What's the worst advice you have been given?
Don't be mean, it's just a lighthearted question, not meant to be inflammatory.What is the worst parenting advice you ever received from your mom or mother in law?
My mother has told me that my children have demons inside of them (they're autistic) and they just need to get involved with a church.
My son's grandmother asked me why I wasn't putting cereal in my son's bottle yet. He was 2 weeks old.
My new stepmother thinks they just need more socialization. She tells me that we're always home. It's always a huge fight with her, because she is out of the house from 6am until at least 6pm, so how does she know what we do in those hours, and in my opinion, by 6 pm, kids should be in winding down, having dinner and getting ready for bed.
My son's grandmother says not to think anything of my son's severe speech delay because all of her boys talked late and now they're fine. Not to be mean, but not many people on my son's father's side of the family can read or write very well. (Not at all saying I'm perfect, because I'm not).What is the worst parenting advice you ever received from your mom or mother in law?
when i became pregnant with my first daughter i was 19 and unmarried and my boyfriend's mother told me to get an abortion! That is the worst thing i've ever been told to do! After my daughter was born me and my boyfriend broke up because he was not ';ready'; to be a father yet he was perfectly ready to be really intimate 9 months earlier. Don't worry i didnt get the abortion and i married someone who loves my daughter and we had a son and then twins (a boy and a girl) and his mother is always very helpful!
Ha! How long can I post? My mil sincerely believes:
1. You have to put a baby (yes, a newborn) on a schedule to eat. They shouldn't eat whenever they want.
2. That anything organic is good for the baby - even if it's left out on the counter unrefrigerated for a day OR not suited to their age (such as giving a two month old baby solids, or organic honey (!!) or organic, unpasteurized juice).
3. Lay the baby on its stomach when it sleeps.
4. She wanted me to drink during my pregnancy.
5. The baby should sleep in total darkness and silence during the day.
The list goes on....some of it was judgment issues that if we didn't buy a travel system where you can ';carry'; a sleeping baby from the car to the house that we were bad parents (actually I wanted an expensive travel system and DH wanted the $99 travel system with a car seat that didn't look safe enough for a tricyle! The issue was about money, not at all what she thought it was about). If we had a child after 30 yo we would automatically be bad parents.....you get the idea. And I love her - she raised my husband whom I love --- and I'm sure she was just the ';perfect mom';, but let me indulge my maternal instinct, make my own minor mistakes (like she did) and our lives would be a lot less complicated and better.
I honestly can't say I've gotten any horrible advice from my parents or in-laws. They are pretty good about knowing when to step in and when not to. I trust their advice almost more then I do doctor's because they've been there, done that, and all of their kids have lived to tell the tale. However, if I got that kind of advice [about the chocolate milk] I'd just trust my own insticts.
My ex-mother-in-law tried and tried to convince me that my newborn should be given fresh cow's milk ( we lived on a dairy). I'm still convinced she slipped my daughter some....
That I should pump and bottle feed instead of breastfeed because I wouldn't know otherwise how much my daughter was eating. My MIL also wanted me to start her on cereal in a bottle at 6 weeks because ';she should be sleeping through the night by now';
Well I thought it was useless, but my 6 month twins had a bad diaper rash(it turned out to be a yeast infection) my grandmother-in-law told me to rub yogurt with active cultures on their butts. She was somewhat right they needed to eat it.
The worst advice I received was from my in-laws to allow my eight year old daughter to walk to school or ride her bike alone from school...about 1 mile....nothing EVER happened in their neighborhood. But I was more skeptical, even though I was new to the neighborhood. These people had no conception as to how dangerous it had become on the street for a little girls. We had a big fight, and my husband sided with his parents. 'Why would anyone want to hurt a little girl walking to school to get an education?' they queried naively. Needless to say, my daughter came home scared to death when a group of boys knocked her off her bike. I'm glad that nothing else happen to her. Thanks for the advice, and I didn't even get an apology from them.
my baby is due to be here in a few weeks and i question some of the things that my MIL tells me. they pretty much go in one ear and out the other. she said she gave her babies cows milk from the time she came home from the hospital and vitamins. she seemed a little upset when my hubby told her that i was breastfeeding. she asked how she was going to feed the baby if i was breastfeeding.......ummm i wanted to say your not going to. i am you don't have breastmilk. but i just laughed instead. plus she is always telling us to buy used things such as a crib and carseat and save the extra money. i buy used clothes but i refuse to buy things like that. you never know if that carseat was in an accident. they could lie and tell you it wasn't. we have told her this several times and she still talks about it. she also tells me about how our child is going to be a brat if he is like his dad! i want to tell her that is only if i let him run all over me like you let your children do when they were little and i won't.
