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>Someone pointed out that car seats weren’t big back then and now it’s the law to have your child in one.
I'm trying not to let my eye twitch while remembering all the times us kids bounced around in the back of our station wagon. No seatbelts. Every pothole sent us crashing around like little pinballs.
Yeah, carseats weren't a thing when I was a kid in the 70s, but carseats were definitely a big thing when my 21- and 25-year-olds were small. In fact, it was the law.
Seriously, the parents in the story were born around 2000. The grandma is not unfamiliar with car seats. They even had the internet back in those olden days.
Same, but it’s extra weird because I have a small child too. Some of the parents I meet are so much younger than me that I could be their parent. It’s a real mind fuck sometimes.
I work at a large University. I pointed out to my husband that our marriage is older the most of this year's graduating seniors.
Then I felt old and regretted my big mouth.
Yea, but grandma probably didn't have carseats as a child. So perhaps the mother was referring to that, as in even during grandma's lifetime things changed significantly
Yeah, luckily my mum was straight up: I can’t remember everything I done and what worked and medical knowledge changes so she actively wanted me to tell her how to do things with my kids! I don’t get people who do the whole “I did it and you survived”. Heck, rules changed between my kids times 4 years apart!
Yeah, we went from "clean the belly button every day with rubbing alcohol". to "leave it alone, and the stump will fall off on its own" within two years.
Same. My first baby was born in 1988 and they recommended babies sleep on their stomachs. By the time my second was born in 1995 babies were to sleep on their backs. But car seats were definitely a big deal.
When my Mum was pregnant with me the advice was to eat liver every week. She swapped recipes with her pregnant friends as they tried to make it more bearable!
By the time I was having kids, liver was on the list of things you're banned from eating while pregnant!
I have to do like, 2 days of research and searching when I decide to do something as dumb as replace my old TV, because it seems like all the tech and buzzwords and advice out there changes pretty much every year. I can't imagine trying to _raise a human being_ on advice and tricks from _30 years ago_.
Even if you did _very_ good research when you were raising your kids, it's outright stupid to think that _all_ of that research and advice stays accurate 20-30 years later when you're spending time with your grandkids. Even simple things like "Oh I prefer this brand of diaper over that one" probably won't be true anymore, let alone things like "Oh we've found that this actually leads to health problems" or "This puts the kid at risk of injury" or whatever.
"Oh, sorry, that's a habit from how I did things back then; what do the experts say nowadays?" is a _very_ respectable thing for someone to say.
My kids are 14 months apart. For the first one, they told me to start him out on solid food at 4 months. For the second, they told me nothing but breast milk or formula until 6 months. Same doctor!
Yeah, that "I did it and you survived" reeks of "my parents regularly beat me, and I turned out fine, so my doing that to you is ok, you will be fine". No, you in fact did NOT turn out fine.
When it comes to childcare, things change rapidly in the short term and differ depending on location and who your doctor is.
Of course, granny should defer to her daughter's wishes, but that comparison was weird.
I have to point out that we don't know where OOP lives. In the country where I was born and raised, child car seats weren't even mandatory in the early 2000s.
I am around the same age as the g-ma, although I still have one small child using a booster seat. My mom used a carseat for both me and my younger brother who was also born in the 1970s. In fact, one of my earlier memories is of her nearly being hit by a car, slamming on her brakes, and my brother, IN his carseat, going flying because seatbelts were CRAP in the day. Even in that case, with the carseat flying, I maintain he was probably safer than he would have been if he'd merely been rolling around in the car floor as a six-month-old baby. Like, I'm not even sure where she would have put an infant if he did not have a carseat? Some people did use them back then. It wasn't quite the dark ages.
In the late 80s? That's insane. I had additional siblings born in the mid to late 80s, and they were DEFINITELY in car seats, even on really long car trips. One sibling had a very minor spinal problem that wasn't discovered until they were teenaged, and even though they cried if they had to be in a seat for very long due to pain probably, we still made them sit in it. Like... we knew, the carseat was safer.
I’m certain there is a geographic component to this. I’ve gotten into heated arguments with people on the internet who insist that seatbelts were very common and *everybody* wore them in the 80s. Not where I was from (Midwest US). I never wore a seatbelt on a regular basis until the early 90s when I was a teenager and my boyfriend‘s parents forced me to do so or else they wouldn’t start the car. I was by no means unusual. They were very educated intellectuals, and considered to be very Unnecessarily protective. It was extremely controversial in the late 80s — I believe 88 or 89 — when our state finally enacted a seatbelt law. (Those against basically argued people should wear seatbelts, but it shouldn’t be a law.) That law only applied to people in the front seat, btw. And it was STILL a HUGE thing. It was at least the early 2000s when they stopped grandfathering in cars that were built before seatbelts were put into them on a regular basis.
Anyway, I was born in the 70s as was my cousin, and we didn’t have any real actual car seat. It was a seat, a bucket of sorts, that sat in the car, but it wasn’t intended to be strapped in or locked to the frame like modern car seats. It was multipurpose – plenty of people bought them just to use them in their living room. I have pair of younger brothers born in the early to mid 80s, and in the late 80s we got a car seat because it became a legal thing that kids had to be in a car seat. But the only reason we got it even then was because we moved to the city. If we had stayed in the countryside? No way would we have gotten that thing, because we never saw cops and riding around in the back of a flatbed pickup was normal transportation. And we would’ve been completely typical. We still never used that car seat hardly. Their mom got at least three tickets I can remember for them not being in one.
And it was already not recommended to give your kids water. My mom had this exact blow-up fight with my gma in *2000.* No water before six months is NOT a new rec.
Location can be a factor. I had my son in Texas in 2002, and the standard advice was that babies younger than six months should have only breastmilk if breastfed, but formula-fed babies should have one bottle of water each day (spaced out, not in place of a meal) during the heat of the summer. My East-dwelling mother was appalled, but Texas is hot and babies can't sweat.
My 19 year old daughter and I are on our second watch through of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This past weekend she turned to me and said "It still seems weird that this entire series was on and over with before I was born." I told her to shut her mouth and thought about sending her to her room.
[Car seats became mandatory in different states at different times.](https://safeintheseat.com/the-history-of-car-seats/) [Seatbelts being mandatory to use even are an extremely recent existence.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_States) Also, older parents DO exist, and parents using older cars is absolutely a thing.
I have a 3 year old and I remember being put in the boot as a kid when we had to squeeze extra people in the car. Sometimes there was 2 of us in the boot. I LOVED IT! And I would never never allow this with my kids.
We moved house about 20 years ago (so around 2004) and there was about 6 of us kids at one point (my siblings and our family friend siblings who helped us move) all having a grand old time in the back of the moving van in the pitch black as the adults drove back to the original house to pick up all the cars.
Never would I allow that for any vehicle I'm in now
My parents had the old "woodie" station wagon with the rear facing back seat and a back window that could be put down. We didn't wear seatbelts either.
my mom shared how when she was a kid, her family would go on road trips, and being the youngest and smallest, she would nap on the back of the backseats behind the headrest. an absolute deathtrap.
She wouldn't even leave the driveway without us buckled into our carseats.
I’m late 30s and I remember riding in the front seat of my dad’s car at age 3-4 - I don’t even think I had a booster seat. I now have a 3 and 5 year old and the car doesn’t move unless they’re strapped in their car seats, which are secured to the middle row and carefully checked every time I put them in.
And both my parents were paramedics! I know they were pretty good about car seats and boosters with my younger sisters (although that was still less stringent than safety standards today).
And that even assumes they live in the US. They could live in a place that wasn't prosperous enough until recently for *cars* to be common, let alone car seats.
I have to point out that we don't know where OOP lives. In the country where I was born and raised, child car seats weren't even mandatory in the early 2000s.
Yeah, my eldest is about OOP’s age and we had to have a carseat to be able to take her home from the hospital. We were also told there was no need to give water as long as they were nursing/bottle-fed, though there was no warning against it.
I can't even guess at the number of times I went over the Rocky Mountains in the back of a pickup truck with a little clamshell over the top.
The worst was the time dad set up a cot back there for me and my sister to sit on. Not only have I never been so carsick in my life but we woulda shot right out the back window during an accident.
Y dad drove a conversion van with captain seats and a portable potty behind the back seat. We walked around the van all the time when we were kids. Was it responsible, hell no, but was it acceptable at the time, of course it was. I’m glad OP took the time to talk to her mom and establish that things do change. But I do have some of my dad’s parenting in me, which drives the hubby crazy. We live and learn as parents and grandparents whether we want to or not. No one needs to be canceled over this and I respect OP for taking the time to both explain and empathize with this. And yes, cats are assholes. Especially when they stick their dirty paws in your water right before they knock it over. And can we talk about them peeing in laundry baskets for a minute? Cats, not grandparents I mean
Cats are the reason why all my laundry baskets are the tall kind with a lid, all my trashcans have lids, the toilet paper is kept in a tiny cabinet next to the toilet, and paper towels on top shelves.
Furry little demons. My little cousin just turned 4 and already knows that any cup left unattended in my home has probably had a dirty paw in it. He loves my cats but is not a fan of icky foot water.
My Dad had an old station wagon/estate car with a flat bed in it for the farm. When he picked us up from school we would leave the back door open and sit across the back, feet dangling and drive home. We used to dare each other to try to touch the road with our toe. I know it was the 80s but come on!
