My Mother-in-Law Thinks My Kid Needs to “Learn Proper Social Graces.” I Couldn’t Disagree More.

Care and Feeding My husband is not helping! Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by PeopleImages/iStock/Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, My husband, “Wayne,” and I have a 1-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, “Susan.” Susan is very shy. She isn’t comfortable hugging people other than her dad and me. The trouble is that Wayne’s mother takes offense when Susan doesn’t want to hug her. She will go as far as to melodramatically pretend to cry and say, “Don’t you love me?” or “Do you love me or not?” My requests that she cut it out have been met with the irritated response that Susan needs to “learn proper social graces.” Wayne has been no help; his response is that his mom has always been a hugger, and this is important to her. The holidays are coming up, and I don’t want my daughter to feel obligated to hug her grandmother or anyone else she doesn’t want to hug. I’m tempted to have Thanksgiving at home instead of traveling to see the relatives, but that seems like an extreme response. What can I do here? —Boundaries, Please Dear Please, If your mother-in-law refuses to change her behavior after multiple requests from you, and your husband refuses to stand up for his daughter (or even to take her seriously as a human being with needs, desires, and a whole personality of her own—yes, please tell him, even at 4), there is nothing extreme about staying away from his family this Thanksgiving. You can tell your mother-in-law why. (Tell her in a letter or an email: Don’t subject yourself to her berating you on the phone.) Your husband will likely throw a fit when you inform him of your decision. He’ll say you’re overreacting; he’ll tell you that you don’t get to make unilateral decisions about family occasions. You can let him know he’s underreacting, and that you wish you didn’t have to make a unilateral decision—that you wish very much that his mother’s desires, needs, personal style, and habits were not more important to him than his child’s. I’m sorry to have to give you this advice. I’m sorry, too, to have to say that if he doesn’t recognize he’s in the wrong, I see a significant problem both between the two of you and with him as a parent. If I were you, at this juncture, if he insists that Thanksgiving with his family is non-negotiable, I’d tell him he’s welcome to go alone while you and the kids have Thanksgiving at home. If that doesn’t wake him up—and if it doesn’t wake his mother up—things are only going to get worse from here. Be prepared. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don’t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, My husband and I have an almost-4-year-old daughter. She is a smart, energetic, sensitive kid, and her dad and I have very different ways of parenting her. He can be fun and silly with her, but he also tends to be stricter and more authoritarian. He thinks I’m too permissive, while I think he’s too controlling. Don’t get me wrong: I think holding boundaries with kids is important. But I also think it’s important to speak to kids calmly, with kindness, and help them rather than command them. I also try to get her to work with me willingly rather than forcing things, so I try to be playful with her when I need her to complete a task. The issue is that when he gives our daughter an instruction or holds a boundary, he wants me to back him up in front of her. But sometimes I disagree with either the boundary he’s set or what he’s instructed her to do (usually because I think he’s being unreasonable or unrealistic). At those times, I can’t bring myself to show that “united front,” and I push back in front of her. Then he gets mad at me for not supporting him. I know kids are supposed to see their parents supporting each other. I know I’m in the wrong for not backing him up—this is all very logical. But how am I supposed to back him up when I think he’s wrong? I don’t want my daughter to grow up feeling like she never had anyone on her side, even when her dad was being unreasonable. Today, she told me she’s scared of her dad because he yells so much and is always telling her she’s not a good listener. How do I handle this? —Stuck in the Middle Dear Stuck, Oh, how I feel for you. My husband and I struggled with this, too, and we didn’t always handle it well. And even when I did back him up when it seemed clear he was being unreasonably authoritative, or removed myself altogether rather than confuse our daughter with a mixed message in those moments when I so strongly disagreed with something he said, she knew we weren’t on the same page. (I didn’t know that then; I do now.) When our disagreement about how to parent her burst through the surface, as it often did (for example, when he scolded her, telling her sternly to go to her room because she’d “talked back” to me—a concept I didn’t even believe in, and in any case felt was not his job to police when she was talking to me), there was no way for her to miss the disconnect. Is it any comfort to hear that she turned out fine? That she absorbed both her father’s point of view and mine and has a clear vision of the kind of parent she means to be to her son? Her dad and I were at two extremes: He wanted her to do as he (or I—or her teachers) said without questioning it; I wanted her to, well, learn to be unafraid to speak truth to power. Our antithetical parenting styles were, of course, a reflection of our own upbringings in different cultures. They were one part of a constellation of differences between us, which brings me to my main point. This is less a parenting problem than a marriage problem. It took me too long to figure that out (hell, we’re still sometimes figuring it out, 34 years in). You and your husband need to be talking to each other about your expectations for the child you share, and about why you’re at cross purposes: You need to come up with a solution together. If you two can’t manage these conversations on your own—because they devolve into arguments, or one or both of you simply cannot listen to and take in what the other has to say—then get thee into couples counseling, pronto. A good therapist can be a valuable referee as you work your way through this. You’ll need to remind yourselves that you love each other for who you are, and that “who you are” is complicated. Understanding how you (each) got to be this way may well make you love each other even more. Finding ways to approach parenthood that take into account what’s important to both of you when it comes to your child is crucial both to your daughter’s well-being and the well-being of your marriage. Ever Gotten a Call From Human Resources? Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir want to hear about it—and help you navigate your problems at work. Does your colleague constantly bug you after hours? Has an ill-advised work romance gone awry? Ask us your question here! Dear Care and Feeding, Three weeks ago, my mother-in-law took her own life. She suffered from bipolar disorder and, unbeknownst to us, had been off her medications for months when she bolted into traffic. As you can imagine, our family is extremely distraught. So far, we haven’t yet told our almost-3-year-old daughter, but she’s begun asking where Grammy is. How can we possibly explain something like this to such a young child? —Struggling Dear Struggling, I’m very sorry to hear of your mother-in-law’s illness and death. Her granddaughter should be told that she was very sick and that she died. She is too young to be told anything about the nature of her illness or the way she died as a result of it. That can come (much) later. For now, stick to the most basic of facts. If your 3-year-old asks what kind of sickness, or what part of her body was sick, you can say “a brain sickness.” She is unlikely to ask for the specifics of how her grandmother died, but if she does, you can tell her, “Her brain got very, very sick, and it made her die.” If you have never before talked to her about what death is, now is the time. (I’ve written about how to broach the subject many times before—for example, in my answer to the letter from Gravely Worried, and in my answer to Bereaved in Blighty. To the recommendations I made there, I would add a book for very young children, Something Very Sad Happened. For a child as young as yours who has had no previous experience with death, not even a pet’s, this is a useful starting point.) —Michelle More Advice From Slate I’m struggling with what to tell my parents when they pester me about why my husband and I don’t bring our two young kids (3 and 5) to visit them more than once or twice a year. We all used to live in the same metro area, but a few months before our first child was born, my parents moved into a luxury full-service retirement facility almost four hours away. It’s so expensive, we’ll be lucky if they leave enough to cremate them. And far from enjoying themselves, they do nothing but complain about the demanding and bigoted old rich folks who populate the place. Advice Family Kids Parenting