The Matt Walsh Show
Correcting Bad Parenting Advice | Matt Walsh Reads Reddit Stories
Sat, 18 Jan 2025
Matt Walsh takes to Reddit to react to parenting advice questions and correct the bad advice they receive. - - - Today’s Sponsor: PDS Debt - PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/walsh
I could not go on without you Lisa. You're scaring me. You are lying. I never hit you. You are tearing me apart, Lisa. Okay, we're ready, Matt.
Okay, as we do some times here, we're going to take a look at... Go over to Reddit, where people often go seeking advice. Advice in many different areas of their life. But in particular, this is somewhere where parents will go looking for advice, which is like the worst possible place to go. And so...
We're going to go through some of these questions, and they may be looking for advice from strangers on Reddit, but instead they're going to get advice from me, which, as you know, the advice that I give is at least a little better than what you'll get from random people on Reddit. So I'll say that much for myself. Okay, there's this one, says, I can't wait for today to be over every day.
I'm literally wishing away my life and time with my toddler while she's still so young. I can't wait for her to go to bed every night. This is a me problem, not her. She's amazing, fun, and funny, a good sleeper, good eater, generally very well behaved, but I'm overwhelmed as a parent, overstimulated, tired, and just want to veg out every night because my brain is too full. I feel so guilty.
Has anyone else felt like this for a long time, like 19 plus months? What did you do? How did you get over it? And reading the responses, and of course everyone is saying, yeah, it's totally normal and okay to feel this way. And that's all you're ever going to get from Reddit. That's all you're going to get from a lot of people, especially the internet.
If you pose a dilemma like this on the internet anywhere, not just on Reddit, you get people encouraging you to continue along a path that you obviously feel bad about.
You're going down a path I can't follow.
Because of Michael Knowles. Now, can any parent relate? Well, yeah, of course. I have found myself on plenty of occasions eagerly awaiting bedtime. But that doesn't mean that it's fine. We actually should not have this attitude as parents. So you should fight against it.
Fight back, you coward! Fight back!
It's okay to want a break. It's okay to be tired and stressed out sometimes. But if you find that you spend every day just anxiously waiting for your kid to be out of your hair, then yeah, that's a problem because you are indeed just wishing your life away. You have to make the choice to enjoy being with your kid.
All done?
We're a culture obsessed with instant gratification. We're the kind of people that we watch a movie and if it doesn't thrill us within the first three minutes, we turn it off. We don't want to expend any effort at all in the pursuit of enjoyment or more precisely of joy. And as a result, we rob ourselves of true joy because true joy requires effort to obtain.
And you got to do that with your kids, which isn't to say that you have to lie to yourself and convince yourself that you enjoy being around them when you don't. It just means you have to try. You have to make the effort. And I mentioned a few days ago, on the show that we played Monopoly two nights in a row during a Christmas break.
Well, that second night, I was not planning to play a board game with my kids because I was having one of those waiting for bedtime type of nights. It was like six o'clock or so. And I was already doing the math of like, my plan was always put a movie on for the kids. And, you know, if the movie is this long, by the time it's over, it'll be bedtime. But then I had to stop and recognize that
this is happening in myself, recognize that this is not the right attitude. And so I said, kind of in spite of myself, you know, let's play Monopoly again. The kids were, of course, thrilled with that. And I did. And we had a fun time. You know, we put the effort in and then once you get into the flow of it, actually ended up having fun and enjoyed it, especially because I won.
Next one says, is it normal to love your child more than your spouse? Ever since the birth of our son, my first and my wife's third, I feel like my relationship with my spouse has taken a backseat.
Maybe it's due to the new dynamic and not having as much time for one another, but I find myself becoming more and more distant from my wife, investing more and more of myself into my relationship with my son. I love my wife and can't imagine not having her in my life, but it feels like every day is a battle with her.
We could never agree or have any sort of meaningful dialogue about how I'm feeling. Is this a normal phase and will it pass? Should I look into counseling? You don't need counseling. You also certainly don't need the counseling of Redditors because once again, a lot of the comments are, yeah, it's normal. You know, this is what it is. Once you have a kid, you love your kid more than your spouse.
This is the response you get from people. Although you don't need counseling for it, I don't think it is wrong. Like you should not love your child more than your spouse. That may be normal in the sense that it's how a lot of families operate these days. But that's why is it normal is the wrong question to ask.
Question is whether it is good, whether it is healthy, whether it is how it ought to be. whether it will make your family stronger, whether it's good for your kids, whether it's good for your spouse. The best thing you can do for your child is to prioritize your wife first.
Good call, baby doll.
