The instinct to help mothers – especially new mothers – is a great one. But too often it comes with an awful lot of 'You Should...' attached.
Here is a piece I wrote for the jolly good US site Kidville.com on the subject, as part of their 'Supporting Moms' series:
‘I know she means well, but she’s driving me crazy,’ a friend said recently about her mother. The friend just had her first baby – the first grandchild too – and her mother was being wonderful; cooking, cleaning, constantly offering help. Unfortunately, she was also constantly offering advice, mostly of the ‘you should…’ kind. ‘You should bath her before the evening feed.’ ‘You should supplement with a bottle at night.’ ‘You should put her down for a nap when she’s still awake, not rock her to sleep.’
Sometimes it was ‘you shouldn’t…’ just for a change. ‘You shouldn’t feed her so much. I’m sure she can’t be hungry’. ‘You shouldn’t use that detergent, it’s too harsh for her skin.’
‘I know she’s trying to help, but she just makes me feel I’m doing everything wrong,’ the friend, close to tears, eventually said.
... to read the rest, go to
http://blog.kidville.com/2014/05/supporting-moms-telling#.U4MaqK1dXvg
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