Mother in Law did not use car seats for my children.

[ChouxPastryHeart]

Hi everyone,

This will be a bit long so thank you for reading in advance and giving input.

My DH and I have two DC; a 3 year old and an 18 month old. We live in Sweden as he is Swedish and has family here. This week, he was away for work which doesn’t usually happen, and since I also work full time, we asked my MIL if she could pick up our girls on one of the days so that they could be picked up at 3pm instead of 6pm, since that was my latest working day. She agreed and a few days before, I sent her a text to let her know where pick up would be etc. I let her know that the childminder lives 15 min walk from our house and that since MIL doesn’t have car seats, she would need to pick them up by walking.

Fast forward to the morning after she picked them up - I have it confirmed by my childminder that MIL did indeed pick them up with her car, but childminder was not aware that she didn’t have car seats. I was livid and just in shock. The journey would only have been 5 minutes, but that doesn’t matter. These girls are the most precious thing in our life and not even 30 secs is worth the risk in my opinion. Not to mention, it is illegal.

I called her that afternoon and calmly asked her to explain what happened. She told me that she had them propped up on some cushions and then used the seatbelt. I told her that I was extremely upset about this, that what she did was dangerous and put the girls’ lives at risk. She responded with: ‘no, it wasn’t dangerous. I fixed it and it was perfect.’ I reiterated to her that I did not agree and that I was disappointed. She replied with: ‘you are angry about this, but that’s not my problem, that’s your problem.’ And, ‘I can’t do things your way, I do things my way and if you don’t like it, that’s not my problem.’ For certain things, I could buy that reasoning, but not for this ffs. 🤯

I was in utter shock and disbelief at this point. When I asked her why she ignored the wish for her to walk to pick them up, she replied with ‘I couldn’t walk that far and I didn’t know the way.’ She absolutely could walk that far; she is 63 years old and goes for hikes when she is abroad! I told her that if she didn’t want to walk, she could have told me days before and I would have arranged something else. She had no answer for me.

I ended the call by saying to her that I find it worrying that she does not see anything wrong with what she did, that this has made me lose trust entirely, and that this was the last time she would be asked to ever supervise the girls alone. Her response was: ‘well that’s your problem.’

My husband is also flabbergasted by this and said he will have a talk with her. I need to mention that this has not been the only occasion throughout the 11 years we have been together where she has disrespected me and crossed boundaries, but this is just a whole other level and involves my children’s safety. DH has had harsh conversations with her before about various things, but I don’t think that will cut it this time. I feel like I am done with this woman.

Am I being unreasonable to expect my husband to implement a serious consequence, like telling her she is no longer welcome in our home, that we do not want to communicate with her at all until she comes to her senses and apologises for the way she has behaved and the utter disrespect?

PS. We never rely on her for childcare regularly, except for asking for a little bit of help for like two times a year and this was one of those times!

Yes. Illegal in Sweden.

I can't believe how stupid your response is. They very often fucking didn't, that's why! How the hell has it "gone a bit far now"??

What do you think laws were introduced about car seat safety?!!!

Using phones while driving is also an issue, but a separate one! Children have a better chance in an accident when seated according to the law!

Spoken by someone who has never had a toxic, stubborn, narcissistic or selfish MIL.....they don't apologise.....because in their minds they are never wrong!

Nothing you've said in your post is unreasonable OP.....I applaud you for taking this matter so seriously (because it IS very serious, especially at such younf ages!) and especially since she has no remorse or concept of the danger she put your children in, not allowing her to care for them in future is absolutely the right move, and your DH should be 100% backing you up in that.
She sounds incredibly rude, and it sounds like this is the icing on the cake with a backstory of issues, so if you need to cut/reduce contact or distance yourself then do so.
Her being a blood relative does not give her the right to remain in your life if she behaves in such a stupid pig-headed way.

It was, apparently, in the 1990s. There is a weird quirk to this - basically all over Europe in the late 70s/early 80s, there were loads of different car seat related safety standards. Britain had a British Standard for car seats for example, BS 3254.

In 1982 (?) I think - the EU created a single safety standard to bring all of these into alignment - ECE R44. At first it ran in alignment with the current-at-the-time standards but by a certain point all EU countries had to adopt the ECE standard.

BS 3254 was very similar to the first R44 version so not much change for the UK. Basically it was similar to the change we've recently had from R44 to R129. But some other countries would have had much more lax standards or possibly no safety standard at all (I don't know, to be honest) - but this was the point of the rule change, anyway. To ensure that children would be just as safe everywhere across the EU and make it clearer for manufacturers who wanted to sell their products across the EU.

Sweden was an outlier at this time in that their safety standard was stricter than the R44 standard - but they weren't part of the EU in 1982, so this didn't matter.

