Kingmama

Go on your vacation, you need it. Use the end of your time away to come up with your plan on how to go forward with in-laws. Your child in the long run will be okay. While it’s nuts she won’t send him to school, kids can get colds and be out of class for a week. Let the school know you are out of town and give her contact information. Maybe the calls every day asking where he is will guilt her. Also we as parents value school because parenting kids all day is hard so maybe she will find sending him to school actually helpful. It sucks but we as parents are trying our best to survive. Just remember soon your kids will be with you on pretty much all vacations and you can look for places with vacation services while there.

So frustrating. You can coddle your kid. I don’t care. However, I have house rules for adults and children and not touching my collectible toys is one of those things. Sounds like Mom is the problem in not understanding no don’t touch. Definitely a hard thing for people who aren’t collectors and who just see toys. I know my 3-year-old has a hard time that Grandpa has a small collection of his childhood toys on display in the living room but they have lead because Grandpa is 82! So those toys are no 😂

I do the same thing of asking my child what toys they don’t want to share or which ones are too special and we put those away. If you have expectations of other people and their children, you have to be clear up front. You could try leading by examples that they might not follow your example in paying for broken toys. You have to establish your boundaries and let the group know beforehand. I think if you come to your friends and say we are really working on sharing or taking turns or not throwing so I’m going to be disciplining my kid when I see this action can you please do the same to model to my child. I think most parents will say yes. That’s something we want to work on also. Whether it’s a time out or a conversation about how it’s not nice to take other people’s things, your friends will handle it a different way, but at least they’re showing some intervention to your own child. In regards to breaking toys or your wall. Have that conversation but you might get some responses that say we do not care about our toys. If our toy is broken in a play date it is put in the trash and we deal with the crying. So you will have to come as a group to an agreement. In all honesty, there are some little kids that I do not enjoy having playdates with because of the different temperaments. Usually with age or little distance kids grow so quickly that play dates are not called off forever.

The best way to offer advice is to offer help. I think previously mentioned in the comments is ask them why they’re doing this and then ask how you can help. A lot of parents do this kind of co-sleeping for breastfeeding reasons and breastfeeding is also a hot button issue. Just get more information about why this is important to them. And then try to empathize. But help help is the best best best. For your specific situation, offer to stay the night and do the night shift. When they realize that you’re willing to do that, but they still have to have the baby on top of them. Maybe they will make a change maybe not but you’re going to be a lifesaver. If you keep offering to stay the night and help with the night shift or to come over during nap time so they can go get their hair done you might even have the opportunity to sleep train the baby yourself. If you can’t be there but you have money you can offer to buy them some sleep items. There’s a little vibrating pad you can put under the crib that helps babies get to bed.

Just always be open to do things their way. I remember my mom was super confused about swaddling. She was like we didn’t do this to our babies but whenever she helped me she always did it. I was extremely appreciative of that.

Not everyone makes the best choices all the time, but they’re definitely trying and having compassion for that is hard but important to maintain relationships.

Speaking of relationships, you can mention how much you love Emily Oster’s newsletters and forward them along to your son and daughter-in-law. Different articles about not hot button items. Maybe items that are kind of in their future like flu shot timing or an interesting article about disability and parenting. Maybe once they start liking Emily’s stuff they will find it for themselves or you can send over a sleep one in the future.