Mil takes DD aged 1 once week for childcare. On this day she usually takes DD to meet her former work colleague who also has a daughter aged 3.
I have met this person a few times, and they aren’t the kind of person i would usually spend time with and have different ideas about parenting. For example she has her DD wearing makeup, nail polish etc, I would feel funny about my DD doing this at 13 never mind 3. She has her DD in a high back booster whereas I want to rear face our DD for as long as possible. She sleep trained her daughter whereas we co sleep. We are still Breastfeeding and plan to for the foreseeable, whereas she FF her daughter. She had her daughter going to dance classes from when she could walk, we prefer to do other things as a family at the weekend.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with this, she has chosen how she wants to bring up her daughter and us ours. But the problem is MiL is constantly comparing us, and this increases every time she sees this friend. It’s like she trusts her friends parenting more than ours. Last week it was ‘Mary was saying there’s a space in the toddler dance class Amy used to go to, you should get DD down for that.’ (Not real names). A few months ago it was ‘Mary put Amy to her mums to weekend when she was DDs age which helped her sleep through the night.’
Feel like I am constantly having to reinforce boundaries. I can’t dictate to MiL what she does with DD when she has her once a week, but I wish i could tell her to stop seeing this woman as I feel like it’s open season on my parenting. DH agrees with me on the parenting decisions, but he also feels like we can’t tell his mum what to do. And we can’t afford the childminder that extra day.
YABU - suck it up, people will always have opinions on your parenting
YANBU - tell MiL that I don’t want hear her friends opinions of my decisions.