I would order him a iced (decaf) cafe latte and we would share it while we sat at a table together.

He loved it, and it was our special ritual that we would do together. Even now, whenever we pass the street where the cafe is located, he will cry out “COFFEE!” and point to our cafe.

As the leaves turned and it became fall, we turned our walks into pumpkin hunts. We would walk around our neighborhood and hunt for Halloween pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns on the brownstone stoops. If we saw one, he would shout out “PUMPKIN!!” and we would count how many pumpkins there were. Charlie absolutely loved this game, and to this day whenever he sees a pumpkin he will cry out “PUMPKIN 1, 2, 3!” with a huge smile. It transformed our daily walks into a hunt/adventure, and it really deepened our relationship.

As the year got colder, the pumpkins disappeared and my walks with Charlie felt a bit less fun. So to bring the magic back, I turned our Pumpkin Hunts into Christmas Tree Hunts. Every time he spots a Christmas Tree with lights, he shouts out “CHRISTMAS TREE!” It has brought a sense of adventure back into our walks, and I can always cheer up Charlie by suggesting we go on a Christmas Tree Hunt.

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At this point, we have transitioned most of Charlie’s daily rituals back over to me so that Bee can focus on baby #2. On a daily basis, we do the following together:

• Drinking his morning bottle
• Reading a book together (Bee and I both do this one)
• Dropping him off at daycare
• Picking him up from daycare (Bee often joins, and we do this together!)
• Taking his evening bath together
• Drinking his evening bottle (Bee does this one)
• Waking up in the middle of the night (thankfully he doesn’t do this too often any more)

Charlie and I have really bonded again, and our relationship is stronger than ever. We had a really strong relationship when he was younger, but things took a hit when the Mommy Preference kicked in. But after implementing the above, we’re in a much better place now and I can honestly say that we’ve largely overcome the Mommy Preference again. He doesn’t prefer me, but he also doesn’t beg for Mommy when we do stuff together.

That is, unless he’s sick… in which case he will want his mommy. But who can compete with that?

Has your family wrestled with a Parental Preference? How did you guys manage it?