Parenting your way through the big family gatherings

We need to be as patient with our own parents and relatives as we are with our children. Time spent with them is invaluable.

It’s Christmas – it’s family time. Like it or not, enjoy it or not that quite, you’re going to be spending time with your original family, whether close and/or extended. For us, that’s today, the 27th – there’ll be quite a lot of us in a closed space, which is bound to make us wanna stuff cheese in our ears to drown out all that we’re going to hear and get mad about. It’s not like we don’t love them or don’t want to spend time with them, but our views on just about anything, parenting most of all, clash more than they should.

To summarize it briefly: we’ve chosen a certain way of parenting for Mattie, right. It’s pretty “liberal” in many ways, at least from a traditional standpoint, while also enforcing and sticking to clear and easily understood rules, suitable for her age. It relies on trust, instead of control, on communication, instead of a master-subordinate relationship, on honesty instead of manipulation, and so on. Yet, for the past three years we’ve felt like aliens on our own planet, because no one seems to understand why we chose the approach we chose, why we’re so unrelenting in applying it, and why we won’t be changing it for anything else.

So when we’re in one place, whether it’s holiday time or just for a quick get-together, there’s bound to be tension, comments, and, it saddens me to say, sneering remarks about the good ole’ days and how we “didn’t need any of that back then”. We’re pretty much seen as complete nutjobs, like some cultists that listen to All I Want for Christmas in reverse while eating spaghetti with chocolate sauce. It’s the Internet that raises Mattie, not us. Many of the things we do are pointless and some are even bad for her. When you ask how or why exactly, no one will be able to tell you. But it doesn’t matter. They still think they know better and that they’re always right.

And the truth is there’s nothing you can do about it. At some point you’ve got to cave in, but you’re going to walk a long road before that, and it isn’t one ridden with trees and birds and bees – no, it goes through swamps and barbed wire and rusty nails.

But it doesn’t have to completely destroy your psyche. I mean, look who’s talking though – for the longest time I’d snap like a mouse trap over comments and actions I thought unacceptable, I strained the relationship with my parents to the brink, and I was on the verge of even limiting time together to an absolutely bare minimum. 

That was never going to solve anything, but it was going to destroy everything. All their deficiencies and quirks taken into consideration, they’re our folks, right. Better yet – they are Mattie’s folks, and she deserves to have them and to spend time with them and to experience all these different characters and their unique personalities.

And this process of acceptance, even though I’m still working on it (Zori got there faster, she’s the smarter and wiser of the two, after all), started with one realization: despite their terrible approach and all the damage they might do, they are the only ones we have. And they won’t be with us forever.

So how did this process unfold? There were several key steps that I, personally, had to go through.

Step one: Don’t try to control others.

It’s a big world and your kid is a part of it. Little by little, starting pretty much right away, they will start to experience it and its many intricacies. It’s a pretty colorful place too, so there’s something for everyone, and there’s someone for everything. Your own familial bubble, the best and most perfect place to raise kids, is on the other hand quite small. It might be great, even the greatest, but it’s small. Everything that’s outside of it will probably clash with your views on parenting and, beyond that, what is best for your little one.

So when everyone’s gathered around a Christmas table, you experience that clash with the unknown, the world beyond the border and outside the sphere. It’s different for everyone, but for us it’s a place of primordial chaos. It’s a big, crazy Italian family, where everyone talks to everyone all the time, being very, very expressive, loud, and completely lacking any filters. Dumb comments abound. Most of them talk without thinking. They don’t listen. They don’t care about our parenting style, Mattie’s wishes, or what she has to say. It’s not intentional, just how they are.

When they see her, the first thing that happens is they swarm her, each more impatient than the last to show how much they’ve missed her and how much they love her. They kiss her, hug her and pull her, completely ignoring her personal space and opinion – maybe she just doesn’t want to be ripped apart right now? It used to really get me wound up, seeing her thrown around like this, no one bothering to ask if she wants any of it or is even in the mood for it. If we stick to the rule of treating kids like you’d treat an adult, well, it’s not really looking good, is it?

