Janelle S

Perhaps the behavior of an oversugared, unscheduled, underslept child might be the reminder grandma needs about why she didn’t used to parent her kids that way. It may be that she becomes very eager to drop off said child to her long-suffering kindergarten teachers.

I was all set to say something about how if you’re getting free childcare you might need to adjust your expectations, but then I got to the part about “don’t tell mommy,” and “we won’t be taking him to kindergarten.” Yikes! There are such things as overnight nannies… But obviously an ideal solution would be to resolve the issues with grandma and grandpa. As a doula I always encourage new parents to take responsibility for setting boundaries with their own parents. They should be in charge of those conversations, not the son-in-law or daughter-in-law. One approach might be to talk to your child—it’s possible she would prefer to go to bed at her normal time, or bring along a Candyland game or a birdfeeder kit to do with grandma or grandpa. Things might look different to grandma if it comes from your child that she’s tired of TV and misses the healthy food she’s used to. You might be able to couch discussions with grandma in terms of “missing home,” and wanting to keep things familiar so that your child is happy away from home. If your child will miss being at school and will be happiest sticking to normal routines, this is a great angle to take with someone whose singular motivation is keeping your child happy. Good luck! Hope you get lots of good suggestions here!

I was just like your son and his wife; I had been a nanny for a long time and thought that I knew a lot about parenting, but my husband and I fell into a pattern of putting our baby to bed at 9pm or later every night because we never graduated from the newborn stage of “reading his cues.” I know a lot of people on this site are pro-sleep training but I’m not and never will be, HOWEVER we approached sleep SO differently with our second son. Between the extremes of “parent-directed” and “child-led” sleep there is a wonderful, happy place of middle ground where you view the ability to fall asleep as a skill that a parent can’t force a child to learn, but a skill that CAN BE TAUGHT. My guess is that your son and his wife have fallen into their patterns for a reason, and if it’s because they want to be able to comfort their baby whenever he cries, then thankfully there are still hugely effective strategies available to them. With our second baby, we set a regular bedtime of 7pm, which is when babies naturally get sleepy. In order to make that work, we kept him from napping right before bed, we used several infant “sleep hygeine” cues—practiced in exactly the same order each night—-to tell his body to prepare for sleep, and we kept his room absolutely dark, no pinpricks of light from a smoke detector or anything. When dealing with night wakings, we used a red light setting on a headlamp to comfort him, and we used the “sleep ladder,” to give him some time to practice his self-soothing skills. We started when he was under 6 weeks old and so we never got into the habit of nursing him to sleep or rocking him to sleep, but with an older baby it will take more time and patience. As a granny, I think your advice would be better received if you can say, “I just learned this! Look what I found on Google about the sleep ladder and how it can help teach babies a new skill. Boy, when I was raising kids we never thought about it this way. How exciting!”