When a child is neglected, it’s natural to call Child Protective Services. In fact, research shows that before their 18th birthday, about a third of American children will be the subjects of a CPS investigation. Clearly, it’s no joking matter, but one grandmother thought it would be funny to threaten her daughter with CPS.
The distraught mom recently shared her story online. According to her, the grandmother was undermining her every parenting decision for the two months she’d had the baby. She wasn’t sure whether she would take this and her other comments to heart or if she was just overreacting. But folks online justified her worries, calling out the grandma for her weird behavior.
A woman just had a baby two months ago, but her mother wasn’t as supportive as she would’ve wanted
Image credits: RDNE Stock project / Pexels (not the actual photo)
In fact, she even threatened to call CPS, later calling it a joke
Image credits: Teona Swift / Pexels (not the actual photo)
Image credits: MART PRODUCTION / Pexels (not the actual photo)
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Image credits: Mikhail Nilov / Pexels (not the actual photo)
Grandparents tend to become overinvolved in their grandchildren’s lives
Grandparents and parents rarely agree on parenting topics. Because they’ve already done it, many grandparents think they have the upper hand. Research shows that 37% of American parents have occasional disagreements with their in-laws about the grandchildren, and 6% report major disagreements.
One reason for this might be that grandparents are often more invested in the grandparent-grandchild relationship than the grandchildren. It’s what experts call the intergenerational stake hypothesis.
It states that older generations perceive their relationships with their grandchildren as more important than the grandchildren perceive their relationships with their grandparents. What’s more, grandparents are more emotionally invested and automatically think they are closer to their grandchildren than the grandchildren report back.
Some experts suggest that grandparents can become emotionally overinvested in their grandchildren’s lives. They may go as far as to think of this relationship as a do-over, as some commenters under this story noted. But they often fail to think about their own children – the parents – and focus too much on the grandkids.
Some studies suggest that grandparents see their grandchildren a couple of times a week on average. In 2014, one survey showed that 42% of American grandparents saw their grandchildren weekly, and 22% visited them daily.
However, parents often feel resentment when they see how involved grandparents are with the little ones. In fact, in that same survey, 54% of parents said that grandparents spend more time with their grandchildren than they did with them as children.
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If grandparents want a close relationship with their grandkids, they need to repair the relationship with their adult child first
A parent-child relationship can often be fraught. Even if the two have a good relationship as adults, the shared history can bring up bad memories, hurt feelings, and resentment. What many grandparents don’t realize is that in order to have a good relationship with their grandchildren, they need to fix the parent-child relationship first.
Licensed family and marriage therapist Whitney Goodman explains that “grandchildren are not a do-over for parents of adult children.” She notes how grandparents often feel entitled to spending time with their grandkids, but forget that they need to repair the fraught relationship with their own children.
“If you cannot maintain a good, healthy, solid relationship with the parent of that child, it’s very unlikely that they’re going to let you have access to that child,” she explained in an Instagram Reels video.
“It’s also extremely painful for adult children to watch their parents put in all of this time and effort into these little humans that they birthed and they brought into this world, but not to put in any time or attention or care into understanding their own child and the parent of that child to have a good relationship with them,” she went on.
According to Goodman, if grandparents want to avoid no-contact time-outs, they need to foster good relationships with their adult child and their partner. After all, the adult child is the parent this time around, and it’s not a chance for the grandparent to have a do-over.
In the comments, the mom shared more of her mother’s weird behavior, all of which raised serious red flags
Commenters warned the mom that this was normal and the grandma was potentially looking to have a do-over with her grandson