I mean, the relationship with your child is important, but it's not what the family is built on. And you can go through seasons with your child, especially I imagine as they get older, where there's some tension, where you're not connecting with your child. I mean, these things are gonna happen through the course of parenting. And that's gonna happen.
It doesn't put the family in jeopardy though, but when you're not prioritizing your spouse, it does. You know what I love about New Year's? It's not just about watching that ball drop or making resolutions we might forget by February. It's about the feeling of possibility, the fresh start we all crave.
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Get a free debt analysis right now at pdsdebt.com slash Walsh. It only takes 30 seconds at pdsdebt.com slash Walsh. pdsdebt.com slash Walsh. Next question says, am I being too dependent on my husband? Today's been tough. It's that time of the month that I'm feeling absolutely miserable. Lightheaded, heart racing, weak. Oh.
I told my husband how I'm feeling.
He said he was concerned, but I also know he's on phase because he says I'm always complaining about something. What's bothering me is right before he left, he mentioned to our two year old that he's going golfing prior to going to work. So basically he was letting me know indirectly, usually asks if he can go golfing, which I always say yes to.
I do sometimes find it annoying when he asks because I'm a default parent. He has the freedom to decide what to do with his free time. He doesn't need my permission, and he doesn't have to plan around anyone's schedule, but he didn't even ask this time. I get it he needs a break, but couldn't he have offered to stay home and help me with the kids?
I'm not expecting him to take care of me, but a little support would be nice. Before he left, he asked what my plan was for when the kids nap, and I said I'd lay down. He just agreed and took off. I feel like I'm being unreasonable, but at the same time, I wish he'd show a bit more empathy. Am I overreacting? I want to focus really on just one part of this.
The real answer here is the obvious one, which is you need to talk to your husband. Just take exactly what you've written on Reddit for strangers to chime in and just say that to your husband. Don't scream it at him. Don't scold him. Just say it. That's a good place to start. Maybe your husband should help you with the kids more.
Maybe from his perspective, you actually get more breaks and have more time off than he does. I don't know. I mean, that's where communication is important, to figure that out. But I do want to home in on the bit about complaining. Your husband says that you're always complaining about something.
I'm going to constantly complain about my fibromyalgia. You don't have fibromyalgia. No one does.
Now, predictably, the Reddit commenters are going to say that your husband is dismissive and uncaring and... What a horrible thing for him to say. And maybe that's the case. But my question is, is he right? Yes. If you don't complain very much at all, but in this case, you're just trying to tell him how you feel, trying to tell him you don't feel well.
And his response is just to blow you off and say that you always complain about something and then go golfing. Well, then he'd be in the wrong. But I have found in my experience that people who have a reputation for always complaining don't. have earned that reputation most of the time by complaining a lot. So what if it's true? Well, then you can't blame your husband for lacking sympathy.
You also can't blame him for wanting to get out of the house and go golfing. People just don't care. How can they care? How can someone care when you're complaining always? At a certain point, it's natural. It's human. Someone goes, okay, what now? We don't talk enough about what complaining can do. Complaining, it's not like infidelity.
It's not going to blow up your marriage in one big dramatic explosion. Complaining is more like, it's more like, it's like rust that eats away gradually. It makes the structure of your marriage weaker and more brittle. And it's just this kind of gnawing, nagging, constant thing. Nobody likes to be around a complainer. It's not a lack of love on their part. It's just that it's literally impossible.
I mean, actually physically impossible to enjoy being around someone who whines and and moans all the time. I understand there's a gender difference here. Women are more prone to complaining.
I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.
Part of that is that women are more expressive, more emotional. They talk more about how they feel, which means that it's always going to be more repulsive and more unattractive for a man to be a whiner than it is for a woman. But that doesn't let women off the hook. Really think about it. Has that become the majority of what you communicate to him? And if so, you are killing your marriage.
You are killing it. You're destroying it. And here's one more thought. If you're prone to talking about your frustrations and burdens, you should also talk about the other side too. You should talk about what makes you happy. When you have a good day, you should talk about that. I think complainers, when the situation really metastasizes, they won't even tell their spouse if they had a good day.
It's like this contest of who's more put upon And that's when the situation is really bad. And that's when you're acting in a way that could be catastrophic for your marriage. So I don't know if any of that is necessarily the case here.
But when I see these kinds of things, when people are talking about their marital disputes and you see this sort of thing just mentioned as an aside, oh, yeah, he says I complain all the time. Anyway, it's like oftentimes it's, wait a minute, that right there, that's something there. That's not in any way. And you move on. When someone you know and love That's it. Great shot.