I think I've just been banned from seeing my grandchildren!

[TiredRetired]

My parenting was different from the way my DIL is bringing up my two grandsons but that is not usually a problem. They are happy little boys.
Background; I had my 4 kids in the 1980s/1990s. I read the Continuum Concept and never looked back. We co-slept. Breastfed until natural weaning. Home educated second youngest until ready for school.
DIL was given lots of help by me to b'feed ( asked for) which she does diligently but not sure she really enjoys it. She sticks rigidly to meal & nap times which we have to come home for. I have always stuck up for her when other family members have rolled their eyes at this because they seem happy in the routine. I will occasionally get a lecture - for instance I once kept eldest out past meal time because we had stopped at a cafe. I texted not to worry about lunch but was told in no uncertain terms to come back immediately
I visited a few days ago in their new house they've just moved to. I was sleeping in the dormer bedroom opposite my 3 yr old grandson. He arrived in my room about midnight having undone his sleeping bag, climbed out of his cot and come through. It was cold in the rooms (corners often are) and his hands and feet were like ice. I know they don't like co-sleeping so I grabbed the duvet and took him downstairs to snuggle on the couch and warm him up. Just did not occur to me to put him back in his cot like that.
To cut a long story my son came through and said, I'll take him Mum. Suspected I'd done the wrong thing as he was quite short with me.
Got a lecture in the morning from DIL as though I was a small child myself and I'm afraid it went badly. After listening a bit I said "of course I'll do what you want in your house but my parenting was different to yours so it can be a bit difficult for me to know what to do here. I'm not 12 yrs old and I've brought up 4 kids. Can I not be the Grandma that's a bit different because after all, you're the biggest influence on them ( that's a precis of my side of it)
She was really angry and said she can't see how I can continue to visit and she doesn't know what else she has to do...
You get the picture?
I am heartbroken. Don't know at the moment now to fix this. I apologised and said of course in your house, your rules but there's something broken now

Grandparent wasn’t using her best judgement of what the parent would want - she was ‘just being me’, and ‘the Grandma’s that’s a bit different’ - she was purposefully going against what DIL wanted because she disagreed with her parenting.

That’s not right, the rules are clear, no co sleeping means in both a bed or doing it on the sofa in the middle of the night, I also don’t beleive the op didn’t consider putting th4 child back to bed, she simply saw an opportunity to co sleepso went downstairs to do it on th4 sofa, so she could pretend that was different, it isn’t,

come back for lunch, her other example, is also clear, she elected not to bother,

I never offer any advice now - though I tentatively suggested breastfeeding on demand once (advice taken). I am not a very hands-on grandparent, would hate to have DGC overnight with me as small children and without their parents. Ditto taking small children out - did that with my own, now I want to look at the pictures, do the shopping etc without having to worry about DC.
My DiL is very hands-on with her DC (my GDC) and has them to stay every week-end. It would drive me nuts - and would have done the same to my late DH, who liked DC in small doses, or old enough to take part in amateur drama etc.
I might disagree with DiL etc but I have found it counter-productive to say anything. OP is making very clear that she sees DiL's methods 'wrong'. I have never heard of the Continuum method, but if it's suitable for babies in the Amazon (infant mortality very high) I doubt it's suitable for a 21st-century baby in a small, nuclear family. But that's only IMO - and I would not voice it to someone following the Continuum method.

There is no world in which sitting on a sofa, while awake, holding a child, is co-sleeping. Co-sleeping involves sleeping together.

At midnight?

Yes, at midnight.

Co-sleeping means the adult and child sleep together, that's what the term means.

You don’t think a child should be being encouraged back to sleep at midnight?

What makes you think the OP had any intention of sleeping? Commonsense would suggest she was going to warm him up then put him back in bed?

I think if an adult is worried the child has a chill, making sure they are warm before putting them back to bed is the responsible thing to do.

If you don't want to take them into your own bed and then move them when they are warmed up and sleeping, wrapping them up in a blanket and holding them on your lap would be a good choice because the child is likely to go back to sleep quickly in both scenarios. Minimal disturbance, minimal sleep lost.

The worry putting them back to bed directly would be that they would become more chilled(unsafe), or be unable to fall asleep again due to being chilled - most people can't, this is a safety mechanism, and possibly why the child woke in the first place.

Putting a very cold child back to bed like that is a very strange idea, and likely to produce even less sleeping.

As would waking the parents for that matter, because it would involve more moving around and noise.

The OP mentioned how tired she was, so the potential to fall asleep on the sofa with child and duvet is still relevant. If there are anxieties about co-sleeping, then finding them dozing or snuggling on the sofa in the middle of the night could be upsetting because of that too. While a 3 yo isn't a tiny baby so risks are lessened, we don't know what other factors like relative sizes or previous issues/traumas might be present as well; eg if someone knows a case in which a young child died while co-sleeping on a couch, they may not want to even go near that situation themselves. How easy is it to wake up gran if she falls asleep on the child?

