How to Prepare your Parents to be Grandparents

Grandparent prep 101. What’s changed since you were a kid and how to help your parents feel prepared to help you with your baby.

Depending on your parents or in-laws, preparing your parents for all of the changes since you were a baby can be difficult at times. We often hear “well I did it this way with 5 kids and you all turned out alright.” “You survived, didn’t you?” Or, “I did this for 18 years, I know what I’m doing.” But the fact of the matter is, while yes, you probably turned out alright, a lot of babies didn’t. And without social media, your parents may not have known about or heard about those babies. Losing a child was not really talked about back then or the reasons were often attributed to different things or just “bad parenting.” But luckily, we know a lot more now and many babies’ lives have been saved from new safety regulations.

But how do we help our parents understand both the new safety standards and just basic things we may want to do differently?

This is a delicate balance… Because we seriously need our parent’s help (hello village) but we don’t want to be so critical of them that we alienate them from helping us at all.

This will largely depend on your relationship with your parents and their stubbornness level, but here are some tips that can help you prepare.

Understand what’s changed since you were a baby

Taking some time to understand what’s changed since you were a baby and why will be the first step to guiding your parents there. At a minimum, knowing the safety standards that have changed will be essential to ensuring a healthy, happy baby. But there are a lot of other things that have changed as well - both good and bad.

Safety standards that have changed

• Sleep: The biggest safety standards are safe sleep guidelines. We put our babies on their back to sleep, on a flat surface, with nothing in their crib or bassinet but a fitted sheet and a swaddle or sleep sack. No positioners, crib bumpers, blankets, pillows, or stuffed animals. The AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) just updated its safe sleep guidelines for the first time since 2016 so check those out here.

• Car Seats: The next big thing is that it is recommended that you put your baby rear-facing in their car seat for as long as possible. This is because their heads are s larger proportion to their bodies than adults and rear-facing seats keep their heads more supported in an accident. For more on car seat safety, visit the safe kids ultimate car seat guide.

• Rice Cereal: it is no longer recommended to put rice cereal mixed in with baby’s formula or breastmilk to thicken it up. Our parents were told that this would help babies feel fuller and help them sleep at night but it really doesn’t work and it just adds a filler to the bottle that has no nutritional value, preventing baby from getting the nutrients they need from formula or breastmilk. Formula or breastmilk are the only things that should go in your baby’s bottle. Occasionally a pediatrician may recommend this to help with reflux but only do it if a pediatrician tells you.

• Baby Powder: there has been all kinds of information coming out that is proving that baby powder is not something that should go near areas where it can enter your body (i.e. private parts) or where we can breathe it in. So now we just use diaper cream as a way to prevent and resolve diaper rash.

• Whiskey for Teething: I’m not even joking when I say my mom told me she did this when I was teething. Parents were actually told to rub a little whiskey on baby’s gums to help soothe their pain from teething. This is incredibly dangerous. Now we just stick with teethers, or frozen fruit feeders. Your pediatrician may recommend an infant pain killer as well.

Take some time to get to know the new safety standards yourself (there’s more than just what’s on this list) and also think about other things you may want to do differently than your parents.

Write down your boundaries

Make a list of the things that you want to draw a hard line about (i.e. safety), vs. some things that you may be able to be a little bit more relaxed about while your parents are helping with your kid (i.e. soft boundaries). Like maybe safe sleep is a hard boundary but you can be a little more relaxed about screen time while grandma is helping.

The more time your parents will be spending with your baby, especially one on one, the more you should think about what your boundaries are and what you are willing to be more flexible on versus what is set in stone.

Make this list for both the safety standards but also for parenting philosophies and general decisions. It’s ok if these change over time, we often have to change what our boundaries are as parents as we learn about our baby and from trial and error. But creating this list together will be a good starting ground. This is also a good exercise to do together with your partner so you can have a conversation with grandparents as a united team.

Here are some things to think about - this is not all-inclusive but one to get you started:

• Safety standards (these should be a hard line)

• Screentime

• Sugar and general nutrition standards

• Baby Led Weaning versus purees or both

• Discipline, spanking, timeouts, yelling, etc.

• Respectful parenting or attachment parenting

• Sleep training, routines, nap times, and schedules

• Toys and gifts

Think about your parents’ strengths and limitations (and your own)

Some of you may have parents that are energetic, positive, and ready to take on the world. But many of you may also have aging parents who may not be fully physically or mentally able to care for an infant on their own. Understanding your parents’ strengths and limitations will help you to narrow down where they may be able to best support you as a new parent yourself.

Think about or write down what tasks you are comfortable with your parents helping with. If you aren’t sure they can be trusted alone with your baby, maybe they can help with other household activities like laundry, cooking, or dishes. This is also a very helpful task to complete when creating a postpartum plan so you can ask your postpartum care team, including grandparents, to own certain tasks to support you in the 4th trimester.

Start the conversations

Once you know what you will want to do differently and have decided on your own personal parenting style, boundaries, limitations, and requests of your baby’s grandparents, sit down and have a conversation with them about it.

Unless you have an incredible relationship with your in-laws, each partner should have this conversation with their own parents or be accountable for the communication with their own parents.

Here’s an idea of how the conversation should go:

• I am so excited for you to be my baby’s grandparent. You are going to seriously be the best grandparent ever

• We are going to be really exhausted and overwhelmed and will need your help A LOT! It takes a village right?!

• Because of that, I want to make sure we are on the same page. There are a lot of guidelines that have changed since I was a baby, particularly around safety, so I want to review those with you to make sure our baby is as safe as possible.

