DH's parents haven't seen DS since he was 19 months old and he is five now.
I've spoken on here before about why that is. I haven't seen them since that time either and DH sees them very rarely.
Occasionally DH wishes that things could be different with them, they are his parents after all, and will sometimes say that he wishes things could go back to "how they were" or that they could have "a second chance."
But he's had his entire life being controlled and manipulated by them and he knows that, in reality, how things were before was pretty terrible a lot of the time and that they have had hundreds, if not thousands of chances already.
To give you a small idea of what they were like, three days after we lost our first child to stillbirth MIL asked me if it still hurts to give birth if your baby is dead. A short time later, when we lost our second child to prematurity she asked if our daughter had been born with all of her face or not. She caused arguments at both of our children's funerals and informed us that they were 'not proper grandchildren' to her.
When DS was born she kept referring to herself as his mother and once, when he first learnt to crawl, she lifted him off the floor and onto her knee by grabbing him by his neck, both hands around his throat, and hauled him up.
PILs are not in the best physical health and BIL and SIL had already raised concerns about how capable they were of taking care of their children, so that was a concern of having them look after DS too. They have regular falls and are unable to get back up on their own, both have problems with their backs and legs and they have other physical conditions too.
They've made a long habit of lying to one part of the family about the other, told many lies about me, about DH, about our SIL, in an effort to turn people against each other and get sympathy for themselves.
And the worst one was when BIL was in hospital following an accidental overdose of alcohol and drugs. Instead of telling us this, they told us he had a hereditary disorder that might kill him and that DH and his siblings might also have. They wouldn't tell us the name of this disorder though, so we had no idea what to ask the doctor to test him or DS for and we believed this disorder might have been the reasons why we lost two of children and could potentially lose our third. We went through hell trying to get answers before we found out it was all a lie.
They have regularly disowned DH on one day and then claimed to have no knowledge of doing so the next.
They are a nightmare and his childhood was a bizarre mix of suffocating attention and weird behaviour. They had a neighbour strangle his pet rabbit once, as they said it was ill, and then left it for him to find dead in it's cage. They tell 'hilarious' stories about the time his older brother fell from an upstairs window as a toddler and they didn't know until a woman passing in the street found him underneath it, the time his sister was found crawling on the road as a baby and they had no idea she wasn't in the house, and how they always knew their oldest friend was back home from time away in the army because they would see his wife with a black eye.
I realise this is a long post but it's actually just a tiny fraction of why I don't want them near me or DS and why DH sees so little of them.
And yet if they had been on that programme today it would have been all "we don't know what we've done" and "we love them all" and "we've apologised but Sarah hates us and we don't understand why" and people would feel sorry for them. I know because this is the way it is now, everyone has an opinion and I've had abusive messages from friends and family demanding I stop upsetting PILs.
Yet they ignore the fact that DH has also kept DS away from them, it's not just me.