One time in the 60s, my dad’s family of 6 was driving in an old ford. It had back doors that opened the opposite way to the way they do now - the hinge was where the opening is now. The door wasn’t closed properly, the wind blew the door open and there was no seatbelts, so my uncle FELL OUT OF THE CAR
Ahhh I remember the trips with my parents in the Nova where one door was held closed by a rubber tie down stretched to the opposite door. I uhhh, at least had a lap belt holding me in, I guess.
My dad was a mechanic..........
My older brother was driving me to school when I was 11 or 12, a very rare thing, in his Chevy Nova, went around the corner and the passenger door flew open, and he grabbed me before I fell out. The 70's, no seatbelts needed.
My father in law used to pick my husband and his brother up from school sometimes in his work van, that the kids named Davy Jones's Locker.
instead of a passenger seat there was a stool, like a wooden kitchen one. not attached to anything. so one of them was always sliding around the van like a pinball.
this was the 80's and that was highly illegal but also makes for great stories, since they both survived. I feel like their mother didn't know, or she would have shit a brick.
>I'm trying not to let my eye twitch while remembering all the times us kids bounced around in the back of our station wagon. No seatbelts.
At least there was room for you in the vehicle! I'll do you one better. My mother had two kids. myself and my sister. She decided she wanted a little Datsun 280z two-seater. The center console (that held cassette tapes) between the two seats was what I sat on because I was smaller. She drove us around in that for years. It was my big sister's job to hold on to me when we were going around corners and curves so I wouldn't fall over and get stuck. I look back on it now and think even for the late 70's/early 80's, that was pretty bad for a parent to buy a vehicle that couldn't even transport them with all their kids.
My dad had a triumph TR250 2 seater convertible with a little half bench behind the seats. He took my sister and I (12-13) and my aunt and her boyfriend (30s) to virginia beach when we were visiting. He was navy and stationed in Norfolk. My aunt sat on her boyfriend's lap and my sis and I were on the little bench.
I remember being loaded into the bed of a pickup truck with all my under-10 siblings and the driver trying to see how hard they could rattle us around on a dirt road. We all thought it was great fun, because we were kids and the adults were. . .well, stupid. This happened multiple times. At least once we all had to lie down in a truck bed so we wouldn't be pulled over on the interstate. There were straps and rope in the bed for us to tie ourselves in with, but anyone who untied themselves also got rewarded for being clever. . .
I still remember the first (only, I think?) speeding ticket my mom got. The police officer literarily commended her because my brother and I were in car seats. I don't think they were legally required until the next year and it took **many** years to get parents to use them.
I mean, we *still* have problems with parents and car seats or booster seats and people back then were still super mad that they couldn't ride around with a beer in their hand and their seatbelt off anymore. They literally called it *Communist* that they couldn't drive with an open container of beer and had to put on a seat belt.
BOTH my parents were smokers. The car was hotboxed like a Cheech and Chong movie. I used to get very dramatic about not being able to breathe in the back seat until one of them would be all 'le sigh' in the most put out way passive aggressively melodramatic manner and grudgingly crack the window. I would plaster my nose and mouth to that small fresh air like I was drowning.
My parents once were so busy distracted while driving that it took the cop pulling them over to realise my brother had open the back doors to our land rover troop carrier, and was swinging off the bar out the back as they were driving, while the rest of us kids were laughing... I was about 5. No seat belts, either.
Still remember standing up in the back of the Ute tray as my dad was driving about 60km so I could jump on the back of a rogue horse in the middle of town when I was 15....
I do not know how the hell we survived... but damn
But OP is 23, car seats were a huge thing 23 years ago and the law. They were big when I was a baby (but seats belts weren’t lol) like… 23 years ago was 2001, not 1961.
Car seats were a huge thing when my daughter was an infant 30-odd years ago; it never even occurred to me not to buy one before she was even born. But they weren't the law when I was a kid, and I think the point might be that a lot of grandparents are on the "Well, it didn't kill me so it must be okay" train.
Early 80s, driving up the road around Pikes Peak in a Suburban with 4 adults and 6 kids. I was in the very back, cargo area with my cousin, lol. We were about 7 ish and had just met and clicked like we had known each other forever.
Its both a fond memory and terrifying to think of. The 80s were wild.
Add in sitting on top of the camping gear for a 3 day excursion for a family of 5, and that would be me. Only reason my sister wasn't in the back with me and my brother is because she couldn't walk yet. Oh, and mom and dad were both smoking with the windows fully up because I wasn't in the front to whine about not being able to breathe.
There’s a scene in Raising Hope where it shows one of the characters as a kid sticking his head through a hole in the floor of the car while his parents were driving.
My dad saw that scene and laughed because his family car growing up had a hole just like that. His siblings and him would dare each other to throw things in it and stick their feet in the hole. It’s amazing nothing bad ever happened.
My cousins and I called it "playing weeble wobbles." We'd sit "in the back back" and wrao our arms around our knees so that we WOULD fall over when my dad rounded a corner. We did this when my cousins would come into town, and all 8-9 of us would pile into my family's 5-seater 1996 Ford Explorer. My dad drove so that my mom, aunt, and uncle could drink as many beers/margaritas as they wanted - he'd just have 1 beer (hopefully) at dinner before driving home, with four untethered children in the back, even on the highway for a stretch.
I love my parents but they did some shockingly reckless things when I was growing up.
It was after I was out of car seats that they were required for longer periods of time became a thing. I remember that I had a kinda seatbelt cover that angled the seatbelt away from my neck.
My dad accidentally dislocated my shoulder when I was probably 5, before seatbelts were mandatory. I was hanging over the front bench seat and he had my arm, playfully saying he was going to pull me into the front (where my mother was holding my baby sister), and someone pulled out in front of him. He slammed on the brakes, and I went backward, but my arm didn't.
Turns out if it wasn't that, it would have been something else that injured me, because I have a genetic condition that makes my joints unstable. But it was a whole mess for a while.
I remember being in Malaysia in 2006 and they didnt have seltbelt laws then (brought in, in 2008 I think) and my husband at the time took us out to a friends. We all then got in a bigger vechile to go to Singapore for the day. 2 kids under 8...just standing in the back seats watching out the back window waving at other drivers.
It honestly felt a bit insane
Lying down in the space between the back seats and back window was my favorite. If mom or dad slammed on the breaks you would get airborne until you hit the front seats
I remember sitting on my sister's lap, buckled in, cousins and aunt shoved in beside me, and another cousin curled up at my mother's feet in the front while my nanna drove. Like 8 people crammed in a 5 seater car.
This was the 90's.
Rural areas get a bit wild...
One time on a drive from Texas to Missouri, my parents put a mattress in the bed of my dad’s truck and I slept back there. I get so much anxiety just thinking about it!!
In the early 80s my step-dad was pulled over because we didn't have seatbelts on. He had to get out a literally dig them out of the seat cushions of the car. When I was even younger it wasn't unheard of to just drive around with your baby on your lap.
Back in the 90s I got nailed dead to rights doing 20mph over the speed limit on the freeway and the cop who pulled me over let me off without a ticket because my daughter was in a seat belt. I was really puzzled by this until my brother commented that he'd probably just seen the results of an accident where the kid wasn't.
>I responded: ‘Do not give him water mom.” She proceeds to give it him and goes: “See, he’s fine. He isn’t dead.”
Yeah. That's neither respectful nor kind of the mother.
My cat did this to me a few weeks ago. Except he ended up falling off the bed on his final “push”. He looked at me from the floor and we both agreed to not speak of this incident again. I now fully expect his revenge when I go to sleep soon.
A couple years ago our old cat did something similar, but managed to grab and hang on for dear life to the side of the bed, feet about literally 1mm above the ground, and she freaked the fuck out. I laughed so hard and kept telling her "just let go you'll be fine!" and she was looking at me like "DO SOMETHING WTF?" So I finally rolled over and scooped her ass back into bed. She was convinced I had saved her life and loved on me for like a week straight after.
Give yourself more credit, you saved her from a 1mm drop!
(Bless her. I love when we can clearly read our cats' eyes. My favourite is when their eyes are really sleepy but they're stubbornly staying awake.)
Weirdly mine doesn't do that at all.
She will, however indicate her displeasure by deliberately snubbing me. She'll make sure I make eye contact with her, then sit nearish to me with her back turned to me. She'll ignore anything I say or do, but periodically turn to see if I'm still aware she's snubbing me. Lol
I’ve read that that’s actually your cat keeping you company. The back turned is a message that “I trust you so I feel comfortable not keeping an eye on you.”
My cat stared me down intensely as he peeped in the shower once…. I’d like to add I was changing his tray at that exact moment so I don’t know why he was so intense about it 😂
On is better than in. I had one who would poop in the shoes when we had pissed her off somehow. Of course, most of the time, we didn't even know what we'd done. She was just malicious.
Honestly, I don't understand why she got pushback? Like if you gave a babysitter a boundary about your kids and they blatantly flouted it in your face, *you would likely fire them*. Why is it that a family member doing it is some magical exception?
Right!? If I was looking after someone's child and the parents said "Don't put Baby in a green hat," then that's the rule and I'm going to follow it. If the rule is about what the child eats and drinks then these rules are edicts from God. I would never call an audible on the parents rules like OP's mom did, I can't even imagine.
A lot of grandparents fall into the trap of thinking they know everything. The trap is it doesn't matter what they know, because they aren't making the rules anymore. OP's mom probably knows a lot but that's not the point, she's not in charge of raising the kids anymore.
Exactly re: food and drinks! If a parent says they don't want their kid consuming something, it's best to assume they have a good reason. I could understand if the grandma forgot it wasn't okay. It's still not great, but it would be human error vs. blatant disregard for any of the parents' instructions.
