My daughter is five and seems to be getting hurt more often than ever. Not only does she refuse to leave the cats alone when they growl at her in warning, resulting in a scratch here and there; she’s also playing more sports, scraping her knees, stubbing her toes, and even falling a bit more than usual. While this rough-and-tumble play is normal—especially for sporty kids like my daughter who love to run and play in the dirt—it still causes moms like me to cringe, and reach for the peroxide and band-aids more often than we’d like.

Usually she picks herself up and goes about her day like normal; once, when she fell kicking a ball in the driveway and skinned her knee up, she started bleeding and didn’t even realize it! But sometimes the pain is very real and hard for her, and she wails, her face scrunching up and turning red—much like my younger sister’s did when she had colic as a baby—and the hurt pout on her face just breaks my heart.

My response to these bursts of painful outrage is to hold and coddle her, murmuring into her hair as she squeezes me and cries, “Mommy!” Maybe it’s just as much for my own need to be the soothing mommy as it is for her; I don’t know. But I know it makes her feel better within minutes and she’s back to playing. I know this because my own mother held me when I got hurt as a child, making some of my favorite memories from my childhood ones when I was sick or injured just because of the care she gave me so carefully and lovingly.

My husband, on the other hand, who was never coddled in his life—his own father used vulgar female body part terminology to yell at him when he broke his arm and shattered his elbow playing sports once—refuses to comfort her, saying, “Oh, you’ll be alright, it’s okay,” and leaving it at that. This makes me so angry, and if we are both present the situation sometimes ends up with me clutching a crying girl, her head buried into my shoulder as she sobs and wets my shirt, while my husband and I argue over babying her or not.

The thing is, he’s perfectly happy if I baby him when he gets a boo-boo (and lordy, you can bet he makes a big deal out of it if he, say, gets a minor cut on the fence, or hits his thumb with a hammer) and especially when he is ill (which, admittedly, is rare; both of them have very healthy immune systems). So if it’s okay to baby a full grown man, why not a little girl who just wants her mommy?

I’d love to hear from other parents who deal with these painful moments—which only occur on a weekly basis or less, mind you; it’s not like she’s screaming for me to hold her out of pain every day. What do you do? Do you baby or try the whole tough guy thing, and why?