"We didn't do that and you turned out ok!"

[user1471517900]

AIBU to think this is the most annoying phrase you can hear with your child from grandparents? Or are there more?

what mothers have always done - cuddle their children, breastfeed them, carry them around Not for my DF, evaporated milk formula with bread crumbed up in the bottle, tied to the potty and table leg and when my DM was harassed into leaving my DSis for an evening out came back to a baby in a cot still wet with tears. Not all parents are equal.

It is a very annoying phrase, i agree OP.

A phrase that annoys me is "have you tried ginger biscuits?"

my dad says things like this all the time - drives me mad!

I don't have my own children but DP has one 9 year old who he drops off and collects from school.

They live 6 miles away from the school.

So a few months ago my dad was due to go look at a job with my DP but whilst they were looking time was going on so my DP said I have to go collect DS from school.

My dad then said to me later on " I don't understand why he collects him from school he should be walking to and from school by now!"

Erm dad its like 2 miles on a busy main road with pavements and then 4 miles on a windy country main road with no pavement?

Well I had to walk the same distance when I was younger than him and I turned out fine!

ok then dad...

A lot of grandparents are defensive about their parenting - sometimes there are just genuine changes in information which can feel alien but other times it's because they know they've done something wrong.

My friend's DM claims that her neglectful parenting was fine because it was better than how she was raised (and it was truly awful, friend used to come to ours for tea because her DM would just leave bread for her when she went to work). Friend's grandfather went to prison for trying to murder his wife and children so you'd think the bar would be slightly higher but apparently you can't criticise because my friend "turned out ok"...

The phrase is annoying because its usually used as an attack not a defence.

The people defending "we didn't do that and you turned out OK" would be right if the phrase were generally heard in response to a younger parent randomly telling their own parent off for not having used a car seat/ baby monitor/ avoided smacking/ got down on the child's level or whatever.

"We didn't do that and you turned out OK" is usually an attack on a younger parent's choices by a grandparent who feels implicitly slighted by their adult offspring not parenting the same way they did though. Its rare that the younger parent will have said anything critical - usually the criticism is purely in not choosing to do exactly what their parents did.

My mother was outraged that I let my DD dress up in a princes costume when she was about 3, because she never let me do that. DD had several dressing up costumes - animals and "job" ones which were gender neutral or perhaps more "boyish" but also a princess dress. She asked me why I let DD have a princess dress and seemed to think that I wouldn't have let DD have one purely because I didn't have one... this makes no sense to me - apparently not unthinkingly copying your parents' parenting is a criticism of them and for a while, when my older children were small "we didn't do that" (keep you in line of sight near a specific large stream which was a feature of my childhood and which we were by with the grandchildren was one) "and you turned out OK" was trotted out almost every time I saw my parents and they saw me do something they didn't do with me or my siblings...

It got rather wearing and I was very close to replying "more by luck than judgement" an awful lot of times, especially about leaving small children supervising even smaller children out of adult line of sight around water and dogs...