Slate Plus members get more Care and Feeding every week. Have a question about kids, parenting, or family life? Submit it here!
Dear Care and Feeding,
My mother is becoming very attached to my 6-week-old daughter. She says things like “Thank you for her, she is a blessing,” which I know is an expression of gratitude but which also irks me because my daughter is a person, not a gift to be enjoyed. I have said this to my mom—that I know she is grateful but that I did not have a daughter for her—and she gets mad and says, “I am so thankful for her, she is the best gift.”
She loves so deeply, and craves this love, and it is beautiful that she loves my daughter so much. But I worry that she will be too attached. For example, she is going away for the weekend with girlfriends and told me, “I am so sad I won’t get to see her this weekend. Send me photos every day.” Sending photos every day feels like an assignment. I told her this seems like a bit much, and she replied, “It only takes a second to take and send a photo. Photos are what grandmothers like.”
My mom has attachment and abandonment issues from many instances of grief and trauma throughout her life since childhood. Her sister died last year, and she has always struggled when I have lived elsewhere. There’s a chance my husband and I might move away and I worry that her intensity of feeling will escalate and we’ll start hearing, “You can’t take my granddaughter away from me!” I could use advice about setting boundaries in this space and handling grandparents with attachment issues, while also being grateful for their love and support.
—Too Close for Comfort
Dear Too Close,
Congratulations on your new baby, who has undoubtedly brought a lot of joy into your life even as her arrival has also thrown into sharp relief this personality conflict with your mother. Your mom needs constant connection and reassurance. Likely because of growing up with a mother like that, you find such behavior smothering and reject the “obligations” it imposes. This rejection, in turn, just makes your mother upset and more needy. I’m guessing this pattern has always been present, but now that the baby has presented your mother with an object of infatuation, things have gotten a little dire.
First things first: You are only six weeks in! That is the blink of an eye, child-rearing-wise. It is entirely possible that your mom will settle down a little as the weeks and months go by and your daughter cements herself in your mother’s life not as a precious gift but as a human being who cries, smiles, poops, etc.
But I understand why you’re overwhelmed by this behavior in the present, and feeling worried about the future. You’ve got obligations aplenty all of a sudden, and you feel as if the last thing you need is your mom making very specific demands of your time and energy. One simple way to start creating and enforcing boundaries is not to accede to these demands; send photos to your mother when you feel the desire to share, not according to her made-up “What Grandmas Like” schedule.
She’s staking a claim, with statements like that, about how she wants your relationship to work. But have you thought about What Moms Like—or at least, what you like? Your boundaries shouldn’t be constructed piece by piece in response to her plenitude of demands. Instead, they should reflect your philosophy of intergenerational interaction. How often do you want your mom in your life? How engaged do you want her to be with your daughter? I’d encourage you to actively make those decisions now, and discuss them with your mother, so that you (and your mom) do not feel that you are constantly barring the gates from invasion, and instead are conveying your own wishes for the present and future.
Even as she starts to get used to the boundaries you set, it seems likely she will forever be pushing for just a little more. This will be annoying, but I urge you to exercise forgiveness and generosity as much as possible. Be firm but loving, be grateful to have a mom who wants to be involved, and don’t be afraid to occasionally say, “Oh, the phone was in the other room—sorry about that.”
Also, get her a digital photo frame—that will help a lot.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’m struggling to figure out how much I should be making my 4-year-old play independently. He’s an only child, which means that while he doesn’t have a sibling playmate, he also doesn’t have another kid competing for his attention at home. I finish work a few hours before he finishes preschool, so I often have time to complete chores before picking him up—meaning there’s not a lot of “Mommy’s vacuuming, you gotta entertain yourself, kid.” My husband and I obviously set dinnertime and bedtime, but there’s an awful lot of just … doing whatever my son wants. Like, there’s no reason for us not to build blocks with him, so we build blocks with him, or paint with him, or whatever he wants to do.
