I received a comment on my previous post about maternal gatekeeping that pointed out how it negatively impacts child development.  (My blog was, admittedly, focused more on the parent doing the behaviors, than on the children affected by them.)

Maternal gatekeeping comprises the beliefs and the behaviors that make mothers more primary than their partners in taking care of the children–essentially, it’s a form of control that makes mothers feel overly responsible and overloaded, while the other parent is marginalized.

What does that mean to the child, from an attachment perspective?

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I was listening to a radio interview with Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO whose book “Lean In” is apparently inspiring and provoking women in equal measure.  But that’s a story for someone else’s blog.

Anyway, what grabbed me–in the interests of my blog–was her mention of something called “maternal gatekeeping.”  It means (some) mothers are reluctant to relinquish control and as a result, fathers do less in housekeeping and child-rearing.  According to one study, gatekeepers do, on average, an extra five hours of family work a week.

So, are you a gatekeeper?

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You might have seen the 60 Minutes piece about Newtown parents who’ve become activists for gun control.  They started with the Connecticut legislature, and now eleven families of Newtown shooting victims took Air Force One to the capitol to try to impact the process there, armed only with the photos of their dead children.

One mother spoke about how the lawmakers who are threatening to filibuster (essentially, to stop gun legislation from even getting a vote) need to look not only in her eyes, but into the eyes of her daughter.  The strength and resilience of these families is phenomenal.  What does it say to the rest of us?

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We learn to parent, to a large extent, by having been the children of particular people.  What I mean is, we saw what parenting looked like up close throughout our childhoods.  Once we’re parents ourselves, we get a chance to imitate, or to do it differently.

This can often be more fraught than it sounds.

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I had a professor who once said that there’s nothing useful about  comparing our pain to other people’s.  What she meant is, our pain is our own, and there’s no sense in judging it.  The sense is in accepting it.

She wasn’t talking about dialectical behavior therapy, though she could have been.  Because DBT attributes a lot of our subjective suffering to the judgments we place upon ourselves.

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Until I had my daughter, balance didn’t seem that hard to achieve.  I was balancing competing needs and desires, sure.  But they were all mine.

Now, I’ve got to balance hers and mine.  Some weeks, something’s got to give.

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It’s a crucial relationship commandment: Know thy partner’s buttons.  What I mean is, learn what provokes a strong reaction in your partner (even if it makes no sense to you, especially if it makes no sense to you.)

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I wrote in a previous post about my 14-month-old daughter’s first tantrum/meltdown, seemingly ahead of schedule.  She went for a repeat performance yesterday in a much more contained environment: the car.

It’s a frequent experience among the parents of toddlers, an example of the competing needs parents have to juggle, and decisionmaking under stress.

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You have a kid.  You feel love beyond your wildest imagining.  You can also feel frustration on a level you’ve never felt before.  And often, afterwards, you feel profoundly guilty.

Why is this?  What can we do about it?

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I read an interesting tidbit recently that suggested one reason some babies/toddlers lag in  their developmental milestones is because their parents are too attentive.  Meaning, the kids never have to work for anything–they can just whine when a toy is out of reach and it appears.

Sometimes I’m guilty of that particular example.  But I also went into parenting believing you can’t spoil a baby.  From an attachment perspective, parenting ones so young is about trusting them to recognize and communicate their needs (often by crying), and then meeting those needs reliably.

So where does the truth lie?

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