Frustrating communication barrier as a parent

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m the father of a toddler, and I just forwarded this article to my wife–FDA recommends against cold medicines for toddlers–with the suggestion that we go over the specific medicines mentioned there to make sure the local clinic doesn’t dispense one of them to our kid the next time she has a cold.

But I’m already feeling frustrated in anticipation of the conversation I know we’re going to have at that time. She never bothered to read the article, tuned me out when I tried reading it out loud to her. But now, gracious, the little one has a cold, we must go to the doctor forthwith! And of course, this being Asia, the doctors aren’t doing their jobs if they don’t dispense medicine. And this being Asia, the cough syrup or whatever it is won’t have ingredients listed.

And when I press the point that we ought to get the doctor to tell us what exactly is in that cough syrup, she’ll dismissively query, in effect, “Are you a doctor? No? Then what good does it do to tell you?”

If I point out that we have Google and Google News and all kinds of medical sites, well, why would you trust them? But I’m supposed to trust the anonymous liquid dispensed by an underpaid doctor at a local clinic. Fine. By the way, car seats are also overrated.

I’m starting to think that she’s a bit lazy about looking out for our kid, or maybe somehow she blocks the idea of anything bad happening to our kid and she’d rather leave everything to fate instead of taking what meager steps we can to protect her.

Boy, this is frustrating. I’m not sure if I want to ask you guys what I should do, or just invite comiseraton over similar experiences, but this has happend often enough in the past that I’m worked up just thinking about what will happen next time.

2

That’s a tough situation you’re in. You have my sympathy.

As far as treating your son for his cold, I think I’d go with natural remedies before giving him questionable medicines.
I wish I had some advice for you regarding your wife’s attitude toward safety. That sucks.

3

Does this major communication failure occur on topics unrelated to the child?

If so, I’d suggest you’ve got what amounts to a culture gap; she’s going to do things her way in accordance with her culture, and your ideas are foreign & hence not worth following.

If so, that’s an unenviable position; you may love each other, but you’ll make a lousy life-team. And that’s a lot of what a marriage really is; a two-person team trying to get through life’s processes mostly unscathed.
As an childless-by-choice adult American I have to say that my present attitude toward American parents is that most of them seem like overreactive paranoid ninnies. They are so busy protecting their child from every imagined hazard that the kids will grow up crippled by fear and with crippled immune systems to boot. And each day brings a new hysteria about a new hazard and (surprise!) a new product you can buy to protect your precious child from said hazard.

I suspect your wife shares some of my disdain for the stereotypic American 21st century parent.

Now I’m not suggesting that you personally fit the sterotype. Doubtless you are a reasonable person who doesn’t fly into a panic if the little one eats some dirt or picks up a bug. You’re someone who believes gloves and a helmet are not needed for riding a tricycle. At least I hope you are.

But if your wife thinks thinks you fit the stereotype, well that’s enough to drive the dynamic in your relationship. The only way out of that trap is a real discussion about real beliefs between two people who are both willing to revise their attitudes. And if you two aren’t those two, well …
Many cultures take a very deferential attitude to expertise in general and doctors in specific. The US was that way back in the 50s. It was unthinkable to even want to know what was in a medicine or to ask the Dr. a question. “Just follow orders” was the attitude.

Perhaps you can turn that deference to authority to your end. I’m the Man and I’m in Charge, period. Not the way many 21st century American men (myself included) want to deal with their wifes, but if that’s what it takes to accomplish your goals, so be it.

4

My experience is that there is nothing like having a kid to bring what were formerly mildly interesting cultural differences into sharp relief. For us I would say that this has been a good thing both for our relationship and for our kids but I cannot say that at any given moment while it was happening I enjoyed it all that much. And it was harder after we moved to his home country, because then his fundamental attitudes were the locally dominant ones and so reinforced. It’s a power shift in some ways, it’s different from if you live in a country where you are both foreign.

I think people from the same cultural background often have parenting differences and have to work them out in much the same way; but at least they can mostly agree on what factors are working underneath the differences which is not always the case when you marry a furriner.

For instance, your attitude – and mine, really – that it is responsible to do personal research into medical matters and irresponsible (or lazy, as you say) not to is quite the reverse of the attitude in many places. In many places it is considered very near the line of psychotic and certainly arrogant to think you can, much less should, read a couple of websites and then decide what is and is not a good idea to prescribe for a cold. That’s why they went to medical school, innit?

I actually had an expat experience regarding cold medicine just after we moved here to the lovely Netherlands. My kid had a cold and I had run out of OTC cold medicine. Having had some experience in these matters around here I knew that the OTC remedies here for cold and cough are about as effective as doing nothing and considerably less effective than salt water.

So I called the doc-- all the good drugs here are by prescription, y’see, a side effect of cradle to grave health care. And I asked him if he would prescribe for me what I had bought OTC and was already giving my kid. He’s an agreeable guy and said he would. So I read him the label and you might have thought I had been giving my kids rat poison by his reaction. And maybe I was, as what he had to say about it was pretty much what is in that article.

If it were just this issue I would say that you should go along to the doc and ask them about this and tell them why you are worried. But since it is not, I recommend to you a lot of thought about why you think what you think and then a lot of conversation about it with your wife. And I would go ahead and do it now, because you will need the practice in spotting and then climbing over the Cultural Divide parenting as the kids get older. It doesn’t get less complex over time, I can promise you that. But we, in any event, have a lot less tension about it now than we did when the Wild Boys were tots because we talked about it incessantly then.

Okay, I talked about it incessantly and some part of it got through, and then we talked about it some.