Sweden joined the EU in 1995 - at this point they had to adopt the ECE standard, which unusually, was less stringent than their current safety standard of the time (T-Standard) which may well have included rear facing - I'm happy to take that poster's word for it that it did. Apparently, this is the story behind the birth of the Swedish Plus Test - because the Swedish car safety organisations were unhappy about being forced to accept foreign car seats conforming to the lesser safety certification, they invented this crash test called the "Plus test" that manufacturers could opt to have their car seats put through in order to show that they passed the T-standard as well as the ECE standard.

It's not very common for safety standards to get less stringent over time, usually they get stricter. This is an interesting example of an outlier to that and the reason was because the ECE regulation was designed for continuity in safety standards across the EU.

From 1995 to the present day you've had companies making R44 (and now R129) compliant seats, forward facing for most of Europe, rear facing for the Nordic market. As well as some Nordic specific manufacturers making rear facing seats for their own market only. For a long time these seats were considered too difficult for other European parents to install (because of the tethers) so they weren't sold here. It was only because of ERF awareness campaigns on the internet that they now are.

So glad for responses like @Runnerinthenight felt like I'd been dropped into a batshit alternative world where using car seats for children was seen as a whimsical fad!

The only unreasonable thing I can see there is the baptism dictat. That was pure bigotry.

But I don't think it was polite or reasonable to skip the annual Mother's Day family gathering. Would it have killed you to go?

You are going to alienate your husband if you keep on expecting him to go to bat for you over small potatoes.

You are also going to find it hard to back down from your unnecessary lines in the sand without your MIL believing she has scored a victory over you.

I'd rethink your approach here completely. Let her feel she has a win or two on things that actually don't matter.

Pick your battles.

Not every irritating thing this woman says or does is a hill to die on.

'Be the bigger person' This isn't a problem with the OP's behavior this is her children's lives being put at r

*being put at risk

You are way over the top to cut contact. Why couldn't you ask her to collect the car seats from the childminder with the girls?
Yes she was wrong but you could also have prevented this.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Yours is the correct response to your idiotic and dangerous MIL. Thank goodness your husband is totally onboard with your reaction. LC from now on, I’d say 💐

Victim blaming much? #TutTutTut

Show her this OP

It's crash test dummies and it is a proper booster seat not just cushions. Cushions are even worse.

What is the law in Sweden? I'd be tempted to report her if it is illegal not to use child seats.

@MrsSlocombesCat

Not to be rude, but to think this way is so wrong.

I'm probably older than OP's MIL, and my children were always in boosters or car seats. In the back seat. My inlaws felt this was a lot of trouble to go to, that "nothing ever happened to our dc."

Until the day I left with the girls after a visit with PIL. Our dds, 3 and 15 months. Car seats, of course. I drove off, and literally 3 minutes later a van ran a stop sign and hit us in the driver's side door, spinning us all the way around.

Even now, 40 years later, I can still feel the impact and hear my girls screaming so loud I could see their tonsils. I can feel the thousands of small glass fragments raining down around us.

But we were lucky. I had some cuts and left-side injuries, but my girls were okay! Scared to death, and with tiny scratches and cuts, but okay.

The entire interior of the car was covered in glass. There was even glass in the baby's Huggies! Thank God for auto safety glass.

The police took DDs to PILs while I stayed with the paramedics. DDs' car seats were too filled with glass to put in the cruiser. The officer told me they would be fine, as the house was so close. (I said "Yes, that's exactly the distance between their house and where we were hit.")

PIL never said another word about how much trouble the car seats were. They even started wearing their seat belts.

One last thing: one of the paramedics told me that the car seats likely saved their lives. That even belted in, they might have been thrown through the windshield. And worse, that seatbelts often cut into a child's body, causing kidney damage or death.Kids under 8 or under a certain weight don't have enough body fat to protect their internal organs.*

The mandatory car seat law had only been in effect three years at that time. It definitely saves lives, and I'm thankful DH and I used them.

If I was @ChouxPastryHeart, I would be beyond livid. No unsupervised contact. Ever.

