"stop being silly"

If she is good enough to babysit twice a week (assuming for free too), then either accept this or pay for childcare.

“Being invalidated” ..FFS. She’s 2 . Unless your MIL is being cruel, putting your child in danger etc you are going to have to suck up differences in “parenting” style. Or look after your child yourself for 24 hrs a day every day.

Pay for childcare in the style of your choosing. The alternative is going to damage your relationship with MIL because you don't trust her to look after your child.

Almost 2 year olds are silly. There is a time to be silly and there is also a time to not be silly and your daughter needs to learn there are times you can’t be silly. It sounds like you think your MIL might not be letting her be silly but also maybe you aren’t telling there is also a time not to be silly.

The bigger problem is that MIL isn’t parenting how you want, taking her out. A 21 month old is a lot and your MIL shouldn’t have to take her out if she feels she can’t cope. That does she might be sillier and MIL might not cope well with that. But your alternative is paid childcare.

Your DC is going to be influenced by many people in her lifetime, and as long as none of them are abusive it is that variety which will make her resilient and confident in herself. She will learn different people and places have different expectations and will mould her behaviour to suit.

As always the first reply nails it.

OP your MIL saves you hundreds of pounds every month by spending two days looking after your child. She might not always do things the way you do but you do seem to be minimizing just how much she's doing for you.

If you don't like it then you're absolutely more than reasonable to pay someone to look after her.

I mean... I'd encourage her to get out with DD during the day, since that would deal with the problem at its source. Beyond that I don't think I'd raise this with her. If she's being silly she needs to stop, likely for her own safety.

Children learn to behave according to who they are with. DD being told not to be silly won t be scarred for life.

And as usual: if you don't like it, fork out the 500 quid a month (or whatever it is) for paid-for childcare. Then you can specify how they should look after her.

She sounds like she's doing just fine to me.

Plus MIL must have done a decent enough job raising kids or you wouldn’t have married one of them!

I’m not saying that’s how I feel or parent. I’m just saying that MIL has a different style of looking after children and may have her own reasons for that style just like OP has hers.

Ultimately, if MIL’s style goes so against OP’s philosophy on parenting then she will have to get childcare elsewhere.

Dealing with different people with different styles is surely useful for the wider world where folk are inconsistent and have different approaches, many of which won’t be perfect.

I think many of us survived that kind of childhood, back when it was assumed children would have some resilience and were not considered to be the centre of the universe.

Since childhood mental health seems to be much worse than it used to be, perhaps learning from the older generation might be worthwhile, rather than taking faddy advice from modern books that people made up as they went along.

Alternatively, go with parenting instinctively, based on your own experience of growing up and let MIL do what she thinks is right, unless she’s actually demonstrably putting your daughter at risk.

I was supporting the OP there in case that wasn’t clear

No, that’s not how you make someone resilient. You can validate feelings without indulging them.

Now maybe I'm being a batshit pfb. Highly likely.
But basically I'm worried DDs being invalidated and it'll impact her mental health in the future.

Don't give her to the MIL then.

Well she might think that you constantly validating her feelings will make her lack resilience and be a self indulgent adult..,

There’s always opposing ways of looking at parenting and I’m sure kids do the best with a bit of balance.

Being with her MIL will help her adapt to being around different people because everyone she encounters in life won’t be as gentle as you.

You're not handing your child to a village, you're handing it to a woman who is prepared to give up her time two days a week, to look after it.

If a child is in fact being silly, there's no harm in telling them to stop being silly.

Not sure about the 'upset' thing as that would depend entirely on what she's getting upset about.

Yes I think you're being a bit PFB, so it's a case of either lower your '(very high) gentle parenting standards', or pay someone to look after your child.