MIL wants itinerary of our holidays

The arguments for sharing everything with your parents are illogical.

Do you text your Mum every time you go out to Sainsburys and get home again? Every time you take a 20 minute drive to the next town? Every time you safely cross a busy road or use a power drill or go up and down the stairs or walk home late at night and not been attacked?

You are more likely to be hurt in any of those scenarios than in going on holiday.

It’s not the time it takes - it’s the “mental and emotional load” of having another thing to remember when you’re trying to manage travel with children and the underlying assumption that it’s your job on your holiday to be keeping her up to date as opposed to disconnecting and focusing on yourselves. It’s not like she’s just popping them a message saying “Hope you had a nice flight and arrived safely” and letting it be until they get round to replying in a couple of days - the MIL is literally chasing them down if she doesn’t get her reply on her timeline. That’s not the behaviour of a mentally healthy adult towards an adult relationship with her son and his family.

I always text my mum to say arrived safely, she does have anxiety but also my eldest who travels a lot does the same to me, and I don’t have anxiety, but guess its second nature that you do that. I will say message when you arrive and he sends photos. He enjoys doing that, especially when he travels solo. My mum wouldn’t ring the hotel though, she would work out local time and assume we are asleep. That is over stepping but the rest is fairly normal.

@Aimtodobetter "OP - I would find that annoying and intrusive as well as to me the underlying assumption is that on your holiday you should be prioritising keeping her in the loop and doing things to make her feel good, not trying to find a few moments to relax"

Yep-that 30 seconds is going to make such a difference to your relaxation time!🤣

I don’t think sharing itinerary is an issue really. I don’t find it intrusive.
Anxiety might be more of an issue here but I think you could approach it with a little more sympathy.

I always share a complete itinerary with my parents, along with insurance details. They do the same with their trips abroad. It's nothing to do with anxiety though, just to have handy in case there's a plane crash/ natural disaster in the vicinity/ we go missing in the jungle etc. so they don't have to go hunting for info. I text them when we land in both directions. I definitely wouldn't put up with intrusive phonecalls to the hotel or multiple reassurance calls though!

I also find it weird people wanting to know you got off a plane safely. If the plane crashed or went missing it would definitely be on the news.

No one checks in with a situation more likely to happen, like having slipping and falling in the shower.

Because that is what the hotel staff called her when they informed OP and her DH that her MIL had called.

You are desperate to show OP and her DH in a bad light. That's weird.

I share itinerary with my parents always, they do with me too

We give our parents the flight details so they can track if they wish. Beyond that, they have our mobile numbers. If they cannot get me on my mobile, how would phoning the hotel directly help generally? I spend so little time in a hotel room that it's unlikely they would track me down easily anyway. Mobile coverage has been way better abroad than it has been at home and there is also messenger, text messaging etc. I've never given out the hotel details in at least 20 years. Come to think of it, since we started travelling without our children (they're adults now) in the last couple of years, we've not told them either.

Exactly what we do. Hopefully there will never be any problems, but if anything did go wrong at home or away it’s useful to know where people are. Just look at what happened in Spain recently!

In the absence of news to the contrary

This is the philosophy in my family and DH's luckily, if something did happen someone would inform them.
My PIL go on holiday the most and we usually know the country but never the actual resort let alone the hotel. surely nowadays with mobile.phones if there is an emergency them you can call their phone.
Although the PP earlier who goes travelling around Asia with multiple stops/flights it makes sense to share where you are going but a week in MAjorca less so

Sadly, we did have a family emergency once and had to contact the hotel because we couldn't reach our relative via their mobile. Knowing which hotel they were in saved so much stress. I know this is rare, but they went on holiday never thinking they'd need to be contacted urgently and need to fly home. Since then, I always let family know our travel dates and the name of the hotel.

Now your DH knows his DM will call, he just needs to text her when you land. It takes 20 seconds. Wouldn't you rather that than have her sitting and worrying all night and potentially ringing the hotel?

