Ok, where to even start. So I have a (nearly) five year old niece. During the first three years of her life, my mum and I were essentially her primary caregivers, as her mum had severe postpartum depression and my brother (her dad) and my dad (her granddad) were full time employed. At around three my brother and his partner started trying to reintegrate as parents, causing a lot of tension and distress with the child whenever she had to leave my parents house to stay with her actual parents. We continued to see her frequently and still do, but her behaviour has gotten more and more atrocious, to supernanny levels.
Whenever she’s around my mother (her grandma) is the worst. Her grandparents spoil her completely rotten, have never taught her how to deal with not getting her own way and are in a constant state of appeasing her tantrums and will not set any boundaries. If I try to enact any discipline at all (no smacking, no shouting, I’m talking naughty step level stuff) my mum will start shrieking in hysterics, pick her up and cradle her and tell her that I’ll apologise to her. All control over the situation is taken from me by my mum, who is incredibly domineering (and, incidentally, also used to being appeased and getting her own way). Not only this, but the child’s behaviour has grown beyond spoilt to like...arbitrarily mean? I don’t know how else to describe it. Even when she has everything she wants she’s now downright nasty, hitting people and screaming demands at people as a first impulse, telling people they aren’t allowed to speak, to sit next to her, scribbling out drawings they do next to her or destroying things they build for no reason, telling people she hates them, doesn’t care about them...
I remember around three years old when I was primarily in charge of her daily at the time, if she did something bad I could sit her down, explain what had upset me and could SEE she was processing why I was upset and was genuinely sorry. Now there doesn’t seem to be any empathic processing going on at all and I’m basically in a constant state of internal panic that the early separations from her primary caregivers has done some damage to her emotional development combined with the fact that I have absolutely no control over the situation because of my mum, who’s toxic behaviour is impossible to stop. I’ve even asked my brother to stop bringing her round but he doesn’t want to acknowledge the situation because then he’d be down a babysitter. My mum will continue to spoil her to disgusting levels, will gaslight me if I try to have an adult conversation with her about it and even if I could stop that I have no idea what to do about her seeming lack of empathic development. All sweetness is gone from her, I don’t even see momentary glimpses of it. I’m lying here at 2:30am unable to sleep after taking THREE pregabalin. Is ANY of this normal? Will she be ok?