Hey, bit of a long post, so I need a bit of reassurance that I'm not alone.. Does anyone else have unwanted opinions constantly about how to raise their child from their family? I have a 2 year old son, and for the 2 years he's been on the planet my MIL makes sly comments about the way I parent my child. I wanted my son to drink water with meals when he was first being weaned, we tried for months to get him to drink water to mo avail so we added the smallest amount of juice to his water and scaled it back until there was nothing but water, my MIL told us to just give up and give him juice and that our efforts were pointless, she just gave her kids juice and that it didn't matter if he didn't drink water. He now loves water and asks for water over juice or milk. When my son turned 18 months old my son picked up slapping as a bad habit, it was usually centred on me and his Dad and the only way I could somewhat control this behaviour is using timeouts. I know some people hate the idea of putting their child in a timeout but he was hitting multiple times in an hour every day and I got to my wits end with it and it's the only thing that worked after trying everything.. When my MIL found out that that was how we were dealing with the behaviour every time we went over there for the 4 weeks following all I got was "I never did timeouts, it's cruel, look how sad he looks, I think it's wrong" etc. Well she understood a bit what it was like for me when she babysat for the day and he had a meltdown and was hitting her repeatedly and all of the techniques she told me to use on my son instead of timeout, surprise surprise, they didn't work! She actually had to resort to putting him into timeout, and the behaviour stopped and he didn't hit again while he was there. He has thankfully outgrown that behaviour. Then he moved onto food fussiness with vegetables which happens with all kids at some point. My approach was to continue to put the vegetables on the plate, offer them to him, if he refuses I tell him there's nothing else to eat and if he decides to continue with not eating he'll go without. My parents raised me and my brother this way and we like most things and we'll both try anything once. Whereas my partner (when I first met him, he's since been converted to trying more food by me refusing to cook him anything else if he turned his food away) and his sister are so picky, my partner's sister will only each starch and meat, no vegetables or anything. So I hardly think my MIL should have an opinion on how I feed my son given that both of her kids (my partner was 26 when I met him) wouldn't eat any vegetables. But she does, she says "just let him eat what he wants, why are you forcing vegetables on him, I never did that with my kids" but she never says it nicely it's always as a sly remark and I know she feeds my son rubbish without me knowing which makes him constipated and ratty. He's now got out of this weird food habit and has eaten everything on his plate without hesitation for the last 3 weeks, all because we were persistent with our chosen technique. And it might not be something that every parent wants to do, and it was a daily struggle but we've come out the other end with a little boy who will eat all of his food, which to me is a huge win.. These are 2 examples of lots of at least 40 different times where she has questionned my parenting in front of my son I'm tired of fighting all the time to "prove" myself, which is what I feel like I have to do all the time. Anyone else have something similar? I just can't seem to do right by her when it comes to my son, and I know it doesn't matter because he is my son and her opinion doesn't matter but we're over their house a lot and it's frustrating listening to the same old bit about how I should be doing it her way.. Ugh. Sorry for the long post, it's been a really long week and I needed to vent.