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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a FTM with an 8 week old baby boy.  My son is the first grandchild on my husbands side, so my in laws are very excited.  They are driving me nuts because they seem to have very outdated notions of parenting and are constantly pushing to baby sit my son.  They have been pushing me to leave him so they can watch him alone  since he was about 2 weeks old.  They ask constantly to babysit and even bring up watching him for whole weekends. I am just not comfortable leaving him at this point, especially not for a whole weekend!!    I am exclusively breastfeeding, and my son really struggled with breastfeeding the first few weeks, so I refused to give him a bottle for the first month because it could interfere with his latch.  I'm pretty anti-bottle, when it comes down to it.  I don't give two hoots what anybody else does for their child, but for mine, I choose to breastfeed.

Recently they have gotten so pushy in their offers that they really seem more like demands.   They don't seem to "get" or respect our decision to breastfeed and why we initially refused to give him a bottle, or why we won't give him formula.  I appreciate that they want to be involved in his life, It just makes me feel like they are trying to take over.  Comments they make about our decisions really seem to undermine my choices as a mother.  They are free to come over and spend time with him, I just don't see why it has to be when My husband and I aren't around.

I think the issue could stem from the fact that my parents will be watching him two days a week when I go back to work, and my mother in law may feel bad about that or may be worrying that my mom will be closer with him than she is.  Regardless, I am feeling very resentful that they are being so pushy.  I shouldn't have to leave my baby when I don't want to just to make them happy.  He isn't a toy for them to play with.  They couch their offers as being intended to give us a break, but really it seems more about them.  Really, if we wanted them to babysit, which at some we will, we will just ask!

Any ideas on how to mellow this situation??[/quote]

My in-laws are the same way and it was very stressful on me, my husband, and our marriage for the first several years! Nonetheless his parents are not nice to me so that made it worse because obviously there is a strange feeling there. It was not easy and my husband is a total wimp so it all fell on me to set boundaries but I am proud to say I did! They were so pushy and wanted to come visit twice a month from being out of town and were always pushing me to leave them alone with baby and telling me I was nursing him too much. They didn't realize I wanted to sleep when the baby slept and instead they tried to kick me out of my own house. If they were nicer to me and accepted me I would have tolerated them better I am sure. Stand your ground but in a nice way. Maybe go take a nap or chill upstairs and let them play with baby downstairs so you can get rest but still not feel like you are leaving your baby. [/quote]

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