But I can’t help but feel that just because there’s no reason not to play with him doesn’t mean we should always play with him. He should learn to be bored, or to entertain himself. Like, isn’t it a good life skill? I just don’t know how to make him do it. Is it as simple as saying, “For 30 minutes a day, Mommy needs Mommy time to read her own books, and you will play your own things, too”?
—Enforced Independence
Dear Enforced,
Take a close look at that word you use several times in your letter, should. Pick that word up, hold it in your hand, squish it into a tight little ball, and chuck it into the Grand Canyon. There is no should on this subject! Worrying about how you should interact with your child is a recipe for making you, and your child, miserable.
How do you want to spend time with your child? When you play blocks or whatever with him, do you enjoy it? Or is it boring as hell? Do you crave time to read a Mommy book, or do you feel basically satisfied with how things are? Instead of focusing on some abstract idea of what you should be doing with your child, focus on what you find fulfilling, and what you find wanting in your life at this time.
I say this because families have ideas on this subject that run the gamut, and existing research shows that all those families are equally likely to eventually raise perfectly fine, healthy kids. I know moms and dads who love nothing more than engaging in hours of make-believe play with their children, letting their imaginations run wild, pretending to be customers at the ice cream store until the sun goes down. I know moms and dads who are good for like 10 minutes of that and then definitely need to go do something else. I know families with entirely free-form schedules that change unexpectedly based on how everyone’s feeling, and I know families that enforce solo activity time from 5 to 6 every afternoon. I even know families that sometimes give an hour or two over to let a child play with a device or watch television, so-called “screen time.” I know! In this day and age! Anyway, all those kids will be fine and will learn independence one way or another.
There is a prevailing theory among many parents, by the way, that smaller kids, like yours, have an easier time playing on their own when a parent is engaged in physical work in the home—chores, cooking, gardening, etc.—than when a parent is doing something that is less easy for a child to decode, like reading a book. You might consider doing some reading in that post-work, pre-pickup time, and then saving the chores for while your son is home—that gives him the opportunity, if he wishes, to ask to participate in the chores, which is a different, often more enjoyable, parent-and-child activity.
The point is, do what you want to do! If what you want to do is read a book, then yes, it can be as simple as saying “It’s Mommy book time,” and possibly investing in noise-canceling headphones.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I have a 7-year-old daughter, “Diana.” Diana’s very musically inclined, and she’s often playing the piano in the living room whenever she has a free moment. But the other day, I heard her playing a piece I hadn’t heard before—the theme music from an anime that I own on DVD. The thing is, it’s very much a Not For Kids sort of show (Neon Genesis Evangelion, if anyone cares), and I keep the DVD well out of reach and hidden under a pile of other, more kid-friendly discs that haven’t been disturbed.
Her piano teacher says he didn’t teach it to her, and when I asked Diana where she heard the song in question, she says with a perfectly straight face that it came to her in a dream. I don’t believe that for a second, but I’m honestly not sure where she came across it. She’s never told lies and stuck to them before this, and I’m really not sure how to proceed from here. I do want to be aware of the media she’s consuming, especially stuff that isn’t aimed at kids her age, and of course I want to get her to be more honest, but past lessons in honesty have generally opened up with her folding when called out on a lie and confronted with evidence of it, which is lacking here. What should I do?
—Musical Mystery
Dear Mystery,
As much as I love the idea that somehow you transmitted the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme to your child in a dream, I think it’s far more likely that she consumed some of the eleventy million NGE piano tutorials on YouTube. Good for her! It is funny that she made up that very specific, utterly implausible lie, but if I were you I would just drop it. If she’s not a kid who fibs very often, it is not worth hectoring her until she fesses up.
According to Common Sense Media user Ronaldcrazy, she’s already old enough to watch NGE with you! “Partial nudity on the main characters butt is not sexual and is for laughs,” says Ronaldcrazy, who may well be age 7 himself. Me, I’d probably wait another six or seven years, but I bet you’ll have a great time watching it with her eventually, maybe while she performs Shirō Sagisu’s iconic score along with the TV.
—Dan
