How often do your DCs see their grandparents ??

[mumtosp]

Hi,

DH and I have been living in the UK for almost 10 years now.... We have a 2.5 yo DS. My parents live in India and are currently here to spend some time with DS.... The last time they saw DS he was barely a year old and one of the reasons I wanted them to spend some time here was because I wanted them to bond with DS....

I love how close they have become in the past few weeks... And it makes me very sad to think that they will be gone soon and may not get to see DS for another year. I try and go to India every year, but that is just a short holiday and my parents will not get to spend a lot of time with DS when I'm in India....
So lately it's got me thinking if I should move back... Because it is important for DS to have that bond.... But both my parents and DH don't think it's practical to move countries just because I'm being emotional..... And frankly if you asked me, I am happy here.... My parents are the only reason I would ever consider going back.... I am very close to them...

When I see other kids around here spending weekends with GPs, I do get envious....

I am not even sure what I'm expecting as an answer to this post.... I guess I just wanted to share this and get an independent view.....

Sorry about the long post....

TIA :)

It was good to read about all the various arrangements everyone has with the GPs.... as you all have said, it does come down to how much effort everyone wants to put in and then the distance shouldn't matter....

I must try and Skype more often...

I am feeling better about the situation after reading through all your posts... of course I know I'll be feeling low again when it's time for them to go ... in less than 2 weeks !!

In laws live in England/Spain so a couple of times a year. My parents are divorced and each lives about half an hour away. My mum sees my son (8 mths) every couple of weeks and my dad has seen him twice since he was born and not since Xmas - he's never really shown an interest.

We're in the process of applying for an Australian visa so once we're out there, obviously all GPs will barely see him. It's sad, especially for my mum who does make an effort, but she's also the only one who will visit every year for a few months potentially.

I have friends whose children seem to spend a lot more time with their GPs than mine does but my parents weren't very maternal/paternal with me so I don't expect they'll be the same with my son. Every family is different.

I am British and we live 2+ hours away from my family. Our two DSs see my parents about once every 2-3 months. We go up there for a couple of days during(which is mine and my DM's saturation point with each other!) during the school holidays and there are ad hoc visits in between for birthdays, etc. The relationship between DC and GPs is warm and reasonably close, but we saw more of my family and had a closer relationship when we lived overseas, owing to the longer visits 3-4 times per year.

My ILs are American and they come here VERY infrequently - they've visited us twice in five-and-a-half years. I would be prepared to visit the US once a year if DH was up for it, but he goes for business regularly and sees his family then and has so far not been prepared to take two DC across the Atlantic (we'll do it for the first time in Oct). DH Skypes with his family once or twice a week, so the DC think of them as faces on a computer screen. The relationship is vague and not close at all. This describes MIL perfectly: ... is one of those grannies that talks big to her friends about visiting her lovely DG, but pays no attention to them once she's here.

When I was a kid, I lived in a different country to both sets of grandparents. We actually knew them better than my cousins, because we saw them for longer periods of time. With us, they would come out for 2-3 weeks every year or two, and we would also see them for shorter trips sometimes (like a day or two if we were in Home Country for the holidays). My cousins (who lived 30m-3h away) only got the short trips - holiday weekends, family lunches, help with a new baby - so saw them less even though they saw them more often, iyswim.

I expect it will be the same for us - my mum will come from abroad for 1-3 weeks once or twice a year, while DP's parents may come down for lunch once every month or two or we would go up for a weekend.

My daughter sees my parents every couple of weeks or so because they live nearby. We see my in laws about 4/5 times a year but she goes and stays with them during the summer for a week on her own.

Of my own grandparents, 3 were dead either before I was born or just afterwards. My remaining grandmother was out and about visiting family and friends a lot of the time so we didn't see her that often, a few times a year. But you don't really think about these things when you're a child - your family is what it is. And it wasn't unusual to not have surviving grandparents then.

It's only now that I have my own daughter that I realise that she is having a much closer relationship with all her grandparents than I did simply because they are still alive.