My husband and kids are coming upstairs. I'm in the kitchen preparing lunch and it sounds like my husband is having a rough time compelling my daughter up the stairs. He's losing his patience and my daughter is starting to freak out. Suddenly I hear my daughter cry and she runs up the stairs.   

"Daddy hurt me!" she yells, crying and hugging my legs.

Let me make sure you understand something: We don't hit our kids. My husband has never laid a hand on our kids in anger or discipline, so my guess is that he was carrying our son up the stairs and stumbled over our daughter. So the issue here isn't that my husband beats our kids, because he most certainly does not.

No, the issue here is how my husband reacts to this situation. Suddenly he's in front of me, saying, "I didn't hurt her! I didn't hurt her!" He sounds like our three-year-old son. For a brief moment, I have three kids instead of two. This is a common scenario when my husband gets frustrated with our daughter. His reasoning and reaction is temporarily comparable to a preschooler. It's maddening.

I wish he would remain the adult when dealing with our kids. I understand sometimes losing patience and getting frustrated, but my first instinct when my daughter is hurt is to help her to feel better and then deal with the details afterwards.

I'm not going to stand over her and argue whether she's really hurt or not. I'm going to make sure she's okay and then talk about what happened. If I had stumbled over her on the stairs I would apologize profusely instead of expending so much energy making sure everyone around me knew that it wasn't my fault.

In an instance like this where my daughter is hurt and my husband is also seeking my attention, my first priority will always be my daughter.  I don't know if that makes me a bad wife, but my husband is an adult and my daughter is four. Who would you turn your attention to?