Reply to My mom laughed when I told her my son choked at daycare

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I had a similar issue come up with a food allergy with one of my three children and my mother not taking it seriously, even to the point of not wanting to carry his epi-pen when she took him somewhere. I stopped trusting her to carry that, let alone inject it in an emergency so I stopped letting her take him places. I lost it once and actually screamed at the top of my lungs at my mother about how my child will probably have to carry the epi for the rest of his life, and now i believe she takes things more seriously, but he is old enough now to start carrying it himself as well. The combination of yelling at her, educating her more, and restricting access to him for his personal safety, did the trick with her, but I lost almost all respect I had for her at that time. She is also getting older and losing her filter.

It's really hard to educate people about certain illnesses.

I thought the poster who gives the advice quoted below advice was good, until I realized it was really conflicting. How do you both educate someone close to you about a life-threatening issue and yet simlutaneously stop expecting things from them? It's hard, especially if they see your children a lot.

[quote]
1) That is a lot more information than you gave in your initial post. When you don't give full information but expect people to act as if they had full information, you're setting them up to let you down in their response, and that's not fair to them. I realize your parents may have had more of this information already than we had, but it's something to think about. 
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[quote]
3) You know your parents have a history of minimizing your feelings and experiences, so stop expecting anything else from them. They are not the people to turn to for support when you go through a stressful episode with your kid. Since the evaluation came back fine, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it to them at all, and definitely not with the expectation of the sympathy and support you were looking for.[/quote]

I think this is good advice and while I think this person is probably advocating still telling them about these issues without expecting support, it's almost impossible in practice, at least in my experience. We all expect something from our parents. Just saying "don't expect anything else from them" is not realistic.

What I do now is have my husband communicate with them about these types of issues because he is less emotional about it. 
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I'm the poster you're responding to, I don't agree that the points are in conflict. The first point was whether you can expect greater emotional sensitivity around X than someone would show anyone else, when that person doesn't know Y is going on that makes you more sensitive. I specifically noted that OP's parents may have had full information and thus the point didn't apply to that particular incident, but since it was a behavior OP showed in this thread, I felt it was worth noting it in a general commentary on communication and expectations.

On the third point, I didn't say OP should withhold [i]pertinent[/i] information from her parents. I said I probably wouldn't have mentioned the evaluation because it came back fine and with no information OP's parents needed to have. If OP were trying to have a discussion with her parents about food safety during the visit, she could have kept it to DS has been having issues with choking and gagging while eating lately, this is what the ped wants us to do for safety. That doesn't mean her parents wouldn't have been dismissive anyway, but piling on a bunch of extraneous information like the feeding evaluation just gives fuel to their dismissive fire and distracts from the real issue (safety). That's somewhat irrelevant, though, because it doesn't sound like OP was telling her parents about it in the context of a safety discussion, it sounds like she was telling them about it because she was looking for support. It's a natural impulse to seek support from your parents, but when your parents can't/won't provide it, the healthiest thing to do is stop seeking it. You identified a great solution to this, passing pertinent information through your spouse who isn't emotionally invested in their response the same way you are.

Putting the two points together, point three is about the gating question of whether a particular person is someone from whom you can realistically expect support and compassion. If the answer to that question is no (as is the case with OP's parents), then you shouldn't seek support there, period. If the answer is yes, then you go back to point one and make sure you're giving the person the information they need to give you the support you're looking for instead of setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment by expecting them to read your mind.[/quote]

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