When you have a baby, everyone and their mom (literally) has an opinion on how you raise them. From screen time to feedings to sleeping habits, new parents hear it all, such as, “Wake them up from their nap, they won’t sleep tonight” ― or the opposing, “Don’t wake them up from their nap!”
It’s hard to know what you should do when it comes to caring for a tiny human, and it’s common for new parents to reach out to their parents for support, guidance and for some much-needed grandparent babysitting breaks. And while both parents and grandparents want what’s best for the baby, their views on what exactly is best can really differ.
Parenting guidance and baby safety regulations are continually changing to account for new research and innovation, but it can be hard for grandparents to let go of how they raised their own kids decades ago for many reasons.
“We all, as humans, have some degree of survivorship bias and perhaps some defensiveness related to making specific parenting choices that we now recommend against,” Dr. Krupa Playforth, a pediatrician, founder of The Pediatrician Mom and author of “Eyes, Knees, Boundaries, Please!,” told HuffPost via email. “I think that all of us are sensitive to the idea of our parenting choices being judged, and there’s an implicit judgment when grandparents are told that the way they did things is now considered unsafe.”
