Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My parents are in their 70s and live around the corner. About once a week, we go to my parents’ house for family time and dinner.
My daughter is almost 2 and has a pretty strict bedtime; it becomes more difficult to get her to sleep if she goes past it. Here’s the problem: No matter how hard I try, I can’t get my mom to get dinner on the table early enough for us to get home in time for bedtime!
I try to help her plan and make dinner, but even then, she’ll get out the ingredients and just wait before she starts cooking. She works full-time and has always been bad at coming home on time, so getting the whole evening together to start sooner is not possible. She blames me for not adjusting our schedule (i.e., not letting our daughter stay up later “just” one night a week or so). She has now declared that we just can’t come over for dinner anymore, which is sad to me. Do you have a recommendation for solving this frustrating problem?
—Routines Are Important!
Dear Routines,
I sympathize (very much) with your desire to keep your toddler’s bedtime at an hour that works best for getting her to go to sleep. (Indeed, I’m delighted for you that you have found the magic bullet for a stress-free bedtime! May it ever be so.) What you cannot do is make others, even your own mother, adhere to your schedule. This is unreasonable. (Yes, you are her daughter; you are also a guest in her house when you go over for dinner. Dinner guests do not get to dictate the time dinner will be served.)
But your mother, too, is being unreasonable if she demands that you push back her granddaughter’s bedtime for her sake (thus making your life more difficult). My generous interpretation of her putting off the start of cooking is that she doesn’t want to miss that “family time” that occurs before dinner. Still: Why invite you to dinner, knowing that she won’t get said dinner on the table until an hour that’s too late for you?
All of the above is why I am 99 percent certain this conflict isn’t actually about dinner, but about 1) who’s in charge; 2) your mother’s disapproval—I’m just guessing, but I’ll eat my hat if I’m wrong—of your adherence to a strict routine for your child; and 3) your wanting her to prove that she trusts and supports you in your role as a parent. (And probably some other stuff I don’t have enough information to guess at.)
In any case, when it comes to the particular concrete issue you’re dealing with (if not the sources of it, which I recommend also dealing with, forthrightly), you have three choices, as I see it: You can invite your parents to your house for dinner once a week, making and serving the meal on your schedule; you can propose to your mother that instead of her cooking for your family once a week, she allow you to bring a meal—either home-cooked or picked up from a restaurant—over to her house, and that she further allow you to serve it, so that dinner will be had on time; or you can dispense with a weekly extended family dinner altogether and instead invite your parents to join you for another activity once a week or so, perhaps during the day on the weekend, at a time that is convenient for you and works with your daughter’s (also pretty strict, I imagine?) nap schedule.
You might even give your mom the choice between the three options—or mix it up a bit and rotate among the three, week to week, depending on what works for all concerned. This would require both you and your mom to be more flexible than either of you has so far been inclined to be—but perhaps this would be a good thing for all of you (including, in the long term, your daughter).
—Michelle
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