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ArchivesAwesome post on constructive communication with family
Clicky links, It takes a village
By
on December 05, 2009
3
Tags: religion
Family freaking out about you reading supernatural books to the baby? Dale Mcgowan has a few thoughts on how to deal with it. PS: Thanks to casadekaloi for submitting this shot to the Offbeat Mama pool!
Dale Mcgowan wrote a great post recently about dealing with disagreements with extended family, and about how it's not about "win/lose" conversations or proving to anyone that your beliefs are right, but rather working toward common goals:
In most cases, the problem isn’t that Grandma is actively preventing you from parenting the way you want—it’s that an atmosphere of tension and dissonance and poison is created by your differences.
He's writing from the perspective of being a non-religious parent dealing with a religious family member, but really the lessons apply to any number of disagreements with extended family. Go read the full post on parentingbeyondbelief.com.
AynSavoy said
Thank you for posting this link! I spent the whole yesterday (an embarrassing amount of time, actually) reading through Dale's blog. He's really eloquent and has thoughtful, interesting things to say. I'm not even a parent or about to be one, but I had secular parents and have friends who are secular new parents, and this raised a lot of interesting points and reminded me of my own childhood.
Ashley said
this is beyond awesome and has completely stolen my afternoon! thank you for posting.
Natalie said
Anyhoo… I struggled with breast feeding. It was so hard for me – my nipples are ridiculously small, and my milk just wasn't there. I kept on for about three months, and had nothing left. Don't hate me for switching to formula – what was I going to do, let my baby starve?? La Leche League was no help, and made me feel worse. So those three months were hard. My husband didn't really know what to do or how to help – poor thing, men really can't do much beyond changing diapers for those first couple of months – so after night after night of him hovering over me, I told him to go to bed.
It was pretty much the best ever.
Then one night he woke me up to feed the baby. I got all settled in the rocking chair, and my husband left the room. Soon he came back in with an extra chair, sat down, and started reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to us (me and our baby girl).
For the rest of the nights and early mornings, even when we switched to formula, he read to us, and it was wonderful. We read books 5, 6 and 7, then continued to on more books of the same genre.