The Journal Times Online - Racine, Wisconsin

Twenty-five years ago if I had written on the wall with a permanent marker, my mother would have taken the wooden spoon to my behind. I wouldn’t have dared.
A few months ago my mother gently suggested I not yell so harshly at my 5 and 7-year-olds after they marked up the playroom walls with a permanent marker.
When I was in elementary school, if I didn’t eat what was put in front of me at the dinner table, I sat there. My mom makes excuses for my children when they don’t want to eat what I’ve made.
“Maybe they’re just not hungry yet,” she’ll say.
Yeah, right.
What gives? Why is it that the one place a mom should find unwavering support for giving her children proper guidance is the one place where she’s told she’s doing it all wrong.
When we’re too rigid, our mothers are right there letting us know. When they think we’re being overprotective, they’re right there to correct us.
And of course, we’re right there to tell them they did it all wrong with us.
At the gym last week, a woman asked me if I had ever written about the relationships between mothers and grandmothers and the difference in how they raised their children. She said she chuckles over the way her pediatrician daughter rigidly regulates what her grandchild can eat, based on age.
“Of course I’ve heard you can’t feed a baby strawberries until they are over a year old,” I say.
Then she said her daughter wouldn’t cut her hair while she was pregnant. That’s one I hadn’t heard, and really thought a doctor should know better than to believe something silly like that. Or am I wrong? Is there a newly discovered danger associated with cutting your hair while you’re pregnant? Thank God my children all survived.
“Years ago women thought they were being good moms when they blew the smoke in the opposite direction of their kids,” a woman at that gym says. She is greeted by chuckles, including my own.
See, I think the difference between moms and grandmas comes down to two things: information and experience.
Us moms, we’re just gathering information. And there’s a whole lot more available to us than there was to our moms. With a few clicks of a mouse, we can find out where all the convicted sex offenders live in our neighborhood. Our moms had to trust that we listened when they told us not to talk to strangers.
We can go online and find information on everything from the most common choking hazards to the dangers of deli meat while pregnant to the best rated bottle warmers.
Our moms had none of that. In their eyes, this probably translates to “it isn’t necessary.”
You see, they have experience. They dyed their hair and smoked cigarettes and ate whatever was in their path when they were pregnant. And we were fine.
They drove to the grocery store while we bounced around the back seat of the station wagon, not in car seats and probably not even wearing our seat belts. And we were fine.
Our moms let us ride our banana-seat bikes down the street without a helmet or knee and elbow pads. And we were fine.
But I wouldn’t allow my kids to go unbuckled or helmetless, anymore than my mom would advocate me spanking my kids with a wooden spoon.
So will we mothers and grandmothers ever agree on the best way to raise children? Probably not, but I think we can all agree that the most important requirement for the job of either mom or granny is love – for the kids and each other.
A few weeks ago, my parents were nice enough to come babysit for me for a couple of hours so that I could meet some friends while my husband was at work. My mom accidentally put the baby to bed without a diaper on.
Seriously.
She realized her mistake and cleaned up the resulting mess before I got home. When I walked in the first thing she said to me is, “You’re going to fire me as a babysitter.” Then she fessed up.
“Fire you?” I thought. “You’re the best, most reliable, most loving and my kid’s favorite babysitter.”
All I said to her was, “No way. I need you.”