Do I try to educate my mother in law about this?

[Artmama]

My Mother in law is VERy involved, she lives across the country but they visit every 2 months (yup, every 2 months! and they stay with us for 10 days! Yup!)
So she watches and interacts with my DD a lot when they are here. I am really into certain aspects of GD like avoiding saying cetain types of praise and typical timeout style stuff. Should I send her articles to read, or just let her do what she does unless it is really bad? She is kind and patient, but totally trained her kids like dogs. (you get M&Ms if you pee on the potty etc.) The praise thing is hard for even my dh who thinks I am crazy.
Should I just let it go and focus on my own relationship with dd? That is what my husband feels.

[aira]

Depends.

Little bit of both, IMO. I don't let the GPs do coersive stuff - that's their bread and butter. I stop it, because I'm DS's advocate and that's the bottom line.

Now, the ILs do the yuckiest phoney patronizing, sing-songy praise you've ever heard. Makes you puke from the plastic void of emotion. I would love to get them to stop praising DS, but they can't even see what DH is talking about... So I don't hold out a lot of hope on that one. But I would never stop his relationships with his family over that one.

Now, my mom asked last week for something to read to get on-board with what I'm doing. (I started a thread about it...) But she was getting very frustrated not knowing why I approached things like I did, and why I stopped her from what I saw as inappropriate methods.

I got her the UP dvd and she is all about it now. She bought a paperback copy of the book, and is going to lend it out to all her friends.

So things can get better. If you'd asked me 2 weeks ago if I thought things would get easier WRT my mother and DS, I'd laugh at the impossibility! But it changed.

Just model what you want and stop the really agregious stuff. Hope for the best!

[aira]

http://www.mothering.com/discussions...d.php?t=443847

Here's a link to the thread with all the resourses that were recommented to me...