I haven’t lived this moment yet. I want to be honest about that upfront. Julien is still in that phase where he grabs my index finger with his entire fist and holds on like I’m the only solid thing in the world. Elise is four. She still thinks I know everything — or at least she’s generous enough to pretend. So I haven’t stood in my adult child’s living room and been gently told that actually, we don’t put babies to sleep on their stomachs anymore, or that the car seat goes rear-facing until age three now, or that the thing I did instinctively for years is now something we just don’t do.
But my mother has.
Last month, during one of our video calls, she told me a story. She’d been watching a friend hold her new grandchild — a woman she’s known since their kids were in elementary school together. The friend offered the baby a sip of water from a tiny cup, and her daughter-in-law said, very kindly, “Oh, we actually don’t give water before six months anymore.” My mother said her friend smiled and put the cup down and didn’t say a word. And then later, in the car, she cried.
Not because she was angry. Not because she thought her daughter-in-law was wrong. But because she suddenly felt like a stranger in a role she’d been rehearsing for decades.
The loneliness nobody warns you about
We talk endlessly about the loneliness of new parenthood — the 3 a.m. feedings, the isolation, the way your social world contracts to the size of a nursery. And that loneliness is real. I’ve written about those nights, the ones where Camille and I pass each other in the hallway like ships and barely speak in full sentences. But there’s a different kind of loneliness waiting further down the road, and it doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
It’s the loneliness of becoming the older generation.
It’s the moment your expertise — hard-won, sleep-deprived, paid for in years of anxiety and love — is politely reclassified as outdated. Not by a stranger, but by the person you raised. The person whose survival was, for a very long time, your entire job.
This isn’t a small thing. Research published in Developmental Psychology has shown that the transition to grandparenthood involves a fundamental renegotiation of identity and family roles — one that can be just as psychologically destabilizing as the transition to parenthood itself. Except nobody throws you a shower for it. Nobody sends you a book.
When the rules change without telling you
Here’s the thing about parenting guidelines: they shift. They shift constantly, and they shift quietly, and if you’re not actively raising a small child at any given moment, you might not notice until someone points it out.
Babies used to sleep on their stomachs. Then their sides. Then their backs. Rice cereal in the bottle was standard advice for decades. Now it’s not. Peanut exposure was delayed; now the landmark LEAP study tells us early introduction actually reduces allergy risk. Car seats face backward longer. Bumpers come out of cribs. The walkers that every baby in the 1980s used? The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for them to be banned entirely.
None of this means the previous generation did it wrong. They followed the best available guidance of their time, just as we’re following ours. But knowledge accumulates. Recommendations evolve. And the people who feel the sharpest edge of that evolution are the grandparents — standing in their children’s kitchens, holding a baby in a way that used to be exactly right and is now, somehow, not.
My mother told me once that when I was born, the pediatrician told her to put me down on my stomach to sleep. She did it every night. She did it because she loved me and listened to her doctor. And now, if she laid Julien on his stomach during a visit, I’d correct her. Gently, yes. Lovingly, yes. But I’d correct her. And some part of her would absorb that correction not as updated science, but as a quiet judgment on the mother she was.
It’s not really about the car seat
The correction itself is never the whole story. It’s what the correction represents.
When your adult child adjusts how you’re holding their baby, or mentions that we don’t use blankets in the crib anymore, or explains that screen time before two isn’t recommended — the information is the surface. Underneath is something much more tender: a shift in authority. A passing of the torch that nobody agreed to pass.
Research published in the Journal of Family Theory & Review draws an important distinction between structural ambiguity and psychological ambiguity in intergenerational relationships. Structural ambiguity is about logistics — who does what, who decides what. Psychological ambiguity is about meaning — who am I now? Grandparents who struggle most aren’t necessarily the ones with the least access to their grandchildren. They’re the ones who haven’t been able to renegotiate their sense of purpose and competence within the new family structure.
That’s the ache my mother’s friend felt in the car. Not I can’t give a baby water. But I don’t know how to do this anymore. And this used to be the thing I knew best.
What this means for us — the ones in the middle
I think about this a lot, even though my kids are small. Because I’m both the corrector and — eventually — the corrected. I’m the one who will someday gently tell my mother that actually, we do things a little differently now. And I’m the one who will, twenty-five years from now, stand in Elise’s kitchen and hear those same words directed back at me.
That’s the strange, telescoping quality of parenthood. You’re always occupying multiple positions on the timeline at once. You’re the exhausted father of a four-year-old and a toddler, and you’re also, simultaneously, the future grandfather who doesn’t yet know what he doesn’t know.
So what do we do with this?
I think we start by recognizing that the correction — when it comes from our parents, or when we deliver it to them — is almost never just informational. It carries emotional weight. It touches identity. And it deserves to be handled with the same care we’d bring to any conversation about something that matters deeply to someone we love.
For those of us correcting our parents
Lead with gratitude before guidance. Not performative gratitude — real acknowledgment that they kept us alive with the tools they had. My mother made decisions in the dark, the same way I make decisions in the dark now. The fact that the flashlight has gotten brighter doesn’t mean she was stumbling.
When I need to update my mother on something — a sleep position, a feeding practice, whatever it is — I try to frame it as “The guidelines changed” rather than “You did it wrong.” Because the guidelines did change. She didn’t fail. The science moved.
Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” wasn’t just about lowering the bar for perfection. It was about recognizing that adaptation, not flawlessness, is what matters. Our parents adapted to their context. We’re adapting to ours. Both things can be true at the same time.
For those of us who will one day be corrected
I try to hold loosely to the idea that I’m doing everything right. Not because I’m careless — I read the research, I follow the guidelines, I do my best. But because I know, with near certainty, that some of what I’m doing confidently today will be revised by the time Elise has her own children. Maybe it’ll be something about screen time. Maybe it’ll be something about sleep I can’t even imagine yet. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is building the kind of flexibility now that will let me absorb those corrections later without crumbling.
Camille and I talk sometimes about what kind of grandparents we want to be — which feels absurd when Julien is still waking at 6:15 every morning and Elise is negotiating for one more story at bedtime. But I think the seeds of that future are planted now, in how we think about expertise and authority and the willingness to keep learning even when it stings.
The loneliness is the bridge
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the loneliness my mother’s friend felt in that car isn’t a sign that something is broken between her and her daughter-in-law. It’s a sign that something is working. Her daughter-in-law felt safe enough to speak up. Secure enough in the relationship to say, actually, we do it this way now. That kind of safety doesn’t come from nowhere — it comes from a family culture where honesty is possible, where love isn’t conditional on agreement.
Research on intergenerational boundary-setting in families consistently shows that the ability to renegotiate roles and expectations is one of the strongest predictors of long-term relationship quality between adult children and their parents. The families that struggle most are the ones where no one is allowed to say things are different now.
The correction is the closeness. It just doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
Last Sunday, I made pancakes — box mix, as always — and Elise stirred the batter while Julien banged a wooden spoon on his high chair tray. My mother was on the phone, listening to the noise, and she said, “You sound just like our kitchen used to sound.”
I almost said something about how we use a different kind of syrup now, how we’ve moved away from the high-fructose stuff she always bought. But I stopped myself. Because in that moment, the syrup didn’t matter. What mattered was the echo — her kitchen to mine, her noise to ours, her hands stirring batter decades ago and my daughter’s hands stirring it now.
The rules will always change. The love underneath them is what stays.
And if, twenty-five years from now, Elise gently tells me that actually, we don’t do it that way anymore — I hope I’ll have the grace to put down the cup, smile, and remember that her correction is just love wearing a different outfit than the one I’m used to.
