what makes you think that women don't know how to put men in their place?
It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever. You could easily ascribe a tendency like that to the higher likelihood for single mothers to also be more stressed or less well off and with less time to invest in doing much more than trying to placate the child in the quickest way possible. Plenty of mothers that don't pamper and fathers that do, so that claim needs a citation I would think.
The word they were looking for is "coddle".