Congratulations! You are going to be a new grandparent! From the moment you heard the good news, you may have been dreaming about holding the baby for the first time, staying with the new parents to help out, and how exciting it will be to be in your new grandbaby’s life. Along with your excitement, there are things to consider so that you can have a positive relationship with your child as he or she is a parent for the first time and you can become the grandparent you always wanted to be!
You may have been a parenting pro for your kids, but you will not be parenting this new little one. Parenting is drastically different than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and parents today have different stressors they have to consider, so it is likely that your kids may make different parenting choices than you did, and that’s ok.
As a lactation consultant, I talk to many new parents as they navigate the postpartum time period. Here are some tips your kids, the new parents, want you to know:
• Trust that I am making the best choices for my baby. After all, you did a great job raising me.
• Support my choices, even if they don’t make sense to you. I may choose to breastfeed, even if formula might be the choice you made. You haven’t heard of Baby-Led Weaning and think I’m crazy for giving my baby slices of meat? That’s ok. Trust and support me and learn something new.
• Be my partner. Listen when I have a problem, but don’t try to fix everything for me.
• Respect my boundaries. If I ask you to do something a certain way, please do so, even if it doesn’t make sense to you.
• Please share family stories and traditions but leave room for us to develop our own family traditions as well.
• Ask! Find out what we, the new parents, need and offer support. Instead of “let me know if I can do anything for you,” ask “what would be the most helpful thing I can do for you today?” Also, ask when it is ok to visit, what gifts are ok to purchase, and if it is ok to hold the baby.
• Communicate with my partner as well as me. He or she was not raised by you and may have different ideas about parenting and babies, and we need to work as a team to parent our baby.
• Offer “helpful help.” Helpful help would look like loading the dishwasher, folding laundry, making a meal, doing a grocery pick-up or any other multitude of chores. Helpful help is not offering to come over and hold the baby, even though that’s what you’d really like to do. I need time with my baby to figure things out.
It should be a relief to have you come over after your child has a new baby, not a stressor. Keep in mind that offering advice may be seen as criticism and not helpful, so sometimes keeping your opinions to yourself is the best way to go. It’s time to proudly pass the baton onto the new parents—which can be freeing or frustrating, depending on how you feel. As one new grandparent said, “Knowing when to release and trust that your children are adults with opinions different than yours can be a difficult, but oh-so-proud moment for parent and child.” It can be amazing and beautiful to see your child become a parent and you can be a great support during that precious time. Congratulations on your new title of grandparent!
~Becky Franzen, International Board Certified Lactation Consultant
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