Angsty question- feel free to ignore if you want.
Historically, dads yelling has always been a very not-good sound. Especially to girls.
What happened the first time Steve or Eddie (or both) yelled? Not even at the girls; it could’ve been a heated argument they were having.
How old were the girls? What did they do? How did Steve and Eddie feel? What did they do?
oooh okay i definitely took my time mulling over this one bc i wanna make sure i’m getting my wording right
(and reading this back i’m realizing i kind of don’t really answer your actual question hope that’s okay lol)
I think a really important facet of this is that (in this ‘verse) Steve is a licensed and practicing trauma counselor. Not only does he know how harmful (and counter-productive) yelling can be, he also knows all sorts of other methods for communication that are just better.
It’s not that the girls don’t ever piss him off or do stupid shit and get in trouble – he just knows way more effective ways to get them to realize oh shit, I fucked up than by yelling at them.
(I think if anything, he could be a stress-yeller, but by the time he and Eddie start fostering kids, he’s been through so much shit that he doesn’t really ever hit that stress threshold anymore).
And then, I think with Eddie, he’s still as dramatic as ever even in middle-aged adulthood, and I think he gets loud about things pretty much regardless of the emotion behind it, so the girls aren’t super phased by it if/when he does get loud from a place of anger or frustration. I also feel like Eddie tends to defer to Steve when it comes to the heavier parts of parenthood, precisely because he knows that Steve is coming at it from a place of clinical expertise in a way that he himself isn’t. Steve isn’t a yeller, so neither is Eddie. Maybe if Steve had been more inclined to yell, Eddie would be too.
Same thing applies with Steve and Eddie’s communication with each other – they don’t really get into screaming matches over shit, but when they do argue or have disagreements or conflict or whatever, they get mean, and I think this is where there could be some problems.
Like, they can throw some serious barbs at each other when they want to (and they’ve known each other for a long time so they’ve got plenty of ammo), and when the girls are little, it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment that they actually can understand what their dads are saying.
Hence why, a few hours after an argument (about nothing – they were just both in pissy moods at the same time, and with Hazel not even five months old yet they’re not really getting much sleep which doesn’t help things at all), Steve finds three-year-old Robbie crying in her room, and when he asks her what’s wrong, she whimpers, “Moe said you and Daddy are gonna get a divorce.”
And, fuck, Moe is only six, and Steve didn’t know that she even knew what divorce was (though it’s possible he and Eddie had gossiped a little too close to the sun about one of their neighbors’ divorce earlier that same week, so maybe that one's on them), and the notion that her brain had been able to make that connection from the things she'd heard earlier had Steve feeling like the worst guy on the planet.
Then, when they sat down with the older two girls to make sure they knew that everything was fine and no one was getting divorced, it only got worse because Moe started repeating back to them the shitty things they had said to each other, and there’s a special kind of shame in hearing word-for-word the vitriol he’d directed at Eddie – who he loves; no argument could ever change that – coming out of his kindergartener’s mouth.
Yeah, so anyways, I don’t really think yelling would necessarily be an issue with them, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some real flaws in their communication that stick with the girls.
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I was thinking back on my Tumblr fandom journey, and does anyone remember that brief, so brief moment when...
"You're not gay."
"I could be."
"Not dressed like that, you're not."
was a hilarious father/son moment when John Noah caught Stiles snooping before it was something that was nailed to the cross of things we had to give up as being fun pokes at the queer-coded character being truly queer and collected as examples of microaggressions and insinuations that he was only queer-coded because it was "funny" if everyone thought he was queer but he wasn't? Like that's in any way acceptable.
Also, don't forget, "There is a bible."
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