OP - I would find that annoying and intrusive as well as to me the underlying assumption is that on your holiday you should be prioritising keeping her in the loop and doing things to make her feel good, not trying to find a few moments to relax. It’s not really about her concern for your DH and kids - she could have that concern and manage it by sending him a nice WhatsApp going “hope you’re enjoying your holiday” and waiting for a reply - it’s about her feeling entitled to intrude into your lives based on her schedule and needs, not yours.

Normal to let family know you've arrived safely, especially nowadays with instant messaging. Even more-so if you know she’s a worrier.

Sorry, I assumed you were, as you were replying to a post about narcissism and said the MIL couldn’t handle not being the first thing her son thought of when he landed. Anyway, I agree with you, calling the hotel is OTT and would have annoyed me as an adult child of someone with anxiety. But (another person) being keen to know someone has landed or arrived safely doesn’t seem that terrible to me. It’s quite nice.

@Gul8 , I can see how intrusive this might feel but as you’ve said your MIL is quite an anxious person. It sounds like she’s used to your husband keeping her in the loop. Is it really worth making a big deal of this? I think I’d roll my eyes and have a laugh about it but only you know if you can do that.

I would hate this too OP. I don't have a MIL, but my FIL (from a different culture) can be fairly overbearing at times. When I first met DH I really struggled with it and used to get frustrated because my own parents are not like that at all - we're very close, but not in each others pockets and they have treated me as an adult from the moment I left home. It took me a while to realise that he wasn't trying to interfere or control us, just has a lot of anxiety around his kids (for good reasons that I can't go into here) and was raised in a culture where it's pretty normal to be overly involved in your adult children's lives and still treat them like dependants. We butted heads a few times until we got used to each other. He has toned it down a lot now and I've learned not to get annoyed with him and we seem to have build a mutual respect.

I never said anything about narcicissm

I just don't believe an adult who is old enough to have grandchildren needs to go around ringing foreign hotels to confirm their adult, married child is "safe".

I would always prefer to be told someone has arrived safely, but if they didn't tell me (or forgot to), I wouldn't make it all about me by getting into a panic and demanding their attention to "reassure" myself.

There is a difference between the OP’s MIL overreacting by calling a hotel and A N Other wanting to know their family has arrived safely though. One may be narcissism, we don’t know. The other isn’t.

But there's a big difference between wanting to know they're safe, and actually ringing a hotel because your fully grown, adult son forgot to text you when he landed in the middle of the night

Let's be realistic - we live in an era of 24/7 news - she knows the plane hasn't crashed or that a coach load of British tourists hasn't been killed or taken hostage, she just can't handle the fact that she wasn't the first thing on her son's mind when he landed.

Hmm. I can only hope people on here never come up against a real narcissist. Believe me, wanting to know what your family has arrived safely after a journey is not narcissism. If you have to pathologise it is possibly a sign of mild anxiety. But for most of us-it's just love.

I think you are overthinking this. Being pleased to know someone has arrived safely is not narcissism.

We are also in our forties send details of our hotel and flight times and number to my in laws and I used to send to my parents as well before they died.

It stems from a time when we didn’t have mobiles and so may not be easy to contact when abroad. I don’t consider it intrusive although I wouldn’t expect them to use them except in an emergency.

Both sides of our family have experienced times when we have needed to urgently reach someone on holiday about sick/dying relatives so it is important to us. Even now roaming may not work fully or you may have it switched off to save money/battery or whatever.

Plus, if, god forbid, we were ever involved in a plane crash, tsunami, earthquake etc they would know where we were meant to be and could quite quickly rule out our being effected or not by knowing our more precise location/flight, which is not so easy if all you know is the country in which someone is in.

Every family is different. If I texted my parents to say I’d arrived safely, they’d probably say ‘what are you telling us that?’. Therefore, I find texting like that unnecessary and irritating.

Other families speak every day and text updates when something unusual like a holiday is happening. And I’d imagine they’d find my lack of updates very irritating.

Neither is wrong, just different. I’d just leave your husband to deal with her and try to not get annoyed. Maybe ask him not to tell you about it.