• You didn’t do anything wrong when I was a baby, I’m sure these things were recommended to you by doctors and other experienced parents, we just have more data now.

• I know we all turned out great and that’s a tribute to your amazing parenting, but a lot of babies didn’t and because of these new safety standards, the rate of infant death and injury has gone down a lot!

• Is now a good time for us to review the new safety standards with you? Would you rather us review them together now or maybe I can send you some articles you can read and then we can discuss later?

This is a good time to gauge where your parents are at in this conversation. Are they all on board and excited to learn what’s changed? Check out their body language, are their arms crossed and closed off, are they paying attention?

If they seem receptive to the conversation then you can keep going. If not, then maybe now isn’t a good time or you can give them some reading materials to review on their own and try to discuss again later.

Keep going:

• I’m going to review the basic safety standards with you today and then maybe another time we can talk about how we’ve decided we want to parent.

• We may want to do some things differently than you did with us. This doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong, you are an excellent parent. We just have to make the decisions that we think are best for us and we REALLY want you to be there with us while we learn and grow as parents and to support us along the way.

• I’m asking you to trust me here as we figure out the best ways that work for our family. We may change our minds at times and that’s all a part of the process.

You may need to have multiple conversations over time, as this can be a lot of information. If they are on board, have them learn with you, read the same books, or take the same classes. If they are more resistant, maybe stick with the safety standards first, then add in the other information as you go.

If your parents fall into the category of one who may not be comfortable or well enough to watch your baby on their own, here’s an idea of what you can say.

• In the beginning, it’s really important that I am able to bond one-on-one with the baby a lot. I’ve read it's important for mom and dad to get as much skin-to-skin and snuggle time with the baby as possible, so we will not let many other people touch or watch our baby without us. But it would be amazing if you could support us by helping with X, Y, and Z around the house so we can spend as much time as we can with the baby and so my body can heal from labor while I rest and bond with our baby.

Hold your ground

What do you do if your mother-in-law insists that using a wedge in the crib helps your baby sleep better, or worse, puts it in the crib behind your back? What if you catch Grandpa feeding your baby some ice cream when you have a strict no-sugar rule?

This is why I had you make that list and set your boundaries before planning your conversation with your parents. Those boundaries are important and useful across every aspect of parenting, not just with grandparents. Review your list and remind yourself of what you set as hard rules versus ones you can be flexible on.

For the hard boundaries

Here are some ideas for what to say to prepare your parents for the boundaries and what to say if they break those boundaries.

• Review the rule: Here are the rules and boundaries we have set for our family and household. We’ve done a lot of research and spoken with experts to develop the best and safest environment for our baby. I want our baby to have a strong relationship with you and to spend a lot of time with you because you are awesome. Please trust that we are making the best decisions for our family and follow these so we can ensure you get as much time with them as possible! These safety rules are non-negotiable and must be followed for us to trust you alone with our baby.

• If they resist: I understand you may not always agree with these or may have done something differently when we were babies, but these are not negotiable. Even if they worked well for you, we will not do that in this house.

• If they break the rule: I see you are having trouble understanding these safety standards. I can no longer trust you to watch the baby alone. If you’d like to support us as a family, you can help with these other tasks, but I can no longer allow you to watch our baby on your own.

If your parent has broken a critical safety rule, I wouldn’t give them multiple chances. Once is enough to lose trust in them and revoke the right to watch your baby on their own, especially if you know they did it on purpose. You will have to decide what is best for your family and what boundaries you are comfortable with. Still, you would probably fire a babysitter or nanny if they purposefully did something with your baby that you told them was unsafe - so it should not be tolerated with grandparents either.

For the soft boundaries

For the soft rules, you can follow a similar order above - here are some examples of what you can say:

• Review the rule: Here are the parenting choices we’d like maintained for our family and household. We’ve done a lot of research and spoken with experts to develop the best environment for our baby to learn and grow. I want our baby to have a strong relationship with you and to spend a lot of time with you because you are awesome. Please trust that we are making the best decisions for our family and respect our choices so we can ensure you get as much time with them as possible!

• If they resist: I understand you may not always agree with these or may have done something differently when we were babies, but these are very important to us to follow. Even if they worked well for you, we will not do that in this house.

  • You don’t need to explain the reasons for your decisions here or insult the decisions they made - this is your household. But if you think it will help the grandparent understand and comply, you are welcome to share the research or information that led you to make that decision.

• If they break the rule: It’s really important to me that we don’t feed our baby any sugar. Please respect our decision to follow this. If you are interested in learning more about why I made this decision, I am happy to discuss it, but I will not be changing my mind. If you cannot respect the choices we’ve made for our family, then we will need to limit the time you spend alone with the baby, or you can support us in different ways.

For the soft rules, you will need to decide how much rule-breaking you can tolerate.

Be respectful

In general, I recommend never insulting a choice your parents made when you were a baby. Pediatricians and doctors gave them many unsafe guidelines. They just had different data and research than we did and followed the experts the same way we do. I’m sure once we become grandparents, there will be something our kids think is crazy, too!

If we stick with communication like - we love you, you did nothing wrong; we are just making different decisions with the information we have - then we are more likely to get a parent who’s receptive to change. If you insult them, you are much more likely to get someone defensive and digging in their heels.

Remember that we need help from our parents. Surrounding yourself with a strong village of support is life-changing as a new parent. So try to do your best to work with them, not against them, so as not to alienate them from wanting to help you at all. But your baby’s safety always comes first.

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