I’d Already Done More for My Brother’s Kids Than He Ever Did for Mine. Then I Got a Scathing Email.

Care and Feeding He had some choice words for me. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, I was an “oops” baby, born the summer after my mom graduated and my dad was going to be a senior in high school. They got married after my dad graduated, and although life was tough, they made a go of it and had my brother, “Tyler,” when they were more financially stable. He’s 10 years younger than I am. This 10-year age difference meant that when I got married and had kids (twin girls, then a boy a year later), Tyler was in high school, then off to college, and basically unaware of what my wife and I were dealing with in juggling three small children, work, and life in general. Yesterday, my wife and I got a scathing email from Tyler and his wife, “Jamie.” They were upset that the “village” (my quotes) that is expected to help raise their children (they have two: a 10-month-old and a 2-year-old) has not been provided. They were aggrieved that we don’t understand how hard things are or how much they’re struggling. Their in-home daycare provider takes the week around the 4th of July and the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. Since we know that, and we know they want to save their vacation days to visit her parents (who live far away), how is it that we didn’t offer to take vacation days ourselves and watch the kids for them? And then the kicker: Last week, they wanted to go to a music festival, Friday night through Sunday evening, and asked us to watch the kids. Our son was in a tournament, so we said we couldn’t. They seemed unable to understand that taking a baby and a toddler to an all-day tournament wouldn’t work for us. We are more than happy, when it works for our schedule, to watch the kids for a few hours so they can have a date night or things of that nature. But what they’re asking of us is unreasonable. I do understand their wish to save vacation days so they can spend time with my sister-in-law’s parents, but they can go for one week instead of three. Don’t ask (expect?) us to burn through our own limited vacation time. I also recognize that they have no other family to rely on. Her parents live 12 hours away, and my parents, for a constellation of reasons, are unable to help. The problem is that Tyler has no idea about the struggles we went through. For several years, my wife and I worked staggered shifts to cut down on daycare costs. Our vacation time was spent either when we didn’t have daycare or when our kids were sick. Attending a music festival would have been a luxury we would not have been able to even consider. And, of course, Tyler was not part of a “village” for us, the way he wants us to be for his family. I would love to send a scathing email back detailing our own struggles and telling him how lucky he and his wife are to have us to help out at all, not to mention they have such things as family sick days that didn’t even exist when my kids were young. Before I do something rash like that, any other ideas? —Not My Brother’s Kids’ Keeper Dear Not, I understand your impulse to tell your brother off. What he’s been expecting of you is unfair, insensitive to your own family situation, and, yes, tone deaf—demonstrating a pretty breathtaking self-centeredness in its failure to consider what your experience as parents of small children must have been like. But I’d resist that impulse if possible. I don’t mean “be stoic, suffer in silence, and just take what he dishes out.” I mean: Instead of a scathing email, intended to make him feel as bad as possible, the result of which will almost certainly be his clapping back, steadily increasing aggrievedness and anger on both sides, a further rift between you and your (only?) sibling, and perhaps ultimately an estrangement (as has become disconcertingly commonplace), try reaching out with a nonscathing email, or better yet a proper letter that you take your time to write and revise—or even a conversation in person, if you can count on yourself to keep your cool. You can tell him that you know how hard it is to juggle child-rearing and work without a network of support because you went through it yourself, years ago. You don’t have to say, “Ha! Now it’s your turn!” You can say, “Every stage of parenting—every stage of life!—brings its own challenges. I know you’re frustrated. I get frustrated too.” And, “Of course we want to help out when we can—take the kids so you can have an evening out from time to time, when we’re able—just as I know you’d be glad to help us out within the bounds of what you’re able to do.” I think you can leave unspoken (but loudly implied) that much of what he’s demanding of you is utterly unreasonable. You can keep your tone neutral, nonapologetic, matter-of-fact, and still get your point across. Your point being not We suffered, so how dare you complain to us, much less make these demands of us? but We empathize with you. Take a moment now to do the same for us. We all have our hands full. If the response to this is more anger, step away for now. Tell Tyler you’re sorry he’s so angry, that you love him, that you’d like it very much if the two of you could come to an understanding, but that you’re doing the best you can—and you won’t continue to be berated for not doing enough. Then the ball’s in his court. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, I’ve been through my share of parenting chaos, but I’m finding that the biggest parenting challenges I’m facing are from a kid who isn’t mine! Across-the-Street Kid (let’s call her “Julia”) is around the age of my eldest, who is 14. The two don’t really get along, which we all just accept as a fact of life. Julia’s got a whole confluence of not-great adult situations informing her life, and it sucks for her. Her adults really don’t grasp that their authoritarian, non-nurturing, unsupportive parenting style isn’t working, and that when they get stricter, she just gets sneakier. And being sneakier is getting her into deeper water all the time. I have tried to be a safe place for her as well as a source of factual information. She’s shown up in tears after some pretty ugly family arguments; when this happens, I let her adults know she’s safe and suggest some cool-down time. Frankly, these arguments are bad but not call-the-cops abusive. (In crisis, I should add, my kids rally, setting up a place for her to sleep and making sure she’s got clothes for the next day, etc. … but they also see her as a case study in what-to-not do/be.) Julia is a kid who needs help, and I offer what I can. I word things carefully with her adults because I want to be able to continue to be a safe option for her, rather than risk her actually running away. (“She needs to cool off” usually means “you adults need to cool off too,” but I don’t say that.) Lately, she’s made it clear to me that she is sexually active. (I keep a stash of emergency contraceptives, and she asked for one. And yeah, I gave it to her.) After a discussion that covered