My Husband Has an Unrealistic Expectation About Our 4-Year-Old’s Clothes. I Can’t Keep Up.

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband “Tom” and I have one child, “Billy.” He’s 4 and super cute. It has always been very important to Tom that Billy has nice clean clothes. I’ve always been on board with this, but Tom and I have different definitions of “clean.”

Even when Billy was a baby and we were home all the time, Tom would insist on changing him into fresh clothes if he got any formula drops on his clothing. Now that Billy is in preschool, Tom is focused on Billy’s clothes being pristine at dropoff (Tom drives him each morning). But I find this to be basically impossible. Even if I keep Billy in his pajamas and change him right before it’s time to go out the door, he will inevitably want one last bite of peanut butter toast that he’ll then smear on his clothes, or he will insist on taking a banana in the car that ends up smushed. Obviously I try to clean him up as best I can, but Tom gets really upset when he has any food on his clothes. This is getting frustrating for me. It’s impossible to keep a child’s clothes pristine, right? Am I missing a trick here?

—Realistic About Kid Clothes

Dear Realistic,

If there’s a way to keep a 4-year-old’s clothes spotless, I certainly don’t know it. You’re already doing one of the things I would have suggested, which is changing Billy into school clothes right before he leaves. I’d also try to nix the last-minute peanut butter and the car banana—if he insists on bringing something in the car, give him a granola bar or a little bag of dry cereal or something less messy. I’m thinking not just of his clothes, here, but your car upholstery.

I genuinely believe that parents of little kids shouldn’t torture themselves by sweating the small stuff! But as you’re learning, many of us have those little things that needle us more than they should. Despite telling many, many parents of toddlers that they should give themselves a break and lower their clean-house standards, I was always unable to unwind or go to bed with toys and books strewn all over the floor—too much clutter reminds me of my chaotic messy home growing up. It wasn’t something I could easily ignore, so we developed a system for tidying up that took around two minutes every evening, and then I could actually relax.

Have you asked your husband why it’s so important to him that you keep your 4-year-old’s clothes spotless? Have you noticed him being a bit obsessed with other aspects of tidiness, or getting distressed when he’s unable to control his environment? Understanding what’s behind this obsession might help you figure out whether it’s something he can get over with your encouragement, or something you may need to try to be understanding about. I will also add that if Tom is going to get upset about the state of Billy’s clothes, he could be the one to take charge of helping your son get dressed and out the door in the morning.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have a 6-year-old autistic daughter, “Jenna.” She’s beautiful and brilliant and I love her and love being her mom, but I’m definitely doing parenting on hard mode. She is non-speaking and requires a lot of support for her daily needs. We recently moved to a new city for my husband’s work, so Jenna and I are meeting a lot of new people in the neighborhood, at the YMCA, at school. I’m very open about Jenna’s autism and disability. People are often curious about her—she wears ear defenders, carries around a large stuffed animal, and is often jumping and moving her arms around and humming. I’m always very happy to explain: “Jenna is autistic, and dancing and singing is how she expresses herself.” Kids usually get it immediately. But more and more, the adults I meet will say things like, “Oh, well, we’re all a bit autistic, aren’t we?” Or “My nephew is autistic! He’s at MIT now!” Or “It’s evolutionary—autistic people are more evolved than we are.” I get that people are just trying to connect. But sometimes it also feels like they’re trying to erase Jenna’s experience, and ours, by minimizing her disability or implying that she isn’t disabled or won’t be forever, and something about that is really irking me. I wonder if you have any suggestions for how to respond, or at least how to reframe these comments so they annoy me less.

—Jenna’s Mom

Dear Jenna’s Mom,

As a fellow parent of an autistic daughter, I don’t have a go-to response for all the wild things we hear. Each and every time someone says something, I have to decide whether and how I’m going to respond in the moment. It depends on the person and the context, right? If the weird or oversimplified remark is coming from a stranger you don’t want to continue to talk to, the most expedient move is to find a way to end the conversation—a noncommittal “hmm” and finding a reason to be elsewhere are my go-tos in such situations. I don’t see this as backing down so much as reclaiming my time. It is not your job or mine to educate everyone we meet about autism. Nor is anyone automatically entitled to the kind of detailed explanations that might make your daughter’s individual situation clearer to them.

However you want or choose to respond to others in the moment, I think it can be helpful to acknowledge how their well-meaning if clumsy—or ignorant—comments make you feel. The first person I vent to after a weird autism-related interaction is my spouse; we share an eyeroll, maybe a sarcastic remark or two, and sometimes I will say what I might have said to the person had I felt like wasting my time and energy arguing with a stranger. Then I move on until the next time it happens.

The world is full of people who don’t really know your daughter, and won’t be able to see or fully grasp her experience. Most won’t be actively trying to “erase” her disability; they just won’t understand all the ways that it affects her life, in part because they’re only observing her in passing, at school or in the store or on the playground. Every single autistic person is unique, obviously, and yet that won’t stop some ignorant people from assuming that she must be just like some other autistic kid they know. But you know your daughter, and you see and support and love her as she is. That’s the part of all this that you can control. It’s also the part that matters most.

—Nicole

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