Re: ADHD family-member-to-be trying to sabotage me

[Curlymoe115]

My SIL is a retired teacher. My spouse is 17 years younger then her and when she was going to University she was an expert on Child Psychology. Everything Hubby did was wrong, delayed, bad, too fast, too slow etc.. When he was two his sister told his parents that he should be perfectly disciplined and be toilet trained, and sit at the table eating with manners. Her Professors told her so. She would rave on and on about what he wasn’t doing yet. Her parents rolled their eyes because they had actually already raised 3 children, all different yet all perfectly fine.

A few years later SIL had 4 children. Boy, girl and then twin boys. She came out to the house and had her feet in the water. She was going on about how the twins were so slow doing things, and their behaviour and how they were so slow to toilet train. After about an hour of this her dad said to her “Why don’t you apply some of that Child Psychology to them and get them to hurry this up, you told us that it was all supposed to be easy if you just followed the steps”, after a few minutes of thought my SIL looks at her dad and says “you didn’t believe that stuff did you” and he says “no, but you did”.

So you see it is easy to sit in judgement when you have a little bit of knowledge. From our perch on high we can proclaim things with great authority. But when we have to actually live it we lose our surety and then we slowly realize that maybe everything we were sure of was either wrong or at best half right. Keep your head up and look your new in-laws in the face and remind them she isn’t your doctor and she doesn’t have a clue what she is talking about.

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