Before we begin...

For those of you who have been on my email list for a while, thank you! When I first began writing, I was often doing it while holding a sleeping baby or toddler. These days, my children are older and I have found the space to devote to writing you more regularly (and at regular hours!) You'll now hear from me twice a month.

The Nightlight, the newsletter I've been sending you sporadically for years, is now Surface Tension. I'll still be writing about culture and parenting, but layering in guidance for self-reflection and conversation. This is what I believe holds the potential for transforming our relationship to ourselves, our children, and each other. Expect a follow up to this newsletter in a couple of weeks to build on today's ideas.

Thanks again for being here. Truly. And now...

We thought we were on the same page, until we weren’t.

I was spoon-feeding our three-year-old. Again.

The same toddler who used to happily devour avocado, blueberries, and the occasional chunk of liver was suddenly rejecting food. I knew it was a typical developmental shift, but when it was my child going through it, it felt like a crisis.

Which is how I found myself in the middle of daily three-person face-offs around our kitchen table. My husband with a look of quiet disapproval. My daughter with yogurt oozing all over her face. And me, silently pleading for just a few more bites from her as I scraped the rejected yogurt off her chin to pop it back into her mouth.

That night, my husband and I had the same tense conversation we’d been having for weeks.
"If we keep doing it for her, she’ll never learn."
"If she doesn’t eat, she won’t sleep. If she won’t sleep, we won’t sleep."

Neither of us was being unreasonable, but we were stuck. It felt like we were debating strategy, but underneath that was something much stickier that we hadn’t named yet.

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From purees to panic

When our daughter first started solids, making her purees gave me joy. Part of that had to do with hearing about how my dad used to always make my baby food. He’d go to the local market in Colombia, picking out roots and vegetables to cook into soups and purées at home. The image of my father lived in my head, not as a parenting strategy, but as a story of care. Feeding my daughter that way felt tender and familiar.

Meanwhile, in our Brooklyn parenting circle, baby-led weaning was “the way” to transition to solid food. It’s backed by research, endorsed by experts, and reinforced in every mom group. We quickly combined these feeding approaches. As we watched our daughter happily feeding herself, we felt like we were totally crushing it.

Until, out of nowhere, she stopped. She’d wander off mid-meal, climbing out of her chair, returning for a tiny bite, and wandering off again, declaring she was “all done.”

My instinct told me to pick up her spoon and start to feed her again. If she wasn’t going to do it, someone had to help her fill her belly.

What I saw as loving support for our daughter, my husband saw as backtracking. Helping her eat now felt like interfering with her growth.

What looked like a disagreement over a spoon was actually two people responding from two very different places. Each of us was trying to protect what we believed mattered most.

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The iceberg under every parenting decision

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, drawing inspiration from Freud, described culture like an iceberg: the visible parts — holidays, music, art, food, language — are just the tip. Underneath are the invisible forces like values, fears, beliefs, worldviews, and memories.

When something small feels disproportionately big, it’s because you’re only seeing the top of the iceberg. In parenting, you’re only seeing the behavior. What you’re not seeing is why it matters to you — beliefs about love, safety, responsibility, or what it means to be a good parent.

The spoon was visible. What it represented to each of us was not. Whereas I came from a family rooted in interdependence, he had grown up with independence as a core value.

It’s natural to turn to the latest research and parenting trends to figure out the “right” way forward, and there’s always something else at play underneath the surface. Your parenting decisions are also shaped by the cultures you come from, the ones you married into, and the fears and hopes you bring to the table for what you want to create together.

A new kind of conversation

In the end, there was no brilliant parenting hack or gold-standard, science-backed solution that fixed our daughter’s eating habits. Like most phases, we went in circles agonizing over the right solution, and she just grew out of it. As quickly as she had stopped eating on her own, she just as quickly picked up her own spoon again.

Our second daughter is now five and asking for help at the table after years of refusing any help and insisting, “I do it!”

We still have those flickers of “Am I doing this wrong?” or “Here we go again,” but our post-bedtime conversations are much more nuanced.

We’ve shifted from “what’s the right thing to do” to “what does this moment mean to each of us?”

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Get curious without getting confrontational

The more curious you get about what’s beneath the surface, the more space you make for both of you to show up with your full stories.

You don’t have to dive straight into the hard stuff. You just start noticing and share some laughs to lighten the mood. Here’s a question to ask your partner this week.

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What felt totally normal in your house growing up, but would surprise me?

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Until next time!

Melina

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