Dropping hints / emotional blackmail - your coping strategies?

[barnefri]

I'm wondering how others have coped with their parents / ILs dropping hints or using emotional blackmail or trying to be coercive in their desire for grandchildren.

I can't claim to have had a great strategy... mostly I just shrugged and said "oh well then". I never really nipped it in the bud though; I just eventually aged out (I'm mid-forties!) and they came to accept there was no more point making comments.

That said, I'm comfortably childfree, so the hints didn't hurt me, they just caused an inward eyeroll. If I had been experiencing fertility isdues, perhaps I'd have needed to tackle it head on.

Have others coped with the hint-dropping in a more assertive / proactive / practical way?

My mother has spent large amounts of time avoiding my siblings' children, so was not at all bothered about me not having any. She is not a children person - she said she only had us as it was what you did back then!! She's a card...

My partner's mother made some mutterings about grandkids when we first got married, but I just told him that if he didn't tell her to put a sock in it I would tell her he was shooting blanks. Amazingly she has never mentioned it again and I'm now in my 50s and happily minus sprogs!

My mother has spent large amounts of time avoiding my siblings' children, so was not at all bothered about me not having any. She is not a children person - she said she only had us as it was what you did back then!! She's a card...

When my mother (born in 1931) went into palliative care in Oz she was interviewed by the staff (they did that because they were discovering all sorts of interesting things about the patients that only came out in funeral eulogies, and also it helped with treatment - a lot of their patients had fought in the war and were still traumatised by it). I was visiting at the time and sat in - DM was talking to a woman in a clown suit (patient entertainment of some sort). All the usual stuff - how she and DF met, being in the army after the war, being a naval wife, having kids, did she enjoy being a mother?

There was a sort of silence - DM looked at me, covered her mouth and muttered 'not always.' The woman looked at me, I looked at DM and said 'It's OK, we know.' Nothing more was said. Like your mother, I think she only really had children because that was what you did.

In retrospect, I wonder why they asked. It strikes me as an odd question to ask when one of her children is sitting there listening 😃