Please excuse this wall of text...
I'm looking for some advice on what to do with our current situation.
I have a daughter 27 who has a 3 year old son. My daughter works 3 days a week and up until December last year we looked after our grandson while she was at work on those 3 days.
Last December she split up with my grandsons father and he moved away. My daughter started bringing our grandson to us every single day, on days she wasn't working she'd be dropping him off and going home to bed saying she was tired because my grandson wasn't sleeping well without his father's presence and she'd been having a hard time at work. We accepted this for a few weeks but then it started to get silly.
My daughter works a 15 minute drive from our home. She'd finish work at 5 and instead of coming to pick her son up at 5.30 ish like normal she'd start turning up at 7 with no explanation as to where she had been.
He'd be served his evening meal at 5.30 and start getting excited that mummy would be back soon then he'd wait and wait for her as she gets later and later arriving. It breaks my heart when he keeps asking for reassurance that mummy is coming back.
When she is at our home with her son she sits on her phone ignoring him. He has to ask her for affection or to be involved in something he is doing. One example was last weekend my daughter and grandson were at my home, my grandson got a sandpit for his birthday and was stupidly excited when we said he could play in it. He went around everyone in the room asking them to put their shoes on and come and see his new toy. His mum for a change actually did what he asked and came outside, you could see his eyes light up when he saw her coming outside. She stayed maybe 5 minutes then decided whoever she was texting on the phone was more interesting and went back inside. My grandson looked at his grandad and said "she's not coming back is she" got really sad, asked for a hug then decided he didn't want to play with sand anymore and asked to go back inside himself.
My grandson is without doubt missing his mummy, he sees her for less than an hour in the morning and as his bedtime is technically 7 a lot of nights she takes him straight home to bed.
On the rare occasion she's paying him enough attention and actually praises him he gets emotional and immediately starts to cry. He craves her attention so much that when he gets it he doesn't know what to do.
Now we move on to a few weeks later and grandson has still been at our house all-day 6 days a week (his daddy has him on a Sunday) the only difference is my daughter on the 3 days she's not been working has been coming up to our house with him. She will sit on her phone texting her new boyfriend all day while we look after the child.
We talked to my daughter mentioning that we were unhappy with the current situation and our grandson can't be with us all the time and needed some 'just mummy' time. She got really defensive saying we just didn't want her to have a life and stormed out.
The next week she actually spent a whole day with him taking him to a local activity centre and baking cupcakes with him which he loves to do. My grandson came to us the next day happy and super chatty telling us all the things he'd done with mummy. We hoped that things were getting a tiny bit better and the next week she spent a whole day with him too.
Now to today my daughter turned up at our house saying my grandson was obviously too much of a problem for us to keep looking after so she'd enrolled him in a local nursery from 8am to 6pm all 5 days a week.
This is not what we wanted at all. While we agree nursery would be a good thing for him 50 hours a week seems like torture for a child who is already worried that he's been left when his parents are out of sight for only a short while. We were and still are always happy to have him while my daughter works. He's going from missing his daddy, to missing his mummy (even when she is physically with him) to having his grandparents taken away too and it's breaking my heart. All we wanted was for her to spend some time with him and instead she's decided to send him away from all of us.
What can I do? Am I being unreasonable asking her to actually participate in her child's life more?