AIBU to feel upset about my well-off in-laws being tight with money at Christmas?

Weird power games - doing this at a family event.
My in laws are just the same. Spend lots of money on themselves or their house. Any presents they get for our child are a) things the child may not even want and b) very low on value and don’t save us - the parents - any money.
I try to devolve all these chats to my husband and failing that to text / email.
Some people have more money than ability to show love - even making an effort towards trying to understand what the child would like, at a low price point, shows some kind of love - is my take.

Sometimes you can tell, and anyway it doesn’t matter how broke you are beneath the surface if you daily spend on luxuries just for you and are mean and stingy for everyone else.

I can't understand GPs like this. Mine were loaded and I have some amazing presents(and a heap of money!) to show for it. The only thing I could possibly think of is that they are not as wealthy as they appear, which is I suppose possible. Still weird and rude, though.

A Christmas present for your grandchild is not in any way a bail out so why did you type that as a comparison??

Maybe they’re not as well off as you think, or maybe they’ve limited money for the future, or worrying about their future, or have repairs to the house etc etc Everyone always thinks everyone else is loaded, but you can’t know their exact financial situation

In future be less stunned. When they said it was Christmas and birthday say oh you said just for birthday in May.
In future I wouldn’t accept random gifts.
Often people who have money have it as they are like this.
Sometimes there’s also a moral angle to it, they feel children have too much and a book is quite sufficient.
I’d chalk it up to experience but not accept anything and hoc again.

I disagree with most posters here and don’t think they’re being mean. £100 on one grandchild is a lot of money when you have multiple others to buy for too.

Can you remember the gifts your grandparents gave you at Christmas? Perhaps, like me, you’re more likely recall the time you spent with them and the experiences you had with them. Imo your PiLs are particularly at fault because of the lack of involvement in your DS’s life, their poor expression of their love for him in terms of time and gifts. Leave them to their self-indulgence and meanness. Ultimately they’re losing out big time.

I do believe generosity comes from the person not the value of the object!
Like I have the most wonderful friend who is piss poor - but she always posts my kids her kids books when they are done. And I have a friend who does me drawings and paintings for gifts because she is on
sick benefits... both really generous gestures.

When my brother gifts me anything - he brings it up for years.... if he sees it in my house he will say "oh yeah I gave you that hat / candle / cookbook". Like it has strings attached!

I think you're upset because this bike has strings....

I do not think that grandparents spending £50 on their grandkids birthday and another £50 on Christmas are tight to the point of being called mean. I think it's a very normal and perfectly acceptable amount. I don't think my DC had ever spend more than that on them by their (very loving) grandparents. It would never occur to me to label them as tight for that.

What number would you find reasonable, OP?

That’s crazy to me. A single book? I’ve recently bought gifts for a child of a girl I work with and a little boy I’ve never met for a child’s party and got a lot more than a book for both of them!

I am not well off by any stretch of the imagination.

glad there's some sensible replies on here.
£50 for birthday and Xmas is perfectly reasonable. if they gave you the money for the bike and you got all the glory then it's reasonable that actually you tell DS the truth, that it's a joint present.

I’m kind of on the fence. Yes, they could be more generous. But I have made enormous financial sacrifices for my DC and am about to support them through medical school. Holidays, treats etc. are all on hold for the next 5-10 years. At some point I will want to just be selfish with my own hard earned money.

You're not unreasonable to feel a bit 'off' in a way about this, but you would be unreasonable to say anything.

My inlaws could also be weird with gifts. They'd rarely turn up, but when they did, could shower one child with a decent gift and have nothing for the others. Now, in their head, they saw something they thought one child would like, there was just no thought at all to how the other children would see this.

It wasn't that they didn't love their grandchildren, they were just 'different' at best. Without us saying anything, over the years the children came to understand that people are different and that Nan on one side was very different to the grandparents on the other side, it was what it was.

They didn't handle this well; if as seems likely they have a budget of £100 per grandchild per year they should have asked if DS would like to put his share towards a bike rather than telling you later that he'd used up his gift allowance for the year.
But this resentment of older people who very likely had to be frugal during their earlier lives but are now more comfortable, is not great to see. Many older people are generous with gifts and other support to younger family members. Those who are not so generous have kinds of reasons, including a fear of lacking money to pay for care when the time comes. Their age does not globally mark them out as mean.