When they don’t let her talk, when they don’t respect what she has to say, when they talk to her in a condescending, dismissive way, I would always interfere. I’d scold them for talking like this and that, for saying different things, acting different ways, you get it. I wanted to control everything, so that Mattie gets the best possible treatment from her close relatives. How wrong I was, and how impossible that is. 

Now, looking at it from a different angle and from the distance of 2+ years, I see this chaos for what it is – the most natural thing in the world. We can’t change the approach or protect her from this, it’s just… life. Our folks are like this, and we have to accept them for what they are. So who am I to interfere? We can only explain what’s happening and that people are strange and funny and unrestrained, and then she can deal with it in her own way. Yes, even at the age of 2 years and several months. If she needs us for backup, we’ll just be there for her. So yes, step one – don’t control the behavior of others. Our kids need to know that everyone has a mind and a style of their own – it’s part of what prepares them for life. It’s what happens outside the bubble. It all seems too obvious now, but it sure took some looking around to see.

Still, if you’re feeling adventurous and you want to try and bridge the gap even a little, you can.

Step two: Invite them to understand the way you parent and, maybe, invite them to adopt it.

This isn’t an easy process and doesn’t happen overnight. These “novelties” that we preach and apply to our daily life as parents to our kid, even though some are way older than the naysayers themselves, are seen as outlandish, abnormal, and just plain weird. They’ve mocked us, defied us, laughed at us, and mocked us some more for doing what we do. “Ha, you’re trying to talk sense to a kid. A kid is a kid, it doesn’t understand.” 

We’ve led a long battle of trying to convince others to at least take a look at our approach to raising Mattie, to try and understand it, to give us the chance to explain. We’ve tried sharing books, articles, and we’ve tried talking to them, offering a look into what we know in the most friendly and gentle of ways. It didn’t work. It didn’t get better, it didn’t get worse. It just stayed exactly the same. We hit a wall, and that wall is called ego – somewhere in there, I imagine quite deep, they knew we were right, and that they had made mistakes in the past while raising us. So they’d go on these long monologues about how things were back then and that they were definitely much better than we think, so can we just get back down to Earth and, you know, don’t try so hard? “We did fine.” 

So at one point we just accepted the fact that they don’t want to change and they don’t see the benefits of the way we’d chosen to raise Mattie. Never mind that every time we’re together we’ll hear “how smart Mattie is, how coordinated and quick to react, how eloquent and well-spoken she is, and that pronunciation, oh my god!”. Never mind all that – that’s just nature, and our contribution has nothing to do with it. It’s a nice way out, isn’t it. “Nature”. It strips you of responsibility and consequences: it’s just how it is, I had nothing to do with it, whether the results are good or bad.

But look, if your parents and close relatives are more receptive to new ideas and approaches, by all means go for it. Every little bit helps, and if they’re inclined to see that there’s good things to be found beyond the ego-wall, then life would be better for all.

If not, well...

Step three: Embrace them for who they are.

This is where you go if step two fails. We tried it many times, but at one point we just stopped obsessing over it. We didn’t give up, we simply realized that the broken approach that our parents and relatives use when spending time with Mattie, things like lying to her, shaming her, making her feel guilty, and asking her if she’ll be a good girl if she gets that cookie, won’t really affect her that much. Why? Because we parents are the single most important factor in her life on all possible fronts. As long as we’re on the right track and we stay true to our beliefs and methods, all else is second place and, really, quite powerless.

But that’s just one side of it. More than this, we realized that Mattie just needs them. She must have them in her life, because they are hers to have. Sure, they’re not perfect. Sure, they’ll make a lot of mistakes and she will be the one who suffers from them, but she still needs them. A grandma that doesn’t respect her personal space or a cold aunt who’s never hugged her is still better than none at all, and it’s not up to us to rob our kids of these experiences and the memories they will leave behind. 

So the key point in all this is one thing: patience. We need to be as patient with our own parents and relatives as we are with our own children. We need to understand that no matter the approach, the time spent with them is invaluable and immeasurable. That if you take these things away, you will leave blank spots in their memory of their early years. And these spots will never gain enough color to paint a full picture of what life was like back then. 

We hope these ramblings, provoked by family time spent both terribly and joyfully, can do some good. And we wish you a beautiful festive season with many moments of shared joy with the people you love (and the patience to endure it all).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!