enthusiastic consent, force, coercion, consent-with-regrets-later, STIs, and some good old adult caution about “taking care of your body,” I now keep a stash of condoms where she can access them without asking, because risk mitigation is about the best I can do. But I am worried that Julia has been raised with such limited praise plus the requirement for immediate obedience that she’s set up to be taken advantage of by anyone with a kind word for her. I don’t know what else I can do for her. I don’t know if what I’m doing already is the right thing. I wish I had a magic wand that would help her and her family—that would make them do right by her. I’ve spent some time just having her say, “NO” in role-play scenarios so that she hears her own voice saying the word once in a while, and not just the adults she lives with, who say nothing but no. Is there anything else I can do? —Neighbor Mom Dear Neighbor, I hate to say this, because I wholeheartedly believe that we are all responsible for the well-being of any children we come across who could use our help (more on this in a minute), but supplying Julia with condoms is a bridge too far in my book. Since non-prescription contraceptives are available to minors in many places (explicitly so in almost half the states in the U.S.), and there are Title X clinics that provide them for free, your wisest course would be to direct her to resources. Of course I understand the impulse to provide her with condoms yourself (and yes, there’s a higher chance she’ll use them if they are so easily in reach), but I think you may be putting in jeopardy your ability to be that “safe place” for Julia, if her parents learn that you’ve been giving her contraceptives. I do think that you’re doing the right thing by having these conversations with her that her parents should have had/be having. There’s a difference, however subtle, between helping to prepare her for navigating the world around her—including her sexual experience—for which no previous adult has taken responsibility, and handing her an actual object that her parents would strenuously object to. Point her to the nearest clinic, or slip her a $20 bill and send her to CVS. But this may be splitting hairs, and is not what I want your main takeaway to be. Helping a neighbor child, or a classmate of one of your own children, who’s been dealt a bad hand in the at-home adult department (or even just being an extra adult to count on for a child whose own personal adults are overwhelmed and doing the best they can), is a truly good deed. A good deed, by my lights, of the highest caliber. My own parents served as an extra set of parents for a high school friend of mine (who ended up spending many nights at our place, when her mother was raging and her father cowering); they treated my best friend of my 20s (and 50 years later, still my best friend), who had parents who were clueless, not cruel—and from whom she’d learned not to expect anything—like an extra daughter, down to buying her her textbooks when she found her way to law school. My father made it a lifelong habit to do everything he could to support and care for the children of others (even “children” in their 20s and 30s) who couldn’t rely on their own parents for the kinds of things his children always knew they could rely on him for. He taught me by example, without ever once proselytizing, to step up when the opportunity presented itself, in any way you could. And so I was an extra parent to many of my own daughter’s friends when she was growing up: a safe place for them to be; a source of factual information, food, and advice; the one kids felt they could come out to, ask hard questions of, and vent to and cry to. Keep doing what you’re doing for Julia. It has already made a big difference in her life. You’ll know when something is too much—your gut will tell you. Listen to it. But you can’t go wrong by offering a child a safe place to spend the night, an ear, lifesaving information, kindness, love. Ever Gotten a Call From Human Resources? Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir want to hear about it—and help you navigate your problems at work. Does your colleague constantly bug you after hours? Has an ill-advised work romance gone awry? Ask us your question here! Dear Care and Feeding, Any suggestions for how to get an almost 6-year-old boy to stop absentmindedly touching himself at every opportunity, without burdening him with a lifetime of shame he’ll later have to unpack in therapy? It seems to me this is probably the sort of thing that comes with the territory of raising a boy, something we need to proactively address with the understanding that he’ll grow out of it. But my husband was raised Catholic, and it is VERY MUCH not OK with him. (It’s also not an issue with our son’s twin brother, so maybe I am minimizing it more than I should?) We try to tell him that he can do whatever he wants in the privacy of his own room/bathroom, but it’s not OK to do in front of other people. But this approach has gotten us nowhere. So most of the time my husband ends up losing his temper, and our son ends up crying. There must be a better way. My husband is hesitant to Google around for answers in fear of what it’ll do to his search suggestions. —What Do We Do About Diddling? Dear Diddling, Your almost 6-year-old is either bored or he’s stimming. Absent other signs of neurodivergence (which includes ADHD), I’d default to an assumption of boredom. (Why does he get bored more easily than his twin? Because even twins are two different people, and different people experience life differently, process and respond differently, and express what they’re feeling differently.) Either way—whether he defaults to fidgeting because he’s bored (which isn’t all that surprising for a boy his age) or it eventually comes to light that he is neurodivergent in some way—I recommend buying an assortment of fidget toys and making sure there is always one in reach. I endorse what you’ve been telling him, and I’d keep repeating that message, but I would also say: “When you’re in the company of other people, not alone in your room, and you have the impulse to touch a part of your body that is private, one that’s not meant to be touched or played with when others are around, play with this instead, OK?” (And maybe buy your husband a fidget toy or two of his own, and suggest that when he feels the impulse to yell at his child for doing something he’s not doing on purpose, and certainly not to instigate his father’s Catholicism-induced anxiety, he try fidgeting instead, too.) —Michelle More Advice From Slate My parents had me very young, and were, as far as I know, happily married until recently. My dad had an affair with a younger woman at work, got her pregnant, and my parents divorced. My mom died shortly afterward in a way that was maybe an accident or maybe suicide, and I’m still grieving her. This all happened around my own wedding and as you can imagine it was messy and sad. Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Family Kids Parenting