aibu to think grandparents are just expected to know their place now?

[justme39]

honestly feeling quite upset and not sure if i’m being unreasonable or not.

my ds and dil had their first baby a few months ago and ever since it’s just been rule after rule after rule. no kissing baby, no picking him up straight away if he cries because theyre trying to teach self soothing, dont call him my baby because apparently thats boundary crossing now 🙄

i’ve kept my mouth shut mostly because i dont want drama but yesterday i honestly felt humiliated. baby was asleep on me and i kissed the top of his head without even thinking and dil immediately goes we’re not doing that in this really sharp voice in front of everyone. atmosphere after was awful.

i do feel there’s a lack of respect if i’m honest. i’ve raised 3 children perfectly well, all grown adults with good jobs and houses etc so its not like i dont know what im doing. yet if i mention he looks cold or maybe he’s overtired suddenly im undermining.

another thing that upset me was photos. i put ONE picture on facebook after he was born because family were asking and you’d think i’d leaked government documents. ds rang me asking me to remove it because dil was really anxious. i did remove it but i wont lie i cried after because it just feels like nothing i do is right.

i’ve also offered loads of help. meals, cleaning, having baby so they can nap etc but apparently they want to figure things out themselves. then dil posts online about how exhausted she is all the time. i honestly dont know what we’re meant to do anymore as grandparents except buy things and sit there quietly.

now ds hardly messages unless she’s included as well which never used to happen

aibu to think younger parents are so obsessed with boundaries and gentle parenting they forget other people have feelings too?

Can I just ask why the ‘my baby’ is such a big deal? Almost everyone I know calls their grandchild ‘my girl’ or ‘my boy’- it doesn’t mean we’ve erased the parents, or plan to supersede them in any way, or think for a second we ‘own’ the child-but is an acknowledgement that our own baby has just had a baby and reflects how excited and close we feel to both our child and grandchild. Such insecurity- I wonder how the aggrieved new parent would feel about their own parent saying it-if they even noticed.

This is ridiculous.

Asking “please don’t post any pictures” is a simple and polite request, it is in no way “hysteria”.

Stop trying to pretend she forgot, she didn’t forget. Deciding to upload and post pictures is a deliberate and considered decision, it’s not something you do by accident, forgetting that you weren’t supposed to.

@weetumshie to me it sounds posessive. But as someone observed up thread its use may be normal for some.

Sorry but this is just a rant.

Most people on here have given birth and experienced what comes with childbirth,
There is no reason to turn all these negative experiences against one person, together with massive assumptions. She’s upset enough already.
It’s bullying and persecution.
It’s horrible .
It’s a witch hunt. 😠

Hang on, where is the empathy for the DIL in this scenario?! She has been called “batshit crazy” and lacking in empathy for wanting to protect her newborn from very real risks. The OP didnt offer a sincere apology at all - it was a total non apology “sorry if you are upset” with no accountability for transgressing the boundaries her ds and dil had put in place. Now she has been told what she has done wrong she is getting in a massive strop and trying to recruit her son to go against the wishes of his wife and mother of his child. It’s deplorable behaviour and she will end up being cut out of their lives if she carries on. The “well dont give them help and support later” threat really isn’t one - they are very unlikely to want her involved when they don’t trust her and have good reasons not to.

I for one am really glad that society is moving away from being so deferential towards older people. I had an abusive maternal grandmother and a MIL who “didnt believe in allergies” and fed my (severely allergic) baby, dairy despite being instructed clearly not to do so. When he was hospitalised she then cried and tried gaslighting us by claiming she didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to! Unsurprisingly we are NC now.

There is a core of older women (not all, there are plenty of gorgeous grandmothers out there - my mum is one!) who are downright selfish, narcissistic and entitled and cannot stand that they are no longer calling the shots and have to defer to the wishes of younger women. It’s all about their wounded ego. A classic tell is using the phrase “weaponise boundaries” to describe the contempt they feel about the very reasonable requests their children and their partners have put in place.

There is something instinctive about it, which is hard to articulate, but many on here recognise as crossing a boundary. I think the closest I can say is that “my boy” or “my little soldier” are descriptives and colloquial; whereas baby is associated heavily with parent child bond, and so it seems to insert itself into this dynamic.

I think if someone neutral said it, I’d think it was a very odd turn or phrase. But when someone who has form for crossing boundaries says it, it then implies entering into the parent-child dynamic which isn’t wanted or welcomed.

Oh give over! You are all over this thread defending the OP without taking any of the advice on board. Op admits that she has done wrong and realises she needed to apologise for it and needs to now change her behaviour. You arent helping her at all by trying to gloss over this fact.

Isn't that exactly what the parents are doing now though?