So as they have bought some sort of small present for both Christmas and Birthday you are talking at least £110 and more likely £120 this year. Multiply by 7 and that's £840 on presents for the grandchildren. Do they also buy presents for adults? If so that's possibly 6 or more extra presents on top so easily spending over 1k on presents.

They sound really tight! It’s their money of course but if I were you I’d be tempted to buy the muppets Christmas carol and gift it to them from your son at xmas. At least you’d be able to have a little laugh to yourself about it.

My parents and my ILs do keep a running total of what they spend on the grandchildren. That situation may be in play here.

In our case it’s easy for one side to balance because they always send cash. The other side does gifts and at the end of the year make contributions to the children’s university savings in values that even things up. The children are unaware this happens when they are young and are just happy with thoughtful gifts regardless of price, but it makes the in-laws feel better and we parents love the habit.

I think present giving (and obviously receiving) used to be much more modest generally in the past. My grandma probably spent around £30 to £50 on our presents in today’s terms. When my mum was a child gifts were very small indeed and often homemade. The exception being a tricycle one year. They had little money though when my mum and her sister were small. Even when grandma was comfortably off giving or receiving big gifts didn’t sit comfortably with her. My mum used to go all out and grandma would say it “sickened” her 😂 She wasn’t at all mean spirited generally and she was great when we stayed with her, doing child centred things.

I’m on the fence as to whether they are being mean as it depends on their behaviour in other ways.

It’s mean because they keep moving the goalposts. Next year I’d be saying “I didn’t expect you to get him a birthday present this year, what with the bike you helped with”

You are not being unreasonable, I think it is mean to do this to a child.

For my son‘s 4th birthday in March, my PIL bought him a Tonie. We didn’t ask for it, perhaps someone told MIL to buy it. We have recently been informed he is not getting a gift for Christmas because a Tonie is expensive. Similar to your parents in law they have plenty of money.

The even more uncomfortable thing is, for three or four months afterwards she would ring to check that he was using the toy. He didn’t actually like it so we had to lie to keep the peace…

my husband and I have agreed that we are going to buy a small gift wrap it up and pretend it is from them. Otherwise he will get confused getting lots of presents from my parents, and non-from other grandparents.

One man's "tight" is another man's "sensible". They should have been upfront about the fact the £100 was intended to cover more than one occasion but beyond that, I don't think they are doing anything wrong. Some people give smaller gifts and it's not necessarily connected to how much money they have (the royal family famously just give joke gifts and tokens).

I really hate all the posts on this site about in laws being "tight", "mean" or "hoarding money", based solely on the fact they have more money than you. It is normal for people to have more money in retirement, because they need to fund that retirement plus possibly care as well. It's their money, not yours. I'm planning to be very generous to my kids (and grandchildren should I have any). But it doesn't follow that anyone taking a different approach is tight.

Just follow their lead and give smaller gifts to them.

I was prepared to tell you that you were unreasonable. Some people just take a different, more restrained approach to gifting and there is nothing wrong with that.

this scenario is not that. If you are going to do a combined birthday-Christmas gift, it should be made clear in the beginning.

There are exceptional gifts where it is justified. I don’t personally think this is one of them, but they failed in the notification which is where they are wrong.

I don't think saying the money for the bike was a birthday and christmas present is wrong in and of itself - if the budget they set for Birthdays and Christmas is £50 child then that's fair enough, no matter how much they have or appear to have.

It would be mean if they were routinely spending more on the other grandkids.

What is mean, or actually a better description would be cruel, is not making it clear from the start that their £100 contribution would replace your sons christmas and birthday present from the start.

I presume that you also contributed some to the bike, so is your son even aware that any of the money came from his grandparents?

If they had said from the start, we will give you £100 now but it is both his christmans and birthday presents this year, you could have arranged for them to give it directly to DS and you could have given him the money too so he could go an choose his bike - that way he would have been clear that it was a gift from all of you.

Changing the goal posts is really horrible as at 7 DS is not going to understand that they made a contribution to his bike which was their gift to him, unless it was explained that way from the start.

Mean to the extreme
I can understand why you are upset OP but the reality is that they won't change.
Please try not to let this take up too much space in your head, it simply isn't worth it.
Ime, those with the most money are frequently the meanest