How to set boundaries with family as a first time mom: Real talk for fist gen Latinas on conscious parenting and self trust! / Episode 8

Ok I had to get the tissues out for this one 😭

If you became a mom and this kind of advice didn’t sit well with you:

👵🏼 Don’t hold the baby, you’ll spoil her!
 👵🏼 She’s crying to manipulate you!
 👵🏼 If she’s dry and fed, there’s nothing wrong!

Then you’re gonna feel so vindicated through this episode!!

Becoming a mom made me take a magic eraser to so many things I was taught—and it forced me to set boundaries with family in a whole new way. Navigating the old  hispanic parenting and trying to hold my own vision of what great parenting really looked like…even when no one understood...was tough! And if you're a first gen Latina, you know exactly what I mean!

We’re getting into the real emotions that come with trusting your intuition, and honoring your baby’s big feelings—without letting the pressure or opinions break your spirit or change your mind. Because this isn't 'soft parenting', this is a deep conviction that you know your baby better than anyone. 

This episode is for the Latina woman who’s done everything right, but still finds herself in an inner struggle between doing things “the old way” and creating something more grounded and connected. If you’ve been afraid to go against the grain or felt guilt for doing what feels natural—this one’s gonna land deep!

Let’s talk self trust, conscious parenting, and the kind of emotional intelligence in kids that starts with how we choose to lead as mothers.

⭐️All links below are in one place here! 👉🏼 https://beacons.ai/breakcycles

☎️If this hit a little too close to home… it’s time for a Strategy Call!

A 1:1 session with me where we untangle the guilt, drop the pressure, and figure out what you actually want, without burning it all down.

If you feel like you don't have it all figured out, you're in the perfect place to co-create your next move with me!

https://calendly.com/tiffanytuttlecoaching/lifecoachstrategy

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Becoming a mom, especially having a daughter, will hold up the mirror to all the gaps in the parenting that you received.

We understand that everyone did their best with what they knew,

but our generation is parenting differently.

if you've ever felt like your whole family had an opinion about how you parent.

Or becoming a mom forced you to face every unspoken rule in your culture, in your family. This episode is for you.

I am sharing how motherhood showed me exactly where I needed to break the cycles, set boundaries, and do things differently even when it wasn't easy, even when no one understood why. So let's talk about it.

Last week I talked about not listening to all the opinions of Ts, all the elder Latina women who have so much to say about parenting in general. And ironically, it's usually the ones with the biggest opinions whose kids don't even talk to them. So let's keep that in mind.

Definitely check that out because they go hand in hand that episode and this one. Now, I don't want y'all to gasp in Spanish like a novella actress when I tell you this, but I am a pretty boring and predictable person in real [00:01:00] life. I mean, I'm on Cloud nine because they're building a grocery store close to my house.

I am so excited, and I'll probably be there five times a week.

So it's not a shocker that I didn't give my parents any problems growing up. Not because I didn't wanna face their resistance, but because I genuinely didn't care to do what people my age were sneaking around to do, to participate in clubs, looked stuffy, and I imagine they smelled like the sweat of a thousand desperate bros.

Skipping school meant walking somewhere. Girl. I am in South Florida. I'm a chunky girl. I don't like to walk for no reason, so no thank you. Overall, I was really the good girl that didn't ruffle any feathers, which is I know crazy. If you know anything about my brand, what I stand for, my message, it's quite different nowadays, but it took a lot of steps to get here because most of us were raised to be the good girl.

We wanted to be safe. We wanted to make people happy, and that required not rocking the boat, not bringing too much attention to yourself unless you were a star performer. There was really no in-between because if [00:02:00] you almost got a good grade, well you were gonna be scolded, or it was gonna be pointed out that you didn't do good enough.

So either you did the thing or you didn't, you know?

So overall I was pretty predictable. The quiet girl, very smart, great grades, studied for fun, and I gave no one any problems. But you know, there's always a, but I became a mom and that's where the mirror was held up to me . To see my culture as a Latina, and it really clashed with the things that truly mattered to me for my daughter and of course my way of doing things look wildly different than the stories I had always heard about newborns.

To this day, I still hear people say A baby only cries if they're wet, hungry, or have gas. Anything outside of that, if you've checked those three boxes, they're just being brats. They just wanna be held. They just wanna manipulate you. So when I had my first baby, I heard all of those things.

Don't hold your baby, you're gonna spoil her. She's crying just to manipulate you. She has to learn to self-soothe, to sleep, and like literally, we're talking about a [00:03:00] newborn here. It's not even. Biologically normal for a species to have a baby and completely detach from it, but yet we as humans are taught to do that.