I never really got to weird of advice from inlaws and such. But the other day I was at my parents where my sister who just delivered was attempting to breastfeed her son. (she was having a slew of problems with it, she had flat and inverted nipples and milk was not really comeing in yet.) They asked what they should do in order to feed the baby- since the breastfeeding was slow coming and baby was 3 days old. I began to tell her (I have a 10 month old) that for the first few days the baby really is okay with just the colustrum, being well equiped from the womb. but if she was worried to go ahead and give him some formula- but not to much, thier belly is just tiny tiny. Well, then my mom said that it would be okay to give him a bottle of water twice a day. A full 4 oz bottle. I was quite horrified that she thought that would be healthy. If anything besides breastmilk- just formula and nothing else!
my mother- in law is always on my case...do not misunderstand me, I love my mother-in-law to death but,
the worst one is when my son gets too whiny and whines about everything...
so her comments and advice are *honey, I am only trying to help when I tell you this, you are not giving your son enough of your time, you should hug him and hold him more when he whines* First of all, I was offended because this child is too spoiled, and second, when you reward their bad behavior, it makes it ten times worse...
I think sometimes, a grandparent should back off when they really do not know what to do because each child's personality is different and that means that our children are definitely not the same as their's were!! Besides that 3 out of 4 of hers turned out horrible, I married the only good one and that is because someone else raised him. She has already raised hers, let me raise mine!!
That's far from being the ';worst thing you could do.';
It's nothing to the advice I was given when my son was three weeks old that I should add a little brandy to his formula to help him go to sleep.
My MIL's entire parenting philosophy is insane. Her kids just totally walk all over her, and she just kind of shrugs and says she doesn't like it, but there's just nothing she can do. They're going to do what they're going to do, and all she can do is to make sure they don't get in trouble for it, because they'd outgrow it. She told me this when my husband's youngest siblings were nine and eleven. She is constantly talking about how you have to ';pick your battles,'; claiming that she lets minor stuff go so that when she takes a stand about something more serious, it'll carry more weight. So far, the battles she's chosen not to fight include her fourteen-year-old daughter having her boyfriend living in her bedroom, pulling THREE of her five kids out of school when they didn't like school, to supposedly home school them -- then going to work. Basically, she helped three of her kids drop out of school. Two had only gotten as far as eight grade. The other was in sixth. According to her, all teachers and authority figures in three different school districts had it out for her kids. So when my son was about to start kindergarten, she talked so much about how we have to fight the system that my husband finally told her she needed to stop it, because the only person who was making us feel like they ';had it out'; for my son was her. Having been one of the ones pulled out of school for no reason -- and having a hard time getting his GED later because he had no foundation in the basics -- he told her she did him no favors by not making him go to school, and that our sons WOULD go to school, they would do ALL homework whether we felt it was important information or not, and graduating high school was not going to be considered ';an option';, it is considered THE option.
Other family members on his side looked at us like we had each grown an extra head when we bought a crib when our first child was born. It had never even occurred to them that we wouldn't have my son sleep in bed with us.
I am due in February and am planning on a natural childbirth. My MIL told me that I needed to (and this is a quote) ';stop being so selfish and just get an epidural, it's so much healthier for the baby';
WHAT?!
My MIL is nuts. She has told me to put tequila in a bottle when the baby won't sleep, or and I quote ';Give him a little nyquil it won't hurt my son was fine'; I tend to ignore her advice, then rub it in my husbands face that his mother is crazy.
I don't have a a child yet, but I just want to say that this is the most hilarious forum I've seen so far. Haha.
I have 5 more months before my will get crazy advice like this!
My mother-in-law had some strange views on breastfeeding. She once told me it was uncivilized and that is why we now have formula. When my daughter was 9 months old she told me we were at a point of incest. She was putting her foot down and not going to ';allow'; me to do breastfeed anymore, even if it meant she had to get CPS involved.
Not that it is her decision anyway, and it was an idle threat. My daughter nursed until she was 4. We just didn't tell Grandma. ;)
If the chocolate milk idea worked for them, why wouldn't it work now?
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