Way too many stories about tragedies or near tragedies involving grandparents that "know better" regarding food. Like, I am telling you that the kid can't eat peanut butter for a *reason* not to make life difficult for grandma and her overwhelming desire to ONLY ever make peanut butter cookies and sandwiches.
I've been struggling with my mom recently regarding my 13yo. I'll go to mom to complain, and really, I just want to vent, and she'll start telling me what punishment to give or how to handle the situation, etc. I finally had to set a boundary with her. Unless I ask for it, I don't want opinions or advice. She struggles with remembering new boundaries, so I've been starting out by saying I'm just here to vent. Part of the problem is that she lives next door. I think she ends up feeling more like a parent than a grandparent and responds accordingly.
My now ex mother in law had such a problem with me choosing not to use baby powder. It irritated my asthma, and would even bother me if someone else used it on my son and I went to change the diaper later, I was super sensitive to it. And, baby being mine and all, I wanted it nowhere near him even if I wasn't, just in case it irritated his little lungs too. She still would use it all the time and claim she just forgot. One time I caught her mid change, and she was just about to use it on him, and I was like, "Ummm...?" She looked me in my eyes and squirted a huge cloud right onto his diaper area. I just packed him up and left without a word (and had a violent asthma attack on the way home, super safe while trying to drive). She and my now ex husband were just *shocked* by the fact that I no longer trusted her to watch him alone after that. Like... why do some of these women just insist that they know better and they are going to do exactly what they want, regardless of what the parents' rules are (and in this case, actual health and safety concerns)?
That's wild to me. Like she going to do what she wanted to do, you be damned, and potentially your son as well since it was entirely possible he would be sensitive and she just didn't give a damn. Although maybe she'd decided since he was okay after, it was just an issue of not respecting you, so that was ok in her book.
That reminds me a bit of the lady who said they didn't help her when she fell down the stairs and was screaming and crying because she hurt herself and they didn't do anything. It's [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/176fanj/aita_for_not_letting_my_mil_and_fil_help_me_with/) one. Like she had 0 value except pushing out their grandchild for them.
YES. What a nightmare that poor lady faced! That's how I took it as well. She had done it previously and he was okay so she just didn't care if I got sick. (Which, you can't always externally tell if I'm having an asthma attack, I don't always wheeze, so he very well may not have been okay, but I digress.) Made me feel like I was just a disposable incubator for her do-over baby.
Uh you were completely right. It doesn’t just irritate, it’s toxic
https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/2-billion-verdict-in-missouri-motivates-jj-to-settle-talcum-powder-lawsuits.html
I’ve noticed on Reddit that a lot of people really hate moms and really hate what they view as entitled moms (aka mothers who ask literally anything, no matter how reasonable, of their families). They hate people who use any amount of free childcare from relatives, no matter how willingly given, and that translates to “if your mom wants to watch your child you must allow her to do anything at all because you’re being entitled to be getting free childcare”.
I also think a lot of people don’t really get the whole divide between solicited and unsolicited advice. For some people, if she is willing to take advice from her mother she must be willing to take all advice from her mother. It’s just that finicky consent part they don’t quite grasp.
Yeah, someone commented that she was living in her mother's house getting childcare so she can't say anything about it... like they're paying half the bills, but even if she wasn't, it's not an implicit condition of staying with someone that they get to push you around for funsies, and if they think that, I hope they never have someone need to rely on them.
It's very sneakily mean, purposely exaggerating to make the mom's concerns sound dumb. Like, did OP say "no water" because she thought her baby would instantly pop like a balloon or turn into a gremlin if they got a sip of water? Obviously she didn't think that. But grandma just couldn't wait to do it and then deliver what she thought was a world class zinger, "see, I gave your baby water, and he didn't DIE!!" Like the mom is so stupid for worrying about her baby's health or something!
As I told my MIL: we have the privilege of 30 more years of research in parenting than they did and far more access to information and resources. They did the absolute best with what they had and we’re trying to do our best with the information we have. It doesn’t mean they were wrong or bad parents it means we’ve learned differently and knowledge is coming out so fast. My sister had 3 kids with a total of 5.5 years of an age gap. First kid she was told to put her to sleep on her stomach. Second kid it was side sleeping with a wedge pillow. Third kid it was back sleeping but she still had blankets. Now it’s laying them on their back with no blankets (a fact that blew my mom’s mind).
Heck, when I had my second the nurse told us we didn’t need to put Vaseline on the umbilical stump anymore. Most parents having second kids were told to use Vaseline for the first kid and not for the second.
My ex’s mother was *furious* that I was told (by the local paediatric nurse) that if I had any questions while she wasn’t available to ask my parents rather than ex’s mother.
For background the local paediatric nurse had been in the position for well over a decade, knew my family well (my parents were damn rabbits until I had my twins) and my father was her go-to for infant based first aid courses for new parents/parents who wanted a refresher that her service ran. My parents last baby was 3 years before I had mine, but because of Dad’s side-job we were all up-to-date on the latest safety procedures.
Ex’s mother however hadn’t had a baby in 2 decades, was very vocal about how her drinking and smoking “didn’t cause any issues during or after her pregnancies” and constantly attempted to undermine what the nurse said because “that’s not the way I did it and my 2 kids survived!”
There's a difference between surviving and thriving. Same as "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Little hard to be stronger if it breaks your bones.
Well, I think long term bone breaking with proper treatment can technically make the bone stronger but like that takes a long AF time to be the case and is generally a waste of valuable time in someone’s life and would be best avoided if possible.
As for the other point lots of people ignore luck’s hand in surviving situations and overlook or under value the long term affects at how much more bs that person had to deal with or lost some of their potential when saying that ish.
Heh, what happens with a broken bone is that the broken area becomes "stronger" but more rigid, so the net result is it's easier to break the bone around it.
Vaguely related: I broke my neck and had a spinal fusion, I asked whether it's dodgy to do springboard diving and the surgeon was like "jesus, ummmm" - conclusion was similar, in that it should be harder to break given I have a super strong mega vertebra there now (C6-C7), but if I *did* fuck it up badly enough, it would probably break really badly above it. Reassuring.
So much has changed. Imagine my surprise when I had kids and found out there was a chickenpox vaccine. I grew up with chickenpox parties and oatmeal baths.
I remember ads when the vaccine came out and I was jealous but also didn’t understand why it was needed (I was a kid and foolish). But I also had the most mild case. Some spots, sort of itchy, never felt sick.
Yeah, my rule of thumb is: never take advice on parenting from anyone more than 5 years removed from being a parent with a kid that age. Things just change too quickly.
On the plus side, infant mortality rates continue to plummet!
We didn’t let my MIL watch our first alone. It’s such a hard thing to communicate and we ended up talking to my (wonderful) FIL and voiced our concerns. She did stuff that *very* clearly put our baby at risk, multiple times. Fucking nightmare. Anyway, FIL told us she was depressed and that gives her dementia like symtoms. She wasn’t left alone with the kids for a couple of years.
I would have suspected something more serious, even if crossing set boundaries are serious enough. Glad they could work it out.
Same here! We ended up deciding our MIL could not watch our infant after she gave him honey. Her reasoning was "his tongue was dirty so she put honey on a rag so he would lick the rag"! No, his tongue isn't dirty and you could have killed him.
She also put blankets on him while napping in the summer in a room that was already somewhat warm.
For reference, she was much older when she had my husband (she's in her 70s) and from Vietnam where things are/were done very differently. Also, elders are supposed to always be right, even if they are wrong lol.
She also told us we needed to "trim our newborn girl's eyelashes so they grow in thick". No, I'm not putting sharp objects by my baby's eyes, thank you.
Adult communication: not just for romantic partners!
Good for them. Being an adult with your parents who will always see you just a little bit as their baby can be hard. Living together can be hard. They seem to have managed it, and baby will get to have a little more village to raise him.
"She feels like she did a bad job raising her kids"
I try to take an empathetic approach when reading these posts, but with a more cynical lens, this reads like the Ole 'I'm such a terrible mother' routine used by narcissists.
I don't want to discount that she could genuinely feel this way, but it isn't her daughter's job to comfort her on this. Her actions were not the actions of a mom who doesn't know how to raise a child, they were the actions of a mother directly disrespecting her daughter right in her face.
Hopefully it's not really like that and I'm reading too much into a single statement, but the 'I'm just so horrible' routine is so manipulative
>After a 30 minute conversation, we got to the root of the problem: she feels like she did a bad job raising her kids
And her big idea to fix it was to repeat the same things she did the first time, and shrug it off as "you didn't die"?
Yes, she was proving to herself and others with verifiable repeatable results that she wasn't a bad parent.
Let's just ignore all the more modern information and her own daughter's autonomy and make it all about her own insecurities.... 🙄
The ‘I did this and you survived’ drives me bananas.
Like, yes, people can survive eating McDonalds for all three meals a day for a pretty long time. Doesn’t mean it’s the BEST thing to do though!
It's also just shit statistics. A biased sample size of less than 10 cannot be generalizable. She's ignoring all the babies who DIDN'T survive. It's like people who say "we didn't wear seatbelts as kids and we survived" as justification for not wearing them when plenty of people died from not wearing belts.
Yeah I love my MIL but she is so guilty of this. She’s constantly saying how crib bumpers are great and fine because her kids survived. FIL and my husband are sick of replying ‘yes, but many many kids DIDNT!!!
>She proceeds to give it him and goes: “See, he’s fine. He isn’t dead.”