One child is 18 months old. Let that sink in because in your desperation to trip over yourself just to dig out the OP for having the correct boundaries in life mean that you must have missed it. Either you’re just spiteful or incredible naive and unintelligent. You say you don’t know the rules in Sweden, so why are you posting non-relevant information on the UK where this would still be an extremely serious incident and would be against the law? An unexpected, short journey in the UK criteria falls into the situation being unavoidable or an emergency situation. She is not a taxi either which is completely different and the laws exist in the UK and Sweden alike for good reason. If you think this is acceptable then you really shouldn’t be trusted with small children. Even kids in the UK have to have a booster seat until they’re approximately 11/12 or above a designated height. This situation was neither emergency nor necessary because she could have walked easily. Her response to her own actions by being unremorseful and in fact proud of putting her grandchildren in danger is very telling. The fact you’ve underplayed how serious this is in a poor effort to gaslighting the OP into believing she’s overreacting because of “historical events” is appalling also. What’s wrong with stopping her seeing her grandchildren if she’s got form for being an absolute waste of good fresh air and a criminal to boot. The OP has looked over past demeanours clearly like you’re suggesting she does now, how badly do people have to have their children put at risk before you expect them to safeguard them. Everything other than outright physical abuse and murder good by your standards then? Her apparent reasoning that her plan was “perfect” shows that she believes her idea is foolproof and alludes to the fact she would probably do it again on a much longer journey. Do you seriously live with that few brain cells because this isn’t even ambiguous and is perfectly straight forward neglect. The fact you and a small minority of others cannot sell this or are wilfully excusing this is staggering. Why don’t you read the full thread because you will realise that you’ve missed multiple Swedish residents or nationals stating this is a crime that is taken very seriously.

She's never going to apologise or see this your way. I wouldn't have more to do with her then necessary going forward and she wouldn't be having any unsupervised contact with my kids ever again but your setting up for failure expecting an apology that's never going to come. Then you'll need to back pedal or stay no contact for good. A serious consequence is reasonable, going NC is not and it would be going NC because you're not going to hear that apology until hell freezes over. Id go very low contact for yourself and then your DH can supervise any contact they have with the kids.

YADNBU

Children can be decapitated with seat belts, and is another crucial reason why car seats are so important.

This is one of the tragic dangers of absent-mindedness. She was a lazy so and so and couldn't be bothered walking.

This is the stuff of nightmares and I hope you and your husband tell her this, just bombard her with it and don't trust her again.

@Oblomov24

The kind of journey that is:

• unexpected
• necessary
• over a short distance

Is something like when my neighbour's grandson was ill at school, I had a car, she didn't (child lives with gran) so I picked him up in my car.

I don't know the distance but child walked with older siblings to and from school so not far.

It's not absent-mindedness, it's some combination of ignorance, obduracy, laziness and selfishness. If I had the great good fortune to have grandchildren I would be making every effort to get up to speed with all the safety stuff so the GC's parents could feel confident they were safe with me. I most assuredly wouldn't be saying 'Well, I won't be doing that, because I didn't do that 30 years ago and you were fine'. I was very fortunate that my parents didn't do that with me. I know they thought some of the things we did or didn't do were odd and unnecessary, but they had the good manners and sense not to say so. Give and take is needed in all relationships.

Don't you just hate it when older generations say "in my day" about dangerous practices.

My late MIL used to do it all the time. Some of the stuff was downright dangerous - swaddling a child with a high temperature in blankets, rusks in bottles etc.

@ForestForever
Goodness that's a bit harsh. Calling me "spiteful or incredible naive and unintelligent." and "shouldn’t be trusted with small children. " and "Do you seriously live with that few brain cells".

Blimey. All I was saying was I didn't think it warranted "like telling her she is no longer welcome in our home, ". I thought that was a bit ott.

It's not about you and disrespecting you.

It's about her committing an illegal act which endangered your childrens lives.

My approach would be to refuse her 1:1 access and to tell.her I have nothing more to say to her. Make it awkward and uncomfortable and make it clear she isnt welcome without actually saying it.

I wouldn’t let her take the children anywhere again but I wouldn’t go NC over it. I think your dh needs to point it out that no seatbelts is illegal and that it’s not acceptable to prop them up as it doesn’t give adequate protection.

What she did was stupid yeah, but doesn’t really warrant no contact, you’ve said your peice, don’t ask her to supervise the children again but still let her visit.

Did you ask her how she would like to collect them? Did you offer to drop off the car seats for her if she did want them? And why did you ask the childminder how she collected them?

@RampantIvy But 63 is not really an older generation. I’m 59 and some of my friends I met when my kids were babies are now early 60s. None of us would have dreamt of not using car seats when our children were tiny. It’s not a generational thing. It’s a personal stance by this person.

I'm a similar age to your MIL and I absolutely would not do what she has done: it's completely unsafe. An accident can happen at any time, what she did was unacceptable. She also had the option of walking, so there are no excuses.
Furthermore, she has spoken to you very disrespectfully.
Your husband definitely needs to speak with her. Going forward I'd give it a couple of weeks before deciding what you might do. I'd be hoping for an apology as a minimum. I don't think you should cut contact completely, but I would never be asking her to pick up your children again.
I think you're completely in the right on this one