Grandparents: If today's parenting feels over the top to you, you're probably not wrong.

Apps that track every feeding. Sleep consultants. Monitoring a baby's oxygen while they sleep. It's a lot. It can feel like a whole new set of rules were written, just to make new parents anxious.

Here's the part that's easy to miss.

Your life changed too.

Do you..

• …receive alerts when anything comes near your front door?
• …track your steps, your sleep, your heart rate?
• …spend more time researching a casual dinner out than you spent choosing a stroller?

The way we live has changed, not just parenting 

It arrived slowly, one habit at a time, over years. You adapted without noticing you were adapting. Now imagine yourself, 30 years ago, meeting someone living the way you do today. What would back-then-you think?

Your changes were gradual. You opted in, one choice at a time. This is different. Unless you've been immersed in the early parenting world even after your children outgrew it, you'll likely experience some lifestyle whiplash.

The baby is born, and boom — decades worth of parenting adaptations are in your face. The change can seem sudden and enormous. The parenting world also changed slowly, but it was during a time when you were looking elsewhere.

New grandparents find themselves novices at child-rearing. And it’s weird. Because “grandparent” implies experience.

It's an awkward place to be. You haven't been indoctrinated by social media and today's marketing. You've raised your own babies, so you know what worked for you, and you rarely see it considered. Your newness to today's perspective also lets you see the flaws as well as the benefits, but your observations may not be invited. It's a situation that requires restraint and more than a little finesse.

Some changes will have you saying, "Why didn't we have this?!" More often will be the results of powerful marketing that exploits a new parent's insecurity and sells them the fix for a problem that didn't exist an hour ago. So much stress that feels unnecessary, and it’s so clear to you. But remember, to new parents, this is how things work. It's you who is the visitor.

So rather than rolling your eyes at the camera pointed at the baby in the stroller, try counting the number of times when your ring camera saved your life versus how often it disrupts your daily life.

Is it really much different?

Want to catch up on your own terms, and maybe laugh a little while you do it? Face Cards were made for exactly that kind of conversation.