Most parents-to-be have nine months to prepare for a baby. When my husband and I found out his sister and her baby daddy had been arrested and faced possible prison time while our then-one-year-old niece had been thrust into the foster care system, we had exactly nine days to get ready for full time foster parenting. And while our instant immersion into caring for a baby was overwhelming enough, what proved all the more overwhelming was how to successfully coparent this chid with her incarcerated mom and her Guatemalan grandmother. Differences in culture, parenting styles, and personalities created a rocky start to our journey. Along the way, we found our groove, discovering how to keep the peace, retain our rules, and honor cultural differences.
Here are my top five tips for successfully raising a multicultural kid…
Tip #1: Resist Culture Clashes In Favor Of Cultural Understanding
At the age of 19, my mother-in-law crawled through sewage pipes from Guatemala to the United States. And while she’s since built a life for herself that resembles The American Dream, she often acts like she’s still trudging through the sewers. Her behavior, beliefs, and attitudes are common among first generation immigrants. However, in our early days of coparenting my niece, I struggled to make peace with what felt like constant culture clashes. From her insistence to only speak Spanish to the baby to her criticism of how “clean” my house was for her grandchild, to her constant unannounced visits to babysit, I often felt alienated and under attack (as if adjusting to caring for a child wasn’t hard enough!). In all fairness, my mother-in-law most likely felt the same kind of judgement and criticism from me.
Truth be told, bringing a child into our home wasn’t the beginning of my culture clash with my mother-in-law. And it wouldn’t be the end. Ultimately, I opted to cut off all communication with her, leaving my husband in charge of coparenting with his mother. Was this ideal? No. Was it sanity saving? Yes.
Tip #2: Establish Clear Coparenting Rules
My husband and I have joked for years that while we strive to live a drama-free life, we often find ourselves drama-adjacent with family issues. Once we recognized that we were in an indefinite coparenting relationship with my mother-in-law while my sister-in-law was behind bars, my husband and I drew up a set of clear coparenting rules…
Rule #1: We would provide our own childcare while working, ultimately finding an amazing nanny on care.com.
Rule #2: My mother-in-law was allotted three baby visits a week… on neutral ground (a.k.a. the local playground). My husband made time in his work schedule to shuttle my niece to these supervised visits, as mandated by the courts.
Rule #3: Whenever possible, my husband was the point person for communicating with my mother-in-law, thus minimizing language barriers and culture clashes.
Tip #3: Over-Communication Is Your B.F.F.
TV writer and director Jerry Belson famously wrote "Never ASSUME, because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME.” And when it comes to coparenting, this simple maxim holds up. Which is why over-communication is one of your greatest assets as a coparent - especially as more coparenting partners enter the mix. Once my sister-in-law was out of jail and on house arrest, my husband and I recognized that our niece was now being raised by three sets of parents. And given my husband’s family history of poor communication, we took it upon ourselves to become the original over-communicators - regularly talking via email, phone, and text about scheduling visits, showing up on time, and sharing if/when my niece had been fed, changed, napped, and bathed. This over-communication became our #1 success tool. It also opened up the lines of communication with my sister-in-law, healed old wounds, and allowed us to find forgiveness with each other. Today, our relationship is forever deepened because of our mutual willingness to share from the heart.
Tip #4: Don’t Make Anybody Bad Or Wrong
Admittedly, I’m not great at hiding my feelings. And yet, one of the keys to successfully coparenting a child is to not make any other parent or parenting figure bad or wrong. So while I may silently judge my mother-in-law’s smothering parenting style, or worry that my sister-in-law’s tough love approach to parenting leaves my niece feeling unloved, I know better than to shame or blame them publicly. And I think they do a pretty good job of not shaming or blaming my husband and I for what they quietly refer to as “acting white” or “raising her white.” It’s not a perfect system. But we do our best.
Tip #5: Keep Your Rules Consistent
Kids thrive on structure. Having a routine teaches them how to constructively control themselves and their environments. So imagine how confusing it must be for a child when they’re being coparented in different households with different rules. After a judge ruled that my niece was allowed to go back to live with her mom, my husband and I worried that all of our structure would become undone by an often dramatic household. However, we’ve been fortunate enough to continue coparenting my niece, who’s now four and such an incredible little girl. And while we often find there’s an adjustment period that occurs in the car on the drive from my sister-in-law’s house to ours - one where my niece shifts from boundary-pushing and emotional to well-adjusted and calm - my husband and I strive to keep our parenting rules consistent. I can clearly see how this consistency gives my niece a sense of peace, knowing that her only job when she’s with us is to be a kid. We’ve got the rest handled.