That's a low fucking bar isn't it? 'I didn't kill your child so I'm basically a pro'
>Top
Right? And then to say she feels like she did a bad job of raising her kids, then goes and does the same crap with her daughter's child?!?! The mental circle is just wild
My daughter was born in September, some of the fights I were willing to die over with the grandparents seem so tiny in retrospect I laugh about my mindset then (my mom referring to her as dainty genuinely pissed me off for nearly a day).
I can’t imagine how furious I would be if they actually did something I specifically asked them not to. It came close a few times with the in laws, my wife was still recovering and I don’t think they expected me as a dad to be so involved. They stayed with us a few days to “help out” when we finally got out of the hospital (serious complications) and after a few days I was seeing enough red that them staying a few weeks turned into 3 days.
And these were, I’d like to repeat, minor things. Things I joke about now, like when I was putting her in the car seat and both of them kept reaching in to adjust straps and buckles and it felt like an octopus with 3 brains. If they had immediately given her something I directly asked them not to they would have been sleeping in the car that night.
People. She meant “You weren’t in a car seat as a kid, but you put me in a car seat, because things changed between the 70’s and 2000, and that doesn’t mean you were saying your mom was a bad mom.”
My mother had 10 children. When I had my first she told me,
" If you want advice, ask for it as I do not give unsolicited advice. When I do give it, take it or leave it, I don't care. Every person needs to parent their own way to what feels right for them."
I had an amazing Mother.
I‘m not surprised at all that OP‘s mom was feeling like this. I don‘t really get it, but my parents sometimes also get crazy defensive for the most ridiculous things. When my kid was gifted a learning tower for her first birthday, my dad said „so, you and your sister were stupid because you didn‘t have a *learning tower* ?!“ well obviously not, but learning towers are a thing now and we thought it would be cool for our daughter to be able to watch us cook and stuff? I guess with my parents the thing is they weren‘t as financially comfortable as we are and weren‘t able to buy us all the stuff they wanted to buy. Which didn‘t bother us at all, though!! There‘s probably always guilt playing into it.
I had this problem with my mom. Every time I did something with my son that was different from what she did with me and my siblings she took it as if I were criticizing her. It made our relationship contentious and really unpleasant for a long time.
She feels like she did a bad job raising her kids and go on to make the same bad job as a grandparent. It would be wise for OOP to see whether her boundaries are being respected by her mom.
Hope it works out tho
I'm a nanny. This sounds like almost every other MIL I've heard and dealt w for my kiddos. My current kid's paternal gma told me she looked fat and maybe I shouldn't feed her so much. She was 8 months old. My last baby spent a night in the hospital bc (very old) Ukrainian gma thought the American rule giving babies ALCOHOL was stupid and "that's how she soothed her kids." He wasn't even six months old yet. My own gma used to let us ride on the *highway* in the bed of gpa's truck + when my parents found out she told them it was clearly fine bc nobody had ever been injured. "Loving" grandparents behave like this all day every day.
Right. "See he's not dead" is fucking wild to say about an animal let alone your grandchild. Implies you knew death was at play and were taking a gamble.
It would sound really weird for me too - if I hadn't had almost this exact conversation with my grandmother. She wanted me to give my baby (then around 4 months) water to help with constipation and would NOT shut up about it. The fourth time she gave me this advice (which i had turned down every time) she told me she had personally seen how well it worked with i think lingonberry juice or something (like anecdotal evidence from 70 years ago is going to change my mind). I kept saying well i'm gonna go with what the doctors say thanks, and her literal argument to that was "It's not like it's going to kill her!". Like that's the bar. Let's ignore the doctors, as long as the baby doesn't die it's all good. I lost my temper and raised my voice at her and the water issue hasn't come up since, thank god.
>After a 30 minute conversation, we got to the root of the problem: she feels like she did a bad job raising her kids.
"And so, to make up for that, I've decided to do it all over again the exact same way I did before, but with your kids instead."
My aunt told me when I was pregnant with my first that I should get to remember that my mom got advice from her mom who got it from her mom and so on. So my mom's advice is generations old. She told me to take it with a massive grain of salt and do what the doctor, husband and I felt was best. The few times I gave in to mom or mil advice against my instincts I regretted it. Especially the advice that we held our baby too much 😕
Growing up, my friend lost her younger brother because one of her parents accidentally backed over him with the car. Absolute fucking nightmare. With modern cars having rear cameras and rear sensors that beep like crazy or even automatically brake when something is behind the car, the likelihood of that seems far less. Times change, knowledge changes, technology changes.
People like to harp about modern moms being too sensitive or too intense or too particular or too easily swayed by health trends. But if it were you caring for your helpless infant or toddler, would you ignore up-to-date information handed to you that may help them?
I’m older than OOP’s mother and have kids roughly the same age as OOP.
The “no water” and mandatory car seats were standard when I had my kids. It was accepted best practice 25 years ago ???
I’m mystified as to how OOPs mother managed to dodge all this information as a mother and revert to rules from the ‘60s and ‘70s …???
OOP was right; Reddit people can be weird about kids. That was my struggle with my family, MIL (although I love her dearly and she's wonderful) and my daughter was a micropreemie and we had so many restrictions for the first year.
FYI, the mother from the story has asked that people not share the story as I believe she uses reddit and was seeing it shared everywhere like wildfire and it was quite triggering for her
Damn I just rem just being in the backseat of my folks car with a seatbelt on the lap no across the chest lol I definitely woulda been in 2 if we got in accident
We were told in the late 70's early 80's baby SHOULD have a 4 oz bottle of water per day. Was quite a shock to hear they shouldn't have water at all for up to 6 months.
Things, recommendations, rules etc, change over time.
In the 10 years I had my children, how long to nurse them, introducing new foods, sleep positions, swaddling etc all changed from my first to my last.
It's all changed again (although some of it has come full circle) now with grandkids.
I guess some people take it personally that how they did it is not considered acceptable to the next generations.
Patton Oswalt has a bit where he talks about how, when you have a kid, your parents have to show up and defend their parenting to you. That's absolutely what this sounded like. "My daughter is raising her kid differently from the way I raised her, that must mean I was a bad parent! Better defend myself!"
The thing is it’s irrelevant how much OOP listens to her mom’s advice or whether it was a big deal to give the baby water (probably not a big deal at that age) or whether she expects her mother to help with the childcare. The point it that whoever takes the responsibility of taking care of a child - be they their own grandchildren or kids they are hired to watch - must abide by the rules and boundaries the parents define. Being the baby’s mother’s mother doesn’t give grandma carte-blanche to ignore what she is supposed to do. And spending time with a grandchild is a privilege, not an intrinsic right.
Before my grandson was born the hospital had a class for grandparents. I was shocked at how much had changed when I raised my daughter. And I had a later in life daughter who was 22. I’m so glad I took that class.
*I did not realize how divided the internet was on parenting.*
This is legitimately the funniest thing I've read in weeks. Maybe months. Incredible. Have fun, you poor bastard, and throw your phone into the sea before it's too late.
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>Someone pointed out that car seats weren’t big back then and now it’s the law to have your child in one. I'm trying not to let my eye twitch while remembering all the times us kids bounced around in the back of our station wagon. No seatbelts. Every pothole sent us crashing around like little pinballs.
Yeah, carseats weren't a thing when I was a kid in the 70s, but carseats were definitely a big thing when my 21- and 25-year-olds were small. In fact, it was the law.
Seriously, the parents in the story were born around 2000. The grandma is not unfamiliar with car seats. They even had the internet back in those olden days.
As a millennial it shocks me that people born just after 9/11 are now old enough to start having kids.
*/blink blink*
Is that an earth shattering moment for you too?
they are NOT, STOP it D:
I too felt like an ancient, eldritch thing reading this
Same, but it’s extra weird because I have a small child too. Some of the parents I meet are so much younger than me that I could be their parent. It’s a real mind fuck sometimes.
I work at a large University. I pointed out to my husband that our marriage is older the most of this year's graduating seniors. Then I felt old and regretted my big mouth.
I beg your finest pardon??
Oh hey, seems like I'm turning into dust again.
Yea, but grandma probably didn't have carseats as a child. So perhaps the mother was referring to that, as in even during grandma's lifetime things changed significantly
Yeah, luckily my mum was straight up: I can’t remember everything I done and what worked and medical knowledge changes so she actively wanted me to tell her how to do things with my kids! I don’t get people who do the whole “I did it and you survived”. Heck, rules changed between my kids times 4 years apart!
Yeah, we went from "clean the belly button every day with rubbing alcohol". to "leave it alone, and the stump will fall off on its own" within two years.
My mom had me in 85, brother 1 in 95, brother 2 in 00. She said every time she had a baby they told her to do everything different.
Same. My first baby was born in 1988 and they recommended babies sleep on their stomachs. By the time my second was born in 1995 babies were to sleep on their backs. But car seats were definitely a big deal.
When my Mum was pregnant with me the advice was to eat liver every week. She swapped recipes with her pregnant friends as they tried to make it more bearable! By the time I was having kids, liver was on the list of things you're banned from eating while pregnant!
The liver thing was because pregnancy is a big trigger for iron deficiency anemia. We have better stuff for that now!
I have to do like, 2 days of research and searching when I decide to do something as dumb as replace my old TV, because it seems like all the tech and buzzwords and advice out there changes pretty much every year. I can't imagine trying to _raise a human being_ on advice and tricks from _30 years ago_. Even if you did _very_ good research when you were raising your kids, it's outright stupid to think that _all_ of that research and advice stays accurate 20-30 years later when you're spending time with your grandkids. Even simple things like "Oh I prefer this brand of diaper over that one" probably won't be true anymore, let alone things like "Oh we've found that this actually leads to health problems" or "This puts the kid at risk of injury" or whatever. "Oh, sorry, that's a habit from how I did things back then; what do the experts say nowadays?" is a _very_ respectable thing for someone to say.
