My husband and I have a beautiful 6 month old daughter who is the light of our lives (or whichever cliche-but-true sentiment you prefer). To preface this, I believe we both have her best interests at heart, but we have very different views on risk management that my husband believes stems from the difference in our class upbringing.I want some help to try to understand and also solicit some suggestions for how to discuss this philosophical difference in a respectful, productive way. Usually we're great communicators but these parenting issues have been bubbling up and honestly, I'm a little stumped and he's defensive.Some background: I'm grew up solidly upper middle class. My parents are both successful executives who still managed to be actively engaged in my childhood. They were both big proponents of gentle discipline, as well as keeping up to date on the latest scientific/medical guidelines for safety and child development. These values have been successfully instilled in me, and I thought my husband felt similarly particularly when we used to speak theoretically about hypothetical future children.However, now that we actually have a child, I've noticed him getting more and more defensive when we talk about implementing these ideas with our daughter. The sarcastic phrase, "Well I guess my mom was shitty and did everything wrong" has come up more than once. For context, he was raised by a single mother and more or less lived in poverty. She very obviously did not do everything wrong, as he is an amazing human being. She's also great and we have a good relationship, even if we don't always see eye to eye.However, there were some elements of chaos in his upbringing that I would like to avoid if at all possible with our daughter. I won't get into the more extreme of these because he recognizes those as things not to replicate, but with smaller items, he thinks I'm unreasonable. When these come up in actuality or hypothetically, he gets extremely defensive saying that I'm denigrating his upbringing and that I don't understand what it's like to be poor and that we can't erase his perspective in child rearing. Which I agree with, except when it comes to things that I think are objectively unsafe. Maybe I'm being too harsh though? Here are some examples:I don't want his 12-year-old cousin to watch our daughter alone for "practice." She's not a conscientious kid (at all) and regardless, 12 feels too young for me. I offered to supervise bottle feedings and diaper changes to help her learn, but that's not good enough and is also insulting to his mom for allowing 12-year-olds to watch him.Family dogs bite. I'd like them to be put away when our daughter is mobile, but apparently he grew up being told that "dogs bite" and that the way to learn is to let the kid and the dog "work it out." This is one I will be putting my foot down on, but he thinks I'm being snobby about.He talked about how much he can't wait to have our daughter join her cousins in riding in the back of pickup truck flats like he did as a kid. I didn't actually respond to this one because it's so far in the future, but I imagine you can guess my argument and his likely response.Spanking was a thing. We've been clear we will not be spanking and his family rolls their eyes at that. So I said to him privately that if any of his family members tried to spank our daughter, I'd read them the riot act. He thinks that would be disrespectful and that we would need to deal with it gently, since he was spanked by all of them as a kid and is "fine." This is another hill I'll die on.Weird minor one: His family has a Thanksgiving tradition that 6+ month olds chew on turkey bones. When I said that I wasn't comfortable with that because our daughter will have just started solids and also choking hazard?, it was the same.There's lots and lots of small instances of these differences, and they're starting to wear on me. He thinks that I'm being a helicopter parent and judging his family (which I guess I am a little bit, though I do generally think they are great). He also keeps reiterating that he was fine and that because of that, he's okay with more risk than I am. When I bring up the idea of survivorship bias, he tends to snap defensively.We're both still quite sleep deprived and new to this parenting thing. I'm not sure how to open the door to discussing these issues without both of us gnashing our teeth. And like I originally said, I didn't anticipate these being issues pre-parenting so I'm kind of thrown for a loop.Any advice for how to approach this with him? Or does anyone see places where I could compromise and I am, in fact, being more of a snob than a safety-driven parent? My goal is to get us both on the same page, while respecting that he has a different perspective. But every time it comes up, the conversation devolves. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2AtrXHN
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