There's something wrong in that message. I. And in my case, my daughter had so much colic and reflux. She was in so much pain, and I would just, I'd have to hold her because she would spit up. And I remember one time, from the span of the kitchen to my room, she spit up eight times. , And that's only like a five feet distance.

And I felt so sad for her. I felt so sad for me because I didn't have the answers. And I was just met with resistance the few times I tried to reach out, I was always met with, well, I told you not to do that. That's happening because you hold her too much. That's happening. And it was just a constant pointing out of everything I was doing wrong instead of helping me release my fears and guide me lovingly.

And I always say, I know that everyone has the best of intentions. But the delivery , can be inconsiderate to what we want. So that's when we have to take a [00:04:00] stand, stand firm in what we believe and the way that we want our life to look. All of those things that I heard about, don't hold your baby. She's manipulating you.

All these things, it just didn't sit right with me.

I could feel in my body that that was not aligned with how I wanted to be a mom. I could spot the cycle and I knew that was a cycle I had to break.

And I'm sure this happened to you as a new mom especially. The assumptions and the loud opinions was that your hopefulness is just because you're naive. Every happy milestone was met with a negative. Oh, you just wait until, oh my God, if I had a dollar for every, oh, you just wait Party pooper.

That always had something to say. Ugh, I, I, girl, I'd be rich. Those ou just weight comments would get under my skin so bad. Because you genuinely are happy about something your baby did. Oh, she slept three hours instead of three minutes today. Oh, you just wait until the four month regression. It's like, why do you have to rain on my parade?

And as I saw this happen time and time again, I realized that it was [00:05:00] my place to start shifting conversations and setting boundaries. Sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently, but I had to be clear on what I would and wouldn't allow and communicated time and time again. Now, mind you, I had my first child in lockdown.

She was born a couple of weeks after lockdown officially took place,

and everyone wanted to come and meet my baby. And I was going through postpartum, I was terrified of literally everything. So that was a battle in itself. And I had to be the bad guy and say, no, I don't want anyone coming in my house. No, I don't want anyone close to the baby. And I mean, that lasted like months and months and months until people were like, okay, whatever.

I guess we're never gonna meet your baby. But that was so hard to stand firm in that boundary because there was people still going to Disney and, and putting their newborns in all these social situations. But I didn't want to. And of course I would always hear those stories of,

well, Janie took her daughter to the Christmas party and everything was fine. Well, good for [00:06:00] Janie. I'm not Janie, you know.

But I had to advocate for myself, for my daughter, for the vision I had of motherhood. Even though it was being kind of ripped apart with the crazy chaos of the world, I had to hold onto the shreds that I could, that I could control.

And it's so hard to consistently feel like the bad guy, but it's necessary sometimes. And I know that many of you are in this space right now trying to create a new way of doing things in a family that doesn't understand why you are rocking the boat, why are you being difficult?

Why are you making your life complicated? This is the way we've always done things. Why are you trying to change? These kinds of messages you are probably flooded with every time you have to , reiterate a boundary, or you betray your boundary yourself and just turn the other cheek.

But that's also not part of the life that you are envisioning. You wanna honor your desires. You wanna honor your vision and your dreams, not be the one who betrays it before anyone else gets a chance to

And that's the choice I had to make. I had to decide if I [00:07:00] wanted to continue to do things the way they had always been done, have those beliefs that. Everyone had always held about babies, about motherhood, about newborns,

or I could use this opportunity to let discomfort welcome a ripple effect of change. And that's exactly what I did. And I'm so proud that I did for me, for my daughter, for women like me who are in that messy middle and setting boundaries with their family.

Because the beautiful part about this is that once you start making those decisions from alignment, not out of fear, you start showing everyone around you what's possible, and you will create a ripple effect of change starting within yourself. And I'll be real your family might not change. They might not see things the way you do.

But they will eventually learn if they want to preserve the relationship, to respect you, to not touch those topics, because you guys are not gonna agree. But that will take you being consistent and persistent with your own boundaries. Withholding the vision for your life.

Because you can [00:08:00] change the story. This is sacred work that you are doing here, breaking a generational cycle, doing things different than your grandmother's grandmother. Think about that. That's deep.

And this is the kind of work I help my clients do, whether it's parenting, leadership, relationships, choosing alignment over approval, and building a life that you and your kids don't have to unlearn later.

If this resonated with you and you want support in holding these boundaries and breaking cycles in a way that feels good for you, let's work together. Check the information in the show notes, and we could start with a strategy call.