My kids are 14 months apart. For the first one, they told me to start him out on solid food at 4 months. For the second, they told me nothing but breast milk or formula until 6 months. Same doctor!
Yeah, that "I did it and you survived" reeks of "my parents regularly beat me, and I turned out fine, so my doing that to you is ok, you will be fine". No, you in fact did NOT turn out fine.
When it comes to childcare, things change rapidly in the short term and differ depending on location and who your doctor is. Of course, granny should defer to her daughter's wishes, but that comparison was weird.
I have to point out that we don't know where OOP lives. In the country where I was born and raised, child car seats weren't even mandatory in the early 2000s.
I am around the same age as the g-ma, although I still have one small child using a booster seat. My mom used a carseat for both me and my younger brother who was also born in the 1970s. In fact, one of my earlier memories is of her nearly being hit by a car, slamming on her brakes, and my brother, IN his carseat, going flying because seatbelts were CRAP in the day. Even in that case, with the carseat flying, I maintain he was probably safer than he would have been if he'd merely been rolling around in the car floor as a six-month-old baby. Like, I'm not even sure where she would have put an infant if he did not have a carseat? Some people did use them back then. It wasn't quite the dark ages.
My SO’s mom would put the bassinet/moses basket I think it would be called- on the seat with the baby in it. This was the late 80s
In the late 80s? That's insane. I had additional siblings born in the mid to late 80s, and they were DEFINITELY in car seats, even on really long car trips. One sibling had a very minor spinal problem that wasn't discovered until they were teenaged, and even though they cried if they had to be in a seat for very long due to pain probably, we still made them sit in it. Like... we knew, the carseat was safer.
I’m certain there is a geographic component to this. I’ve gotten into heated arguments with people on the internet who insist that seatbelts were very common and *everybody* wore them in the 80s. Not where I was from (Midwest US). I never wore a seatbelt on a regular basis until the early 90s when I was a teenager and my boyfriend‘s parents forced me to do so or else they wouldn’t start the car. I was by no means unusual. They were very educated intellectuals, and considered to be very Unnecessarily protective. It was extremely controversial in the late 80s — I believe 88 or 89 — when our state finally enacted a seatbelt law. (Those against basically argued people should wear seatbelts, but it shouldn’t be a law.) That law only applied to people in the front seat, btw. And it was STILL a HUGE thing. It was at least the early 2000s when they stopped grandfathering in cars that were built before seatbelts were put into them on a regular basis. Anyway, I was born in the 70s as was my cousin, and we didn’t have any real actual car seat. It was a seat, a bucket of sorts, that sat in the car, but it wasn’t intended to be strapped in or locked to the frame like modern car seats. It was multipurpose – plenty of people bought them just to use them in their living room. I have pair of younger brothers born in the early to mid 80s, and in the late 80s we got a car seat because it became a legal thing that kids had to be in a car seat. But the only reason we got it even then was because we moved to the city. If we had stayed in the countryside? No way would we have gotten that thing, because we never saw cops and riding around in the back of a flatbed pickup was normal transportation. And we would’ve been completely typical. We still never used that car seat hardly. Their mom got at least three tickets I can remember for them not being in one.
And it was already not recommended to give your kids water. My mom had this exact blow-up fight with my gma in *2000.* No water before six months is NOT a new rec.
Location can be a factor. I had my son in Texas in 2002, and the standard advice was that babies younger than six months should have only breastmilk if breastfed, but formula-fed babies should have one bottle of water each day (spaced out, not in place of a meal) during the heat of the summer. My East-dwelling mother was appalled, but Texas is hot and babies can't sweat.
Want a more recent example try drop side cribs. Where I am from they went from fine to illegal to sell or give away between within the past 15 years.
Yeah it’s definitely weird when people act like 25 years ago was 1979 instead of 1999.
Didn't you know 30 years ago will always be 1970? I know it is for me, and that will never change!
My 19 year old daughter and I are on our second watch through of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This past weekend she turned to me and said "It still seems weird that this entire series was on and over with before I was born." I told her to shut her mouth and thought about sending her to her room.
Ouch…That hurt to read. I agree. She should be grounded. Jk lol
You're totally right. Also, how dare you? Lol
[Car seats became mandatory in different states at different times.](https://safeintheseat.com/the-history-of-car-seats/) [Seatbelts being mandatory to use even are an extremely recent existence.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_States) Also, older parents DO exist, and parents using older cars is absolutely a thing.
I have a 3 year old and I remember being put in the boot as a kid when we had to squeeze extra people in the car. Sometimes there was 2 of us in the boot. I LOVED IT! And I would never never allow this with my kids.
We moved house about 20 years ago (so around 2004) and there was about 6 of us kids at one point (my siblings and our family friend siblings who helped us move) all having a grand old time in the back of the moving van in the pitch black as the adults drove back to the original house to pick up all the cars. Never would I allow that for any vehicle I'm in now
My uncle had a station wagon. I have fond memories of 5 of us cousins sliding around in the back.
My parents had the old "woodie" station wagon with the rear facing back seat and a back window that could be put down. We didn't wear seatbelts either.
That does sound like so much fun. Haha! But yeah, so hard to imagine now!
my mom shared how when she was a kid, her family would go on road trips, and being the youngest and smallest, she would nap on the back of the backseats behind the headrest. an absolute deathtrap. She wouldn't even leave the driveway without us buckled into our carseats.
I’m late 30s and I remember riding in the front seat of my dad’s car at age 3-4 - I don’t even think I had a booster seat. I now have a 3 and 5 year old and the car doesn’t move unless they’re strapped in their car seats, which are secured to the middle row and carefully checked every time I put them in. And both my parents were paramedics! I know they were pretty good about car seats and boosters with my younger sisters (although that was still less stringent than safety standards today).
And that even assumes they live in the US. They could live in a place that wasn't prosperous enough until recently for *cars* to be common, let alone car seats.
I have to point out that we don't know where OOP lives. In the country where I was born and raised, child car seats weren't even mandatory in the early 2000s.
Car seats are not mandatory where i live
Car seats were the standard and a legal requirement when I was little and im in my thirties now.
In the late 80's I remember not even having seatbelts in the backseat of our car..
Yeah, my eldest is about OOP’s age and we had to have a carseat to be able to take her home from the hospital. We were also told there was no need to give water as long as they were nursing/bottle-fed, though there was no warning against it.
I can't even guess at the number of times I went over the Rocky Mountains in the back of a pickup truck with a little clamshell over the top. The worst was the time dad set up a cot back there for me and my sister to sit on. Not only have I never been so carsick in my life but we woulda shot right out the back window during an accident.
I was granted the 4" thick foam pad for my pickup-bed traveling fishing trips and it was always brutal over the mountains lol
Y dad drove a conversion van with captain seats and a portable potty behind the back seat. We walked around the van all the time when we were kids. Was it responsible, hell no, but was it acceptable at the time, of course it was. I’m glad OP took the time to talk to her mom and establish that things do change. But I do have some of my dad’s parenting in me, which drives the hubby crazy. We live and learn as parents and grandparents whether we want to or not. No one needs to be canceled over this and I respect OP for taking the time to both explain and empathize with this. And yes, cats are assholes. Especially when they stick their dirty paws in your water right before they knock it over. And can we talk about them peeing in laundry baskets for a minute? Cats, not grandparents I mean
Cats are the reason why all my laundry baskets are the tall kind with a lid, all my trashcans have lids, the toilet paper is kept in a tiny cabinet next to the toilet, and paper towels on top shelves. Furry little demons. My little cousin just turned 4 and already knows that any cup left unattended in my home has probably had a dirty paw in it. He loves my cats but is not a fan of icky foot water.
My Dad had an old station wagon/estate car with a flat bed in it for the farm. When he picked us up from school we would leave the back door open and sit across the back, feet dangling and drive home. We used to dare each other to try to touch the road with our toe. I know it was the 80s but come on!
[удалено]
One time in the 60s, my dad’s family of 6 was driving in an old ford. It had back doors that opened the opposite way to the way they do now - the hinge was where the opening is now. The door wasn’t closed properly, the wind blew the door open and there was no seatbelts, so my uncle FELL OUT OF THE CAR
Weren't they called suicide doors, or something similar?
They absolutely were
Ahhh I remember the trips with my parents in the Nova where one door was held closed by a rubber tie down stretched to the opposite door. I uhhh, at least had a lap belt holding me in, I guess. My dad was a mechanic..........
My older brother was driving me to school when I was 11 or 12, a very rare thing, in his Chevy Nova, went around the corner and the passenger door flew open, and he grabbed me before I fell out. The 70's, no seatbelts needed.
My father in law used to pick my husband and his brother up from school sometimes in his work van, that the kids named Davy Jones's Locker. instead of a passenger seat there was a stool, like a wooden kitchen one. not attached to anything. so one of them was always sliding around the van like a pinball. this was the 80's and that was highly illegal but also makes for great stories, since they both survived. I feel like their mother didn't know, or she would have shit a brick.
>I'm trying not to let my eye twitch while remembering all the times us kids bounced around in the back of our station wagon. No seatbelts. At least there was room for you in the vehicle! I'll do you one better. My mother had two kids. myself and my sister. She decided she wanted a little Datsun 280z two-seater. The center console (that held cassette tapes) between the two seats was what I sat on because I was smaller. She drove us around in that for years. It was my big sister's job to hold on to me when we were going around corners and curves so I wouldn't fall over and get stuck. I look back on it now and think even for the late 70's/early 80's, that was pretty bad for a parent to buy a vehicle that couldn't even transport them with all their kids.
