Ahh, I finally have time to respond. Sorry I'm a little late in the game.
Have you and your husband had a chance to discuss why he wants less contact with your family and why so little contact with his own? It can be very simple or very complex. It's anybody's guess unless you talk frankly about it.
How much of your contact is because you simply enjoy the family contact? How much have you and your husband talked about what your dreams of a family together would look like? And how does living near your family change those dreams--for better or worse? Is he concerned with any influences your family might have on your child--TV, sweets, etc.? Does he feel the gifts lavished upon him have strings attached or are inappropriate or unnecessary?
My MIL gives gifts to us or to our son while she can barely afford things for herself. It drives me nuts. I wish she would give just one thing, show restraint and teach him that one simple gift can be wonderful--as wonderful or more so than lavish, or multiple, gifts at times. But everyone perceives gifts differently.
As for visiting relatives, my family always lived a day or more away so visits were reserved for a week or two in the summer. Otherwise, we had all major holidays with just my immediate family--six kids and my parents. I loved it. We created our own traditions and weren't obligated to travel to this family and that family every holiday. My mom had grown up close to many of her cousins but our family didn't. We didn't know anything else so it didn't seem odd. We still get along fine with everyone but we just don't keep regular contact--no particular animosity, just periodic contact. (I talk with my mom maybe once every month or two. Sometimes I don't talk with some of my siblings for a year or so, but it's not because of any bad feelings. We just contact when the desire arises.) We all send periodic group emails to catch people up on our lives.
Then I got married. Big change. Little did I know how consuming living close to my spouse's family could be. I'm fine with it now after 17 years, and after we moved an hour further away, but those early years were hard for me to adjust to.
Why? I was raised that you grow up, go to college, and get on with your life. I still love my family, and we have great conversations when we connect, but I always assumed I would live my own life as an adult. We would see each other periodically (1x every year or 2 or 3), and we would keep contact via phone and/or email. My husband had lived all over the U.S., as well as Jordan and Somalia for a year each, doing geological survey work. When we decided to get married and live in New England, to be nearer his family, it never dawned on me all of the family obligations it would entail.
I love my husband's family. However, I would have never said, "Gee I want to spend all my free time with them." The first handful of summers, our weekends were consumed with family birthday parties, often several weekends each month. In fact, we never got to celebrate our anniversary, until our 5th anniversary when I put my foot down, because it was the day after my BIL's and SIL's birthdays. (They were born on the same day, two years apart.) God forbid, anyone would break the mold and not attend a family event. That just wasn't done. As for holidays, my husband was in his 40s before he ever missed Christmas at home, even when he lived all over the place.
In my own family, I grew up loving birthday parties. It was a simple event where the birthday girl or boy got to choose their favorite meal and determine who to invite. But as we got beyond our teens, a simple round of phone calls and well wishes would suffice. I looked forward to receiving or sending those calls and thought that was enough. Holidays were the same for my family--a call and an opportunity to reconnect were a delight.
Then I married into a family that was still having a birthday party for every blasted person in existence, with gifts and all--whether they were a child, or in their 70s or 80s. Do I sound angry? I'm not now, but I certainly was back then. I thought the first few years of a marriage were a time to get to know each other and to build your own traditions, but we kept getting pulled off to someone else's traditions.
But you know what? Little did I know that our occasional absences gave other family members the freedom to come or not come as the years proceeded. And they learned to bunch several into one big birthday event to consolidate them. Now, I enjoy birthdays again. We finally found a balance between our own family life and the larger family life of my husband's relatives. Now I enjoy the contact rather than resenting it.
It's an interesting thing to develop your own family traditions while blending them with extended family traditions. It may be as simple as a conflict of traditions and dreams with your husband. Or it may be much more complex than that, involving some deep-seeded feelings and hurts from his past.
My husband was the first person in his family to get a college degree and to move away from his home town. He has more relatives than I can count within a one hour radius of where he grew up. On the flip side, my family has a long line of people who went off to college and forged their own lives in different cities around the world.
One way is not better than the other. They're just different. There are good things about both traditions. The trick is to create a blend of traditions that works well for your family--immediate and extended.
By all means, don't cut off contact with your family. If your husband truly wants to prevent extended family involvement, that would be a huge red flag for me. But if it is more a matter of him feeling left out or wanting to develop your own traditions with you and your own children, that is something you two need to consider together with both sides being heard.
I can't tell you the number of arguments we had after some of the visits to my husband's family. So much of it was an argument of expectations being bruised. I thought we would do hikes and spend time together as a couple during our first few summers. I thought we would develop more of our own traditions. I didn't expect to be celebrating 50 to 60-year-old siblings birthdays forever. The first few years were just a life I didn't expect.
To add to the mix, my husband's family is full of unfettered opinions--they don't hesitate to let their feelings known. Over the years, I have learned to express myself more, and they have learned to respect that there is more than one way of doing things. It hasn't been a lifetime of struggle--not by any means. But I spent several years biting my tongue for the sake of tradition and/or their opinions. For me, it wasn't healthy for my relationship with my husband, or for the extended family, for that matter.
We are now at a better balance, one we can all live with better. It requires a little compromise on all sides--yours, your husband's, your family's, etc. Sure, we have lost some of the contact because of cutting down the number of visits, but we have also gained some things by doing this. It's a delicate balance that requires candid communication between spouses.
I chuckle about the fact that my husband's family comes out to our house once each year for our son's birthday. We have invited them other times, but tradition is a hard one to break with some of them. According to some of them, we live "way up there in New Hampshire" even though we are actually just 1-1/2 hours due west of them.
With my MIL at 84, this is the first year she let us do Thanksgiving at our house. It was a small group because some family members couldn't get past the idea of not having it in their own hometown, but my MIL was ready to give up the location and we had a delightful meal here. (My husband and I have been the ones cooking that meal at her house for several years now.) She was finally ready to say it's time for the families to have their own traditions, if they don't want to travel to our house. No animosity, just a fact of her getting tired.
So, to make a short story long, it may or may not be normal to want to prevent family involvement. Have a good long talk with your husband. It may entail an argument; it may not. But communicate nonetheless.
At our wedding, someone passed on a pearl of wisdom--don't let the sun set on your anger (it's actually biblical if I remember correctly). If the anger builds up too much, it can fester. The first few years, I let this happen too often on this subject. But if all sides care enough to say what they really feel, and they feel heard and are all willing to give a little, I'm sure you will come to a better understanding about all of this.
It will take more than one conversation, I can bet. It's a process--a process of love and compromise, but it's worth the effort.
Enjoy your family--extended and immediate. And listen and talk with your spouse!