Can't help but think the childcare martyrs are going to be lost when the child grows up and leaves. It's one thing being a mother, it's another being an obsessive and suffocating..
I was actually trying to think of a tactful and non-accusatory way of saying something last night, which I'll try today - it's hard to voice.
The thing is, parenting style doesn't alter underlying personality type. And one thing I think you really, really need as a parent is a good sense of boundaries. You sort of have to let the boundaries blur a bit with small kids and babies, because let's face it, the demands are so colossal, however you do it, that if you don't see their needs as almost your own and their upset as a huge deal, you won't have the resources emotionally to meet them. But parenting also requires respect for the fact that they are, actually, separate human beings with their own needs and beliefs and feelings, who must make their own way in the world, their own choices, and their own mistakes. And a poorly-boundaried person has enough problems with random people they meet in life making different choices, so they in my rather sad experience struggle to cope when their children do that - "struggle to cope" being euphemistic. A family friend's daughter has bipolar, and she never takes her meds for any sustained time. She had a baby at 20 and by the time he was 14 he was asking his grandparents and social services to arrange a restraining order, she was so catastrophically boundaried. Similarly someone I know has histrionic personality disorder, and while she's managing fine while her baby is small, I do worry a lot about what happens as they grow, because she is very much a "rescuer" who sees herself as a persecuted heroine, and if her son has a girlfriend she dislikes, or votes in a way she disapproves of, or, or, or... it won't end well. She is a drama llama and yet in her mind, she is saving people from themselves, and Lord only knows what degree of intensity will kick in when her child is the target of this missionary zeal to interfere.
Those are deliberately chosen extreme examples; I am not for a moment suggesting anything on this thread comes within a million miles of the problems they have encountered and/or may encounter. That was why I cited them, as I am trying to be diplomatic and not hyper-critical, here. But I am saying that part of parenting well, in my opinion at least, is an understanding that you have to be aware that your deeply loved kids are separate people and you have to sit on your hands more and more as they grow up, and accept they will do things and make choices that at best you disagree with, and at worst you deplore. And they may marry and start families with people whose ideas you find bizarre, or wrong - my MIL is horrified that I vaccinate my children, and still firmly believes babies put to sleep on their backs will choke and that the Back to Sleep initiative is just a dangerous fad which will pass. And if she tried to persuade me of that in the way certain posters on this thread have sought to overbear the OP, I regret to say she would have no contact with her grandchildren if I had to arrange it, because life is too short for that shit.
Boundaries, in my opinion, and the ability to recognise them, matter rather more in the competence or otherwise over the long term of someone's parenting than whether Sue Gerhardt or Gina Ford is your parenting advice source of choice in infancy. And I would gently suggest that there are several rather egregious examples of not even recognising the concept, far less respecting it, visible on this thread.
I just think it might be something worth considering. And in a lot of threads on MN, too - how to wean, how to feed, how to educate, all sorts of things. Boundaries mean respecting difference, don't they? And if you can't do that with a random stranger, how much harder will you find it with your children, when they make choices you can't fathom?