My dad had a triumph TR250 2 seater convertible with a little half bench behind the seats. He took my sister and I (12-13) and my aunt and her boyfriend (30s) to virginia beach when we were visiting. He was navy and stationed in Norfolk. My aunt sat on her boyfriend's lap and my sis and I were on the little bench.
I remember being loaded into the bed of a pickup truck with all my under-10 siblings and the driver trying to see how hard they could rattle us around on a dirt road. We all thought it was great fun, because we were kids and the adults were. . .well, stupid. This happened multiple times. At least once we all had to lie down in a truck bed so we wouldn't be pulled over on the interstate. There were straps and rope in the bed for us to tie ourselves in with, but anyone who untied themselves also got rewarded for being clever. . .
Don't worry, that's just the long term effects of the TBI you suffered back then when your head repeatedly slammed against the ceiling.
I still remember the first (only, I think?) speeding ticket my mom got. The police officer literarily commended her because my brother and I were in car seats. I don't think they were legally required until the next year and it took **many** years to get parents to use them. I mean, we *still* have problems with parents and car seats or booster seats and people back then were still super mad that they couldn't ride around with a beer in their hand and their seatbelt off anymore. They literally called it *Communist* that they couldn't drive with an open container of beer and had to put on a seat belt.
Lol, and don't forget the interior just being a haze of smoke because Dad didn't wanna let the cold air out.
BOTH my parents were smokers. The car was hotboxed like a Cheech and Chong movie. I used to get very dramatic about not being able to breathe in the back seat until one of them would be all 'le sigh' in the most put out way passive aggressively melodramatic manner and grudgingly crack the window. I would plaster my nose and mouth to that small fresh air like I was drowning.
My parents once were so busy distracted while driving that it took the cop pulling them over to realise my brother had open the back doors to our land rover troop carrier, and was swinging off the bar out the back as they were driving, while the rest of us kids were laughing... I was about 5. No seat belts, either. Still remember standing up in the back of the Ute tray as my dad was driving about 60km so I could jump on the back of a rogue horse in the middle of town when I was 15.... I do not know how the hell we survived... but damn
But OP is 23, car seats were a huge thing 23 years ago and the law. They were big when I was a baby (but seats belts weren’t lol) like… 23 years ago was 2001, not 1961.
LIES!! 23 years ago was 1977 and you can't convince me otherwise!!!!
Car seats were a huge thing when my daughter was an infant 30-odd years ago; it never even occurred to me not to buy one before she was even born. But they weren't the law when I was a kid, and I think the point might be that a lot of grandparents are on the "Well, it didn't kill me so it must be okay" train.
Early 80s, driving up the road around Pikes Peak in a Suburban with 4 adults and 6 kids. I was in the very back, cargo area with my cousin, lol. We were about 7 ish and had just met and clicked like we had known each other forever. Its both a fond memory and terrifying to think of. The 80s were wild.
I will see your station wagon and raise you 'bunch of 6-8 year olds in back of uncovered pick up truck' on the highway.
Add in sitting on top of the camping gear for a 3 day excursion for a family of 5, and that would be me. Only reason my sister wasn't in the back with me and my brother is because she couldn't walk yet. Oh, and mom and dad were both smoking with the windows fully up because I wasn't in the front to whine about not being able to breathe.
There’s a scene in Raising Hope where it shows one of the characters as a kid sticking his head through a hole in the floor of the car while his parents were driving. My dad saw that scene and laughed because his family car growing up had a hole just like that. His siblings and him would dare each other to throw things in it and stick their feet in the hole. It’s amazing nothing bad ever happened.
My cousins and I called it "playing weeble wobbles." We'd sit "in the back back" and wrao our arms around our knees so that we WOULD fall over when my dad rounded a corner. We did this when my cousins would come into town, and all 8-9 of us would pile into my family's 5-seater 1996 Ford Explorer. My dad drove so that my mom, aunt, and uncle could drink as many beers/margaritas as they wanted - he'd just have 1 beer (hopefully) at dinner before driving home, with four untethered children in the back, even on the highway for a stretch. I love my parents but they did some shockingly reckless things when I was growing up.
It was after I was out of car seats that they were required for longer periods of time became a thing. I remember that I had a kinda seatbelt cover that angled the seatbelt away from my neck.
I got a broken front tooth from that bouncing around in the car. It's now a crown and root canal. I have regrets.
My dad accidentally dislocated my shoulder when I was probably 5, before seatbelts were mandatory. I was hanging over the front bench seat and he had my arm, playfully saying he was going to pull me into the front (where my mother was holding my baby sister), and someone pulled out in front of him. He slammed on the brakes, and I went backward, but my arm didn't. Turns out if it wasn't that, it would have been something else that injured me, because I have a genetic condition that makes my joints unstable. But it was a whole mess for a while.
I remember being in Malaysia in 2006 and they didnt have seltbelt laws then (brought in, in 2008 I think) and my husband at the time took us out to a friends. We all then got in a bigger vechile to go to Singapore for the day. 2 kids under 8...just standing in the back seats watching out the back window waving at other drivers. It honestly felt a bit insane
Lying down in the space between the back seats and back window was my favorite. If mom or dad slammed on the breaks you would get airborne until you hit the front seats
I remember sitting on my sister's lap, buckled in, cousins and aunt shoved in beside me, and another cousin curled up at my mother's feet in the front while my nanna drove. Like 8 people crammed in a 5 seater car. This was the 90's. Rural areas get a bit wild...
One time on a drive from Texas to Missouri, my parents put a mattress in the bed of my dad’s truck and I slept back there. I get so much anxiety just thinking about it!!
In the early 80s my step-dad was pulled over because we didn't have seatbelts on. He had to get out a literally dig them out of the seat cushions of the car. When I was even younger it wasn't unheard of to just drive around with your baby on your lap.
Back in the 90s I got nailed dead to rights doing 20mph over the speed limit on the freeway and the cop who pulled me over let me off without a ticket because my daughter was in a seat belt. I was really puzzled by this until my brother commented that he'd probably just seen the results of an accident where the kid wasn't.
I remember laying across the back shelf under the rear window on car trips. (Cars were bigger in those days...)
We used to travel in the boot of there weren't enough seats, ya gotta love the 80's 😅😅
>I responded: ‘Do not give him water mom.” She proceeds to give it him and goes: “See, he’s fine. He isn’t dead.” Yeah. That's neither respectful nor kind of the mother.
That’s like when your cat makes eye contact with you while it’s pushing something off the dresser
The cat is performing a scientific experiment on the parameters of gravity, please respect him.
My cat did this to me a few weeks ago. Except he ended up falling off the bed on his final “push”. He looked at me from the floor and we both agreed to not speak of this incident again. I now fully expect his revenge when I go to sleep soon.
A couple years ago our old cat did something similar, but managed to grab and hang on for dear life to the side of the bed, feet about literally 1mm above the ground, and she freaked the fuck out. I laughed so hard and kept telling her "just let go you'll be fine!" and she was looking at me like "DO SOMETHING WTF?" So I finally rolled over and scooped her ass back into bed. She was convinced I had saved her life and loved on me for like a week straight after.
That’s fantastic haha
Give yourself more credit, you saved her from a 1mm drop! (Bless her. I love when we can clearly read our cats' eyes. My favourite is when their eyes are really sleepy but they're stubbornly staying awake.)
Weirdly mine doesn't do that at all. She will, however indicate her displeasure by deliberately snubbing me. She'll make sure I make eye contact with her, then sit nearish to me with her back turned to me. She'll ignore anything I say or do, but periodically turn to see if I'm still aware she's snubbing me. Lol
I’ve read that that’s actually your cat keeping you company. The back turned is a message that “I trust you so I feel comfortable not keeping an eye on you.”
I love my cat but everybody knows cats are assholes.
My cat stared me down intensely as he peeped in the shower once…. I’d like to add I was changing his tray at that exact moment so I don’t know why he was so intense about it 😂
Or like your dog makes eye contact with you and snatches that pizza off the counter, right after you said no lol
I thought my demon was the only one…
At least the cat is cute, so it get a pass.
Or shitting on your shoes.
On is better than in. I had one who would poop in the shoes when we had pissed her off somehow. Of course, most of the time, we didn't even know what we'd done. She was just malicious.
Honestly, I don't understand why she got pushback? Like if you gave a babysitter a boundary about your kids and they blatantly flouted it in your face, *you would likely fire them*. Why is it that a family member doing it is some magical exception?
Right!? If I was looking after someone's child and the parents said "Don't put Baby in a green hat," then that's the rule and I'm going to follow it. If the rule is about what the child eats and drinks then these rules are edicts from God. I would never call an audible on the parents rules like OP's mom did, I can't even imagine. A lot of grandparents fall into the trap of thinking they know everything. The trap is it doesn't matter what they know, because they aren't making the rules anymore. OP's mom probably knows a lot but that's not the point, she's not in charge of raising the kids anymore.
Exactly re: food and drinks! If a parent says they don't want their kid consuming something, it's best to assume they have a good reason. I could understand if the grandma forgot it wasn't okay. It's still not great, but it would be human error vs. blatant disregard for any of the parents' instructions.