I don’t want to go in too much detail as it’s outing but I had to get the police involved following awful abuse received online aimed at my baby with only 2 pictures posted 😢 for some people social media really isn’t a safe place to share pictures. And to me with my experience it isn’t hysteria to expect people to respect my decision to not have pictures of my child shared on social media. It’s not common the thing that happened to us but we should respect parents who choose to protect their children in this way.

Also not to be stereotypical but the older generation are less aware of issues on social media, don’t always know how to restrict images to friends only. They are more likely to have open profiles or have their accounts hacked. There are some absolute nutters out there on the internet who target and trawl through those type of accounts.

💯 % this on all counts! If grandparents don’t know the risks of posting a child’s photos on social media then it’s contingent on them to find out! Instead of glibly dismissing them with “we are old, we find it confusing and don’t understand” aka we can’t be arsed to find out!

No it’s not.

They don’t want people around who are going to make their life harder by doing things they’ve been asked not to do/undermining confidence in doing things they way they think is best.

So it’s a preferable situation for the parents.

For the op, refusing to help with her gc would just mean she’s missing out on seeing them, she wouldn’t gain anything from it (apart from maybe a weird sense of ‘getting her own back’).

Most of the rules seem fairly common sense to me -

• No kissing - that’s very common and is to prevent spread of herpes, which some don’t know they’ve got - easier to have a blanket rule
• no photos on SM - that’s very common and fair enough
• No calling the baby “my baby” - what would possess you to call someone else’s baby “my baby”?

The only one that’s not reasonable is not picking up the baby and trying to teach them to self soothe, but then again that’s just my opinion

Sorry but this is just disingenuous nonsense! It’s not a list of regulations at all, op was asked to do two things - dont kiss the baby and dont post baby photos on social media and deliberately ignored both. Sounds like her dil has her number with the acting innocent after the fact.

I wonder in what other situations do you ignore other people’s boundaries because life just gets in the way?

If you don’t understand the risks of posting photographs of children on social media (this is not hysteria at all) then pull your finger out and do some bloody research. I assume you have access to the Internet and could spend five minutes researching this? It’s just a very poor excuse for selfishness and laziness imo.

Beautifully put! A lot of the behaviour comes down to insecurity and loss of control. I imagine it is a strange transition to go from being THE mother to a mother within the family unit. I know this was the case for my MIL. She described herself as the ‘Queen of the family’ I had a baby and chose to breastfeed after she told me not to as all her children and 7 other grandchildren were formula fed as she directed. She saw DH supporting me as her being overruled.

Most DIL’s just want to get along with their MIL’s and facilitate a loving family relationship. I don’t understand why parents choosing to do things differently causes such offence and a battle of wills. It’s not an attack.

You need to really reflect on that message and take it on board. Feedback is a gift. Treat it as such. They could have just silently pulled away but instead they gave you a chance to rebuild this relationship IF you listen.

send them another message confirming that you understand, you are sorry, you will reflect and take it onboard and you will respect their boundaries and instructions AND you will give them space now. And really mean it.

I am sorry but there are lots of people who act doing what they want crushing the boundaries and then act all innocent and you did sound like one from the very beginning

Why is it only a risk when grandparents post pictures on the Internet then and not when the parents do it?

It actually wasn’t a rant, but thank you for telling me what I meant about what I wrote.

As long as the parents don't think that they grandparents should help when they have a tantrumming 2 year old or need kid picking up from school etc

That's almost blackmail. Do as we say or you won't see the kid UNTIL we want help. Well sod that for a game of soldiers.

I would guess that most parents that post pictures have no problem with GPs posting and those that don't do not want GPs to post.

But the " risk" itself im asking about.

Some parents do, some parents don’t. It’s up to them to weigh up the risks. Some parents might be happy to post themselves because they can see and control the privacy settings, but not want others posting because they can’t see the privacy settings on another account.

I don’t have SM, and after my mum announced my pregnancy to friends and family without asking me if we were ready, the only photos she will be getting until we are ready to tell the wider family ourselves are one-view images. It’s a shame, but otherwise the photos will be all over social media.

Parents dont! That’s the point! I have never posted a child on social media ever. It doesn’t sound like the parents in this scenario have either.

You have weird fixation on turning thing an around on the parents on this thread. I saw your earlier post asking why it’s ok for the mother to kiss her child but not the grandmother. You do realise that the mother birthed this child, had skin to skin contact and is breastfeeding yes? It’s a much more intimate relationship than the grandmother will ever have and that the grandmother is in no way equivalent to the mother of the child and never will be?! It’s really not the gotcha you think it is and is really revealing of how you view the mothers versus the grandmothers in this scenario.

The point pp was making is that those who see it as a risk won’t post themselves either and those who don’t see it as a risk will be ok with wider family posting.

What I'm asking if what the ACTUAL risks are

People talking the images and feeding them into AI to create child pornography for one.