They say it takes a village to raise a child, but after Reddit user, Left_Time7700, learned what kind of help her mother-in-law had in mind, the woman started thinking she would rather do it alone with her husband or not have kids at all. The lady wanted to encourage the childfree couple to have a baby and said she would alleviate their parental stress by taking the little one away with her for the first couple of years abroad. However, her son and his wife hated the idea.
The mother-daughter-in-law relationship can be a beautiful bond where both women feel valued and respected
Image credits: Curated Lifestyle / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
But this woman feels like her husband’s mom won’t stop overstepping her boundaries
Image credits: Gigin Krishnan / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Ketut Subiyanto / Pexels (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Left_Time7700
In the West, relatively few children live with their grandparents without their mom and dad
According to the United States Grandparents and Their Coresident Grandchildren report, there were
around 7.1 million grandchildren under the age of 18 living with grandparents in the country in 2022, and more than half of those (4.2 million) lived in grandparent-maintained households, while the remaining portion lived in either parent-maintained households (2.7 million) or another arrangement, such as having an aunt- or uncle-maintained household (221,000).
However, even in grandparent-maintained households, it was more common to have at least some parents (38.6% of the time, both of them were involved, 36.6% it was just the mother and 6.2% it was just the father) present compared to having no parents present (18.6%). This was true whether the grandchildren lived with both grandparents, their grandmother, or their grandfather.
Image credits: Rajesh Rajput / Unspalsh (not the actual photo)
Judging from the information that we have, it’s difficult to say if the mother-in-law is deliberately trying to undermine the woman. As some of the commenters pointed out, it could have been cultural differences that caused the tension. You can easily find articles on the internet about Indian grandparents moving overseas just to help with childcare, so why shouldn’t they consider the opposite arrangement instead?
Author Danijela Jokic Vaislay, who moved from Bosnia and Herzegovina to India, where she has already spent more than a decade, said her European friends “often complain about how difficult they find it to manage with small children, especially if they are working. Yet, they are not comfortable leaving their children with grandparents; on the off chance they do leave the kids, the little ones spend the whole time crying for their mother.”
But in India, she sees children growing up in joint families and developing a sort of independence from their parents.
“They are comfortable talking, playing, staying, or even travelling alone with their grandparents, uncles and aunties, cousins… and they almost do not even notice that the parents are not around. It is difficult for me to imagine this in my home country, where children spend all of their time with their parents and start crying even when mommy goes to the bathroom,” she explained.
Maybe the Redditor and her mother-in-law can still figure something out that works for everyone.
Some of the people who read the story said the MIL was out of line
But some were a little more understanding
A few also shared their own similar experiences