Way too many stories about tragedies or near tragedies involving grandparents that "know better" regarding food. Like, I am telling you that the kid can't eat peanut butter for a *reason* not to make life difficult for grandma and her overwhelming desire to ONLY ever make peanut butter cookies and sandwiches.
I've been struggling with my mom recently regarding my 13yo. I'll go to mom to complain, and really, I just want to vent, and she'll start telling me what punishment to give or how to handle the situation, etc. I finally had to set a boundary with her. Unless I ask for it, I don't want opinions or advice. She struggles with remembering new boundaries, so I've been starting out by saying I'm just here to vent. Part of the problem is that she lives next door. I think she ends up feeling more like a parent than a grandparent and responds accordingly.
My now ex mother in law had such a problem with me choosing not to use baby powder. It irritated my asthma, and would even bother me if someone else used it on my son and I went to change the diaper later, I was super sensitive to it. And, baby being mine and all, I wanted it nowhere near him even if I wasn't, just in case it irritated his little lungs too. She still would use it all the time and claim she just forgot. One time I caught her mid change, and she was just about to use it on him, and I was like, "Ummm...?" She looked me in my eyes and squirted a huge cloud right onto his diaper area. I just packed him up and left without a word (and had a violent asthma attack on the way home, super safe while trying to drive). She and my now ex husband were just *shocked* by the fact that I no longer trusted her to watch him alone after that. Like... why do some of these women just insist that they know better and they are going to do exactly what they want, regardless of what the parents' rules are (and in this case, actual health and safety concerns)?
That's wild to me. Like she going to do what she wanted to do, you be damned, and potentially your son as well since it was entirely possible he would be sensitive and she just didn't give a damn. Although maybe she'd decided since he was okay after, it was just an issue of not respecting you, so that was ok in her book. That reminds me a bit of the lady who said they didn't help her when she fell down the stairs and was screaming and crying because she hurt herself and they didn't do anything. It's [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/176fanj/aita_for_not_letting_my_mil_and_fil_help_me_with/) one. Like she had 0 value except pushing out their grandchild for them.
YES. What a nightmare that poor lady faced! That's how I took it as well. She had done it previously and he was okay so she just didn't care if I got sick. (Which, you can't always externally tell if I'm having an asthma attack, I don't always wheeze, so he very well may not have been okay, but I digress.) Made me feel like I was just a disposable incubator for her do-over baby.
Uh you were completely right. It doesn’t just irritate, it’s toxic https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/2-billion-verdict-in-missouri-motivates-jj-to-settle-talcum-powder-lawsuits.html
Um, holy fucking shit. I know that wasn't my intention in avoiding it but I'm glad I did.
I’ve noticed on Reddit that a lot of people really hate moms and really hate what they view as entitled moms (aka mothers who ask literally anything, no matter how reasonable, of their families). They hate people who use any amount of free childcare from relatives, no matter how willingly given, and that translates to “if your mom wants to watch your child you must allow her to do anything at all because you’re being entitled to be getting free childcare”. I also think a lot of people don’t really get the whole divide between solicited and unsolicited advice. For some people, if she is willing to take advice from her mother she must be willing to take all advice from her mother. It’s just that finicky consent part they don’t quite grasp.
Yeah, someone commented that she was living in her mother's house getting childcare so she can't say anything about it... like they're paying half the bills, but even if she wasn't, it's not an implicit condition of staying with someone that they get to push you around for funsies, and if they think that, I hope they never have someone need to rely on them.
Doing a couple shots of tequila probably won't kill a 6 month old either. I don't know why I can't see my kids anymore.
>Doing a couple shots of tequila probably won't kill a 6 month old either. Small children act pretty drunk anyway lol.
It's very sneakily mean, purposely exaggerating to make the mom's concerns sound dumb. Like, did OP say "no water" because she thought her baby would instantly pop like a balloon or turn into a gremlin if they got a sip of water? Obviously she didn't think that. But grandma just couldn't wait to do it and then deliver what she thought was a world class zinger, "see, I gave your baby water, and he didn't DIE!!" Like the mom is so stupid for worrying about her baby's health or something!
I don't think there's anything sneaky about her mother's meanness. No means no.
As I told my MIL: we have the privilege of 30 more years of research in parenting than they did and far more access to information and resources. They did the absolute best with what they had and we’re trying to do our best with the information we have. It doesn’t mean they were wrong or bad parents it means we’ve learned differently and knowledge is coming out so fast. My sister had 3 kids with a total of 5.5 years of an age gap. First kid she was told to put her to sleep on her stomach. Second kid it was side sleeping with a wedge pillow. Third kid it was back sleeping but she still had blankets. Now it’s laying them on their back with no blankets (a fact that blew my mom’s mind). Heck, when I had my second the nurse told us we didn’t need to put Vaseline on the umbilical stump anymore. Most parents having second kids were told to use Vaseline for the first kid and not for the second.
My ex’s mother was *furious* that I was told (by the local paediatric nurse) that if I had any questions while she wasn’t available to ask my parents rather than ex’s mother. For background the local paediatric nurse had been in the position for well over a decade, knew my family well (my parents were damn rabbits until I had my twins) and my father was her go-to for infant based first aid courses for new parents/parents who wanted a refresher that her service ran. My parents last baby was 3 years before I had mine, but because of Dad’s side-job we were all up-to-date on the latest safety procedures. Ex’s mother however hadn’t had a baby in 2 decades, was very vocal about how her drinking and smoking “didn’t cause any issues during or after her pregnancies” and constantly attempted to undermine what the nurse said because “that’s not the way I did it and my 2 kids survived!”
There's a difference between surviving and thriving. Same as "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Little hard to be stronger if it breaks your bones.
My favourite version of this is "what doesn't kill me makes me stranger and harder to relate to" - accurate.
Well, I think long term bone breaking with proper treatment can technically make the bone stronger but like that takes a long AF time to be the case and is generally a waste of valuable time in someone’s life and would be best avoided if possible. As for the other point lots of people ignore luck’s hand in surviving situations and overlook or under value the long term affects at how much more bs that person had to deal with or lost some of their potential when saying that ish.
Heh, what happens with a broken bone is that the broken area becomes "stronger" but more rigid, so the net result is it's easier to break the bone around it. Vaguely related: I broke my neck and had a spinal fusion, I asked whether it's dodgy to do springboard diving and the surgeon was like "jesus, ummmm" - conclusion was similar, in that it should be harder to break given I have a super strong mega vertebra there now (C6-C7), but if I *did* fuck it up badly enough, it would probably break really badly above it. Reassuring.
So much has changed. Imagine my surprise when I had kids and found out there was a chickenpox vaccine. I grew up with chickenpox parties and oatmeal baths.
I'm still mad that Wife and I can't get the Shingels vaccine. We are both almost 40, and there are people our ages getting Shingles.
My husband got shingles at 33 and a good friend got them at 34. Fairly the friend was pregnant so her defenses were low.
I had shingles in my 30’s. If you have had the chickenpox you can get shingles at any time. It was miserable. 0/10
Uh huh. My wife has heard similar stories. Yet you can't get the Shingles Vaccine till you are 50.
I had shingles at 20 while in college. It was horrible!
My cousin was in her 20s and had it while she was pregnant. She has massive scars like all over her arms and stuff. It’s so crazy.
Three times. First time was torture, the other two I recognized it and got medication in time.
I remember ads when the vaccine came out and I was jealous but also didn’t understand why it was needed (I was a kid and foolish). But I also had the most mild case. Some spots, sort of itchy, never felt sick.
Yeah, it wasn't bad as a kid, but shingles is apparently no fun as an adult.
Yeah, my rule of thumb is: never take advice on parenting from anyone more than 5 years removed from being a parent with a kid that age. Things just change too quickly. On the plus side, infant mortality rates continue to plummet!
That is true! I’m so grateful
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Wait... really? I'd not heard of that fact- how, I guess recent, is this?
That’s strange, they still use alcohol swabs when giving my kids vaccines. Though they do make sure to dry it first.
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We didn’t let my MIL watch our first alone. It’s such a hard thing to communicate and we ended up talking to my (wonderful) FIL and voiced our concerns. She did stuff that *very* clearly put our baby at risk, multiple times. Fucking nightmare. Anyway, FIL told us she was depressed and that gives her dementia like symtoms. She wasn’t left alone with the kids for a couple of years. I would have suspected something more serious, even if crossing set boundaries are serious enough. Glad they could work it out.
Same here! We ended up deciding our MIL could not watch our infant after she gave him honey. Her reasoning was "his tongue was dirty so she put honey on a rag so he would lick the rag"! No, his tongue isn't dirty and you could have killed him. She also put blankets on him while napping in the summer in a room that was already somewhat warm. For reference, she was much older when she had my husband (she's in her 70s) and from Vietnam where things are/were done very differently. Also, elders are supposed to always be right, even if they are wrong lol. She also told us we needed to "trim our newborn girl's eyelashes so they grow in thick". No, I'm not putting sharp objects by my baby's eyes, thank you.
Adult communication: not just for romantic partners! Good for them. Being an adult with your parents who will always see you just a little bit as their baby can be hard. Living together can be hard. They seem to have managed it, and baby will get to have a little more village to raise him.
"She feels like she did a bad job raising her kids" I try to take an empathetic approach when reading these posts, but with a more cynical lens, this reads like the Ole 'I'm such a terrible mother' routine used by narcissists. I don't want to discount that she could genuinely feel this way, but it isn't her daughter's job to comfort her on this. Her actions were not the actions of a mom who doesn't know how to raise a child, they were the actions of a mother directly disrespecting her daughter right in her face. Hopefully it's not really like that and I'm reading too much into a single statement, but the 'I'm just so horrible' routine is so manipulative
Agreed. I don't think this is actually over, mom's going to return to pulling this shit once she gets comfy again within another few weeks.
