Gatekeeping is something that I think that everyone needs to just know about, so that we can recognize when it’s happening and maybe make better interpretations of what it means and what we can do about it. First, I’m going to share a story from the person who taught me about gatekeeping, and then I’ll share some of the lessons that I’ve learned about it through my years of working with parents and families. And I’ll leave you with some songs to inspire you.
Let’s start with a story from T. Berry Brazelton, the famous pediatrician (emphasis mine):
“When I was born during the First World War, my father was away training on the East Coast. I was nine months old when he first saw me. I was told my mother was waiting in a long line at the station, dressed in her best new suit. I was in her arms, probably fingering her nose, her mouth, pulling on her earrings. A long line of uniformed and medaled men came off the train. My father would have come down the platform, half running, in his well-cut uniform with its captain’s bars. He was handsome—not his face and his prominent nose but in the athletic way he carried himself. Apparently he rushed up, hugging both of us at once and took me abruptly out of my mother’s arms. “Little Berry!” he shouted as he squeezed me in a big hug. As the story goes, I began to cry, louder and louder. What right did this absolute stranger have to take me from my mother’s familiar and warm chest? What right did he have to yell at me and squeeze me? I’m told I wailed louder and louder, in the chaos of all these reuniting families. My father was no doubt stunned. “He doesn’t like me!” he said to my mother as he handed me back.
“The story rings true to me as I’ve grown to understand both the acute awareness of nine-month-old babies at the peak of stranger anxiety and the hypersensitivity of a new father as he tries to connect with his baby for the first time. Had my father known to wait until I reached out for him, our relationship might have been different from the first. Reflecting on this story later on sparked my interest in establishing a rapport with fathers-to-be during pregnancy and preparing them for times when their relationship with the baby may be strained, so that they can understand the baby’s behavior and not feel hurt or resentful. In my practice, I’ve sought to capture fathers for their babies from the first.
“The chance in later years to watch fathers who weren’t present for the first several months of their child’s life confirmed the importance of a father’s early experiences with his baby. It isn’t easy for a parent to catch up with the milestones of development; the stresses around a new baby—the diapering, the burping, the unresolved crying, the mistakes—all become positive steps in the family’s growth. A father who has to suffer through these initial vicissitudes is setting down layers of attachment to his baby.
“My father missed out on this early relationship and, perhaps as a result, always seemed pretty distant, even wary of me. I’m sure he loved me but I never really knew him. My mother fostered that distance with what I now see as unconscious “gatekeeping.” In my work I’ve learned that everyone who cares deeply about a baby is in competition for that baby: parents with each other, grandparents who feel “if only they’d do it my way,” caregiver and parent, parent and teacher, coach and parent. It’s an inevitable reaction and part of attachment. Since my mother had been sole parent through my early infancy, she believed she knew me better. She probably corrected my father whenever he tried to take any responsibility for me, and, as a result, he may have given up early. I have learned that, by alerting adults who care about the same baby to this gatekeeping tendency, they are less at its mercy. Otherwise, they are bound to try to shut the other adult out. When I was older, I interpreted my father’s tentativeness as disappointment. Now I am able to see it more clearly. He always professed pride in me but was distant. Remoteness may have been an incentive to me to make him proud, but it also fueled my ambitions. But we were never really friends. He actually seemed closer to my peers than to me.”
Excerpt From Learning to Listen by T. Berry Brazelton & Berry Brazelton https://books.apple.com/book/id626067814
I think that gatekeeping is normal, and it’s really HARD. We all have a natural tendency to think that we know best. We want to tell other people what to do. If I ask for a stress reducing conversation from someone who has never heard that term, they often assume that they can reduce my stress by fixing my problem… as if I’m too dumb to be able to fix it myself. But a stress reducing conversation (according to the Gottman Institute) is one in which empathy comes before advice! I try my best to ask people for permission before I give advice, but I still often mess it up. And as an owner of an anxious rescue dog, I’ve experienced gatekeeping from everybody from dog professionals to random people on the street, and it feels really insulting. Too much advice feels like the person is saying that we don’t know what we’re doing. Maybe we do, and maybe we don’t! We’re human! That’s the thing!
Let’s repeat that key line above: “everyone who cares deeply about a baby is in competition for that baby”
How can we work as a team rather than competing with one another? How can we strive for growth without requiring perfection? Questions and empathy are so often so much more effective than advice and competition!
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned about gatekeeping over the years:
First we need to recognize it.
When possible, it can help to have a shared vision of what we want to accomplish together. If we can see the intention behind the person’s behavior, it’s easier to deal with it. That’s one of the reasons that I stress that every expectant couple should, if at all possible, write down during pregnancy anything that they can figure out about what kind of a parent they want to be and share it with their partner. We know that the dream is very likely to change over time, and that’s OK. But if our partner knows what kind of a parent we want to be, then they can help us out and it’s easier to give us the benefit of the doubt when we aren’t living up to the goal… which we won’t because we are human, and that’s OK too.
I think it’s important to remain curious and to remember that parents are the experts in their children. No matter how much we think we know about children in general (or dogs, in my case), it’s the parent’s job to be an expert in their child.
Gatekeeping can be about giving too much advice. It can also be ANY way in which we compete instead of working together. Whenever possible, we need to be on the same team, working toward the same goal, even if our approaches look very different.
In a marriage relationship, rituals of connection such as massage or a daily dance together can be really helpful. Generally, things like laughter, sunshine, touch, and exercise are things that make us feel good, which can help us to make better decisions.
To close us off, I’m going to share a few songs to get us thinking about gatekeeping. You can check out the individual songs below or use this link to the playlist on Apple Music)
Sara Bareilles’ King of Anything
Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten
Bruno Mars’ Just the Way You Are
Bruno Mars’ Count on Me
Gossip’s Move in the Right Direction
Ben E. King’s Stand By Me
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