Just to add, the worst mother I have ever known had four children. And was a teacher. And thought she knew everything about parenting. And rolled her eyes at how her grandchildren were raised.

Having four children does not mean you have any parenting skills whatsoever.

In the majority of cases, it does involve relevant experience. Unless the kids were severely neglected.

Yes - my grandmother was abusive and neglectful to my mum and her siblings.

She had multiple kids! Made no difference

🙄

My guess it wasn't just this one little thing, and this was just the last straw for this visit. You sound like my MIL and her constant comments and suggestions and criticisms (you think you're being subtle, but you're not) really just wear on me. Her visits are exhausting because everything I do is wrong/ different and requires her commentary. Nothing can be done for the reason of that's just how I do it.

Your poor DIL has just moved house, is raising small DC, and is managing the household while DH works long hours. She likely has no downtime except for those 30 min that DH gives her in the morning to get ready for her day - and even those are probably not relaxing since she's doing little chores as she goes along.

My advice is to let it go. My MIL apologized after I finally had an outburst of frustration. It would have been fine if she'd left it at that. But then she decided to turn herself into a martyr with a woe is me attitude - probably posted on mumsnet about what I terrible person I am. At some point I had enough of the drama and left it to DH to maintain the relationship with her.

Last comment because I'm fed up now listening to a lot of you going on about boundaries and caregivers, and overstepping the mark. I can not wait till you are all grandparents and back here giving out about your daughter in laws, I'm 53 so probably old to a lot of you, my kids are still young though, 17, 12 and 10, so don't have to worry about daughter in laws but I pray my son gets a wife that understands how important a grandparent is in a young child's life, and hopefully I won't have to worry about overstepping boundaries and obeying the rules as one person said. My husband had his mother and loved her unconditionally and I certainly wouldn't have been able to manipulate him into anything regarding his mother, I respected him for it. We are both irish and have big families and I'd be laughed at if I mentioned boundaries and rules. We don't take life as serious as some of you clearly do

@fairycakes1234 I'm Irish too and it does seem to be different here. I don't really know anyone who hates their MIL the way people do on Mumsnet. It definitely seems to be one rule for the DIL parents and another set of rules for the in laws on here.

Making generalised statements about a whole group of people is discriminatory

She didn't take the three year old out of bed, the three year old took him self out of bed, him self out of his sleeping bag and and then in to grandma's room which was cold. She took him somewhere warm because he was freezing and so her dil could sleep. That's kind thing to do. Reading between the lines these two women help each other out a lot and I hope they get over this because when family raising you need all the help you can get. The people who benefit from that are the grandchildren, so it's very important.

Sometimes the things that trigger a conflict are less important than the things that have built up before it...

I would go back and ask her to be frank with you about other situations where she feels that her routines haven't been followed, so you know what you're actually dealing with.

Acknowledging her right to make the decisions as a mother could go a long way towards settling the situation.

Identifying the specific changes to routines required will help focus on the tasks, rather than personal issues.

Identifying how best to communicate when it happens again could also be useful. For example do you want to get feedback in the moment or do you want to develop a habit of asking "any changes from last time" each time you arrive to babysit?

Then perhaps have a conversation along the lines of you're going to do your best to follow her way of parenting, but you need reassurance that she'll cut you some slack when you default to your parenting methods on auto pilot sometimes.

What do you think?

We are suuposed to be respectful so I'll just say nonsense, that's an over reaction your part...

Why the eye rolling?

I have to admit, it does seem to me she may have been told she was in the wrong whatever she did: damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. The little boy (not a baby) was awake and out of bed in her room. She couldn’t ignore him. Her only three options were to:

1. Put him back to bed when cold and risk him remaining awake and climbing out of the cot again, which could have resulted in an injury (falling from the cot or down stairs), so the parents may have been unhappy about that
2. Wake the parents, which may have meant they were unhappy about that
3. Try to comfort him and warm him up herself and then, once he’d started to nod off, put him back in the cot, which I imagine was her plan. She knew they’d be unhappy if she comforted him in her bed, so thought the best place was the sofa. Then, that’s wrong too!

IMHO if parents have very hard-and-fast rules, they need to spell them out up-front in no uncertain terms, e.g. “ If he wakes, climbs out of his cot and comes into your room, please wake us up, as we’d rather deal with it”. It’s unlikely to be the first time he’s climbed out of his cot and sought comfort.

Though (let’s be frank) as kids get older and come under the influence of many more people who don’t do things ‘your way’ (nursery staff, child minders, teachers, dinner ladies, friends’ parents when going to play or sleeping over), most parents tend to get much more relaxed. As long as the person looking after your child is kind, caring and responding to their needs, that’s all that usually matters.