Lawrence's blog: In-Law behaviours.

Our working parent household is one that has, after three and a half years started to function with a certain degree of normality. I seem to be able to bundle the child out of the door for nursery a little easier than usual these days and have been making a conscious effort to ‘make my time count’ by de-zombifying myself in the mornings and using the nursery run (the fifteen minutes which is often the only time I will see my daughter awake Mon-Fri) to engage in ‘positive’ conversation; and by ‘positive’ I mean a full blown daily daughter led debate as to whether the Incredible Hulk is stronger than Batman and which member of the ‘Paw Patrol’ (if you don’t know the TV show count yourself lucky) we like the best.  On top of this, my wife seems to be balancing her part time work and child care commitments whilst still making her weekly pilates class and I have uncovered new methods of dealing with my OCD (bite your tongue and reorganise/ tidy when they are both asleep).  All sounds good right?

There is however, one topic where, no matter how smoothly things are running at home can be the cause of significant inter-parent friction…..our in-laws.

Make no mistake, our daughter is truly blessed in that she has four loving grandparents who worship the ground she walks on (she is the only grandchild on both sides) and take an active interest in her development and wellbeing.

The problem is that we are often quite dismissive of the impact in-law behaviour can have on our spouse. (Un)fortunately, both sets of parents live too far away to be convenient, Tesco Metro style grandparents, meaning we often struggle when it comes to the likes of baby-sitting and illness cover. As a result, our in-laws often require a pro-longed visit to ‘get their money’s worth’ as it were, and this often exacerbates the effect of in-law behaviours.

Classic behaviours include (but are definitely not limited to):

• My mother doing an excessive amount of household chores; no matter how much I love not having to iron shirts, cook or wash my own clothes, an in-law re-organising your spouse’s knicker drawer can apparently be seen as somewhat undermining. Tread carefully.
• Father-in-law bad habits; if you choose to have twenty cups of tea a day, all I ask is that you put the used tea bags in the bin, don’t stack them on the kitchen worktop.
• Luggage overload; you are here for 4 nights, we live in a small terrace house with the luxury of one of those new electric washing mangles (aka a washing machine), any need for you to bring 3 suitcases?
• Compulsive granddaughter buying; clothes she doesn’t need, will be too small for by the time they are season appropriate or a complete disregard of our instructions not to buy generally.
• Inconsiderate spoiling; “don’t listen to your mum/dad, you can have jelly beans for breakfast”.

It’s an interesting dynamic in that we acknowledge the problem in the other’s parents but are quite defensive of our own.

In the interest of abating more in-law stand offs we decided action needed to be taken. Ironically, there is some overlap with our new found approach and the bureaucratic rhetoric we often preach in the office environment:

1) Shout out bad behaviours: “I like my things how they are so please don’t mess with them”, “the bin is three feet from the worktop surface, put your tea bags in it”, “If you keep buying clothes she doesn’t need we are going to sell them on ebay (cha-ching)”, “You know what, she does need to listen to me, as do you, jelly beans are not an appropriate substitute for Weetabix”.

2) Be understanding of the impact on your spouse: “Whilst I would love to have my items neatly re-arranged by someone else, I understand how having your underwear sorted by a non-blood relative could be seen as encroaching”.

For a while I thought we were the only ones who wrestle with in-law issues, but it turns out there are some pretty common and unique in-law behaviours out there; the mother-in-law who insists on buying her grandchildren massively out of date chocolate because ‘she knows a place and gets it for free’ being one of my personal favourites.

Time will tell whether our new approach will have any lasting impact. If not, we have considered moving to a bigger house to put a bit more distance between us and them when they do stay over.

………we move in September.

Lawrence works as a Senior M&A Manager at a professional services firm in the City and is father to a gorgeous and cheeky three and a half year old.