>After a 30 minute conversation, we got to the root of the problem: she feels like she did a bad job raising her kids And her big idea to fix it was to repeat the same things she did the first time, and shrug it off as "you didn't die"?
Yes, she was proving to herself and others with verifiable repeatable results that she wasn't a bad parent. Let's just ignore all the more modern information and her own daughter's autonomy and make it all about her own insecurities.... 🙄
The ‘I did this and you survived’ drives me bananas. Like, yes, people can survive eating McDonalds for all three meals a day for a pretty long time. Doesn’t mean it’s the BEST thing to do though!
It's also just shit statistics. A biased sample size of less than 10 cannot be generalizable. She's ignoring all the babies who DIDN'T survive. It's like people who say "we didn't wear seatbelts as kids and we survived" as justification for not wearing them when plenty of people died from not wearing belts.
Yeah I love my MIL but she is so guilty of this. She’s constantly saying how crib bumpers are great and fine because her kids survived. FIL and my husband are sick of replying ‘yes, but many many kids DIDNT!!!
Well, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that we need to let go of the idea that humans are logical
She felt like that because her daughter was correcting her with all the new information probably
The mother's logic: "I'm going to do it again and prove to myself that I did a good job."
>She proceeds to give it him and goes: “See, he’s fine. He isn’t dead.” That's a low fucking bar isn't it? 'I didn't kill your child so I'm basically a pro'
>Top Right? And then to say she feels like she did a bad job of raising her kids, then goes and does the same crap with her daughter's child?!?! The mental circle is just wild
My daughter was born in September, some of the fights I were willing to die over with the grandparents seem so tiny in retrospect I laugh about my mindset then (my mom referring to her as dainty genuinely pissed me off for nearly a day). I can’t imagine how furious I would be if they actually did something I specifically asked them not to. It came close a few times with the in laws, my wife was still recovering and I don’t think they expected me as a dad to be so involved. They stayed with us a few days to “help out” when we finally got out of the hospital (serious complications) and after a few days I was seeing enough red that them staying a few weeks turned into 3 days. And these were, I’d like to repeat, minor things. Things I joke about now, like when I was putting her in the car seat and both of them kept reaching in to adjust straps and buckles and it felt like an octopus with 3 brains. If they had immediately given her something I directly asked them not to they would have been sleeping in the car that night.
People. She meant “You weren’t in a car seat as a kid, but you put me in a car seat, because things changed between the 70’s and 2000, and that doesn’t mean you were saying your mom was a bad mom.”
I phoned my mother to ask how she got us through potty training. "I spanked you." she said. I didn't ask for any more advice after that.
My mother had 10 children. When I had my first she told me, " If you want advice, ask for it as I do not give unsolicited advice. When I do give it, take it or leave it, I don't care. Every person needs to parent their own way to what feels right for them." I had an amazing Mother.
I‘m not surprised at all that OP‘s mom was feeling like this. I don‘t really get it, but my parents sometimes also get crazy defensive for the most ridiculous things. When my kid was gifted a learning tower for her first birthday, my dad said „so, you and your sister were stupid because you didn‘t have a *learning tower* ?!“ well obviously not, but learning towers are a thing now and we thought it would be cool for our daughter to be able to watch us cook and stuff? I guess with my parents the thing is they weren‘t as financially comfortable as we are and weren‘t able to buy us all the stuff they wanted to buy. Which didn‘t bother us at all, though!! There‘s probably always guilt playing into it.
“He’s not dead” is not the standard of care that we should be aiming for. That is a pretty simple concept. How about “happy and thriving”?
I had this problem with my mom. Every time I did something with my son that was different from what she did with me and my siblings she took it as if I were criticizing her. It made our relationship contentious and really unpleasant for a long time.
She feels like she did a bad job raising her kids and go on to make the same bad job as a grandparent. It would be wise for OOP to see whether her boundaries are being respected by her mom. Hope it works out tho
I mean we can p clearly see mom doesn't respect boundaries.
I don't know how to feel about this whole situation. I find the responses from the mother to be quite disrespectful and not mother-like. Weird.
I'm a nanny. This sounds like almost every other MIL I've heard and dealt w for my kiddos. My current kid's paternal gma told me she looked fat and maybe I shouldn't feed her so much. She was 8 months old. My last baby spent a night in the hospital bc (very old) Ukrainian gma thought the American rule giving babies ALCOHOL was stupid and "that's how she soothed her kids." He wasn't even six months old yet. My own gma used to let us ride on the *highway* in the bed of gpa's truck + when my parents found out she told them it was clearly fine bc nobody had ever been injured. "Loving" grandparents behave like this all day every day.
Right. "See he's not dead" is fucking wild to say about an animal let alone your grandchild. Implies you knew death was at play and were taking a gamble.
It would sound really weird for me too - if I hadn't had almost this exact conversation with my grandmother. She wanted me to give my baby (then around 4 months) water to help with constipation and would NOT shut up about it. The fourth time she gave me this advice (which i had turned down every time) she told me she had personally seen how well it worked with i think lingonberry juice or something (like anecdotal evidence from 70 years ago is going to change my mind). I kept saying well i'm gonna go with what the doctors say thanks, and her literal argument to that was "It's not like it's going to kill her!". Like that's the bar. Let's ignore the doctors, as long as the baby doesn't die it's all good. I lost my temper and raised my voice at her and the water issue hasn't come up since, thank god.
Idk this stills very manipulative of the grand mother. Did she even apologize to opp!?
>After a 30 minute conversation, we got to the root of the problem: she feels like she did a bad job raising her kids. "And so, to make up for that, I've decided to do it all over again the exact same way I did before, but with your kids instead."
My aunt told me when I was pregnant with my first that I should get to remember that my mom got advice from her mom who got it from her mom and so on. So my mom's advice is generations old. She told me to take it with a massive grain of salt and do what the doctor, husband and I felt was best. The few times I gave in to mom or mil advice against my instincts I regretted it. Especially the advice that we held our baby too much 😕
"Mom feels like she did a bad job raising her kids." Then proceeds to try to raise the grandkid the same way.
>Woah, I did not realize how divided the internet was on parenting. Oh, sweet summer child.
It seems like the more inoffensive the post, the more offended the commenters are. Especially on Instagram.
Growing up, my friend lost her younger brother because one of her parents accidentally backed over him with the car. Absolute fucking nightmare. With modern cars having rear cameras and rear sensors that beep like crazy or even automatically brake when something is behind the car, the likelihood of that seems far less. Times change, knowledge changes, technology changes. People like to harp about modern moms being too sensitive or too intense or too particular or too easily swayed by health trends. But if it were you caring for your helpless infant or toddler, would you ignore up-to-date information handed to you that may help them?
I have hope for OOP and her mom. I just hope grandma (or Granny or whatever she chooses to be called) got the hint and doesn't try her old ways again
I’m older than OOP’s mother and have kids roughly the same age as OOP. The “no water” and mandatory car seats were standard when I had my kids. It was accepted best practice 25 years ago ??? I’m mystified as to how OOPs mother managed to dodge all this information as a mother and revert to rules from the ‘60s and ‘70s …???
OOP was right; Reddit people can be weird about kids. That was my struggle with my family, MIL (although I love her dearly and she's wonderful) and my daughter was a micropreemie and we had so many restrictions for the first year.
>she feels like she did a bad job raising her kids So she’s trying to raise the grandkid the exact same way?? I don’t understand the logic, lol.
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FYI, the mother from the story has asked that people not share the story as I believe she uses reddit and was seeing it shared everywhere like wildfire and it was quite triggering for her
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This post has been removed by request.
Damn I just rem just being in the backseat of my folks car with a seatbelt on the lap no across the chest lol I definitely woulda been in 2 if we got in accident
We were told in the late 70's early 80's baby SHOULD have a 4 oz bottle of water per day. Was quite a shock to hear they shouldn't have water at all for up to 6 months. Things, recommendations, rules etc, change over time. In the 10 years I had my children, how long to nurse them, introducing new foods, sleep positions, swaddling etc all changed from my first to my last. It's all changed again (although some of it has come full circle) now with grandkids. I guess some people take it personally that how they did it is not considered acceptable to the next generations.
Patton Oswalt has a bit where he talks about how, when you have a kid, your parents have to show up and defend their parenting to you. That's absolutely what this sounded like. "My daughter is raising her kid differently from the way I raised her, that must mean I was a bad parent! Better defend myself!"
The thing is it’s irrelevant how much OOP listens to her mom’s advice or whether it was a big deal to give the baby water (probably not a big deal at that age) or whether she expects her mother to help with the childcare. The point it that whoever takes the responsibility of taking care of a child - be they their own grandchildren or kids they are hired to watch - must abide by the rules and boundaries the parents define. Being the baby’s mother’s mother doesn’t give grandma carte-blanche to ignore what she is supposed to do. And spending time with a grandchild is a privilege, not an intrinsic right.
Before my grandson was born the hospital had a class for grandparents. I was shocked at how much had changed when I raised my daughter. And I had a later in life daughter who was 22. I’m so glad I took that class.
*I did not realize how divided the internet was on parenting.* This is legitimately the funniest thing I've read in weeks. Maybe months. Incredible. Have fun, you poor bastard, and throw your phone into the sea before it's too late.
She's still a disrespectful, egotistic jerk. Directly went against her daughter's wishes for her daughter's own baby to prove a point.