Here are 3 wrong things new grandparents do

Grandparents can have difficulty finding their place and understanding what their own children want to establish as a balance in their young parenthood. As noted by our colleagues from Huffpost, Grand parents, overwhelmed by their emotions and their desire to be involved in the lives of their grandchildren, can be led to make mistakes. Parents testified to the media to explain what seemed to them the rudest among their parents who became grandparents.

“[Ma mère] doesn’t like my son’s name (Elijah), so she refused to call him that. Instead, she said this little boy or this little baby, as if he had no name.said a subscriber to the Facebook account of Huffpost. The choice of a child’s first name is indeed extremely personal. And yet, it is often the target of criticism and inappropriate and clumsy judgments towards young parents. “My aunt didn’t like the name I chose for my oldest son (Zachary), so she simply decided to rename him Joshua”confided another mother.

“With my second child, my water broke at 32 weeks and was bedridden in hospital until 34 weeks. Knowing that my daughter was going to be premature and most likely taken straight to a neonatal unit, my husband and I decided to stay alone in the hospital during labor. We would bring in family once we knew they were stable and ready to have visitors“, explains another young mother describing her difficult birth. It was then that his family criticized him for not having been able to participate in the birth: “We texted the family to let them know she had been born and was healthy. My mother immediately called me, furious at not having been present at the birth. I told her I needed support, that we weren’t sure about the baby’s health and that we needed to focus on the baby. She argued that she had a right to be there. I told her that it was about us being able to focus on the baby and that the birth wasn’t about her or what she wanted. She shouted into the phone, ‘Yes, it’s true!’, then hung up on me. She never apologized and, until the day she died, she believed I had done her a lot of wrong“. How the mother-to-be chooses to give birth – from the location, to the natural or conventional method, to the choice of people present – is very personal. Here again, young parents are regularly the target of intrusive questions and comments about their choices.

“During my third pregnancy (which turned out to be stillborn), my mother-in-law said she was surprised I was pregnant again, ‘considering our financial situation’. The whole judgment was horrible”confided a young mother. The subject of the famous “conditions met” to have a child is sensitive. Some believe that it takes time, while others believe that it is necessary to have financial stability or a fulfilling career. Still others think that future parents are never really ready for parenthood and that everyone adapts as they go. However you view things in this area, grandparents benefit from an experience rooted in an era with different social norms and financial realities. Often, they can be tempted to give their opinion on this subject while the parents feel ready to live this experience in conditions which are suitable for them.