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[quote=Anonymous]How far do you go to make your parent appear to be a nicer grandparent than they are if your kid is young? For reference, DD is 4 and her other grandparents are basically stereotypical grandparents- energetic, warm, generous, and a safe haven from the world. My mother visits twice a year and is very hands-off. But my mother is a piece of work. She says rude things about people in front of DD, makes promises and breaks them, bails out of plans that have been made ahead of time, etc. My impulse lately is to cover for her and give DD a while longer to have her illusions. This means when my mom doesn’t want to play bc she wants to be on her phone,  I redirect DD and make a nice excuse for my mom (“grandma has been so busy and needs a break”). If my mom doesn’t want to come to the special grandparents’ event at school during her visit, I make an excuse to DD that makes my mom look good. The latest is with Christmas presents- my mom told DD that she could pick anything on a certain page of a catalogue if she chose it by a certain day. DD has been SO excited about this thing and it took a lot of little-kid effort to finally commit to her choice. She told my mom her pick and my mom immediately changed the rules and was like “you can have any of these things on these other pages and the thing can’t be more than X amount.” Basically it was an arbitrary budget that conveniently happened to rule out the one thing DD set her heart on.

DD is now writing sad little notes to Santa asking if he can add it to her list and is so disappointed. Santa will probably come through but at what point do you tell a very little kid not to trust the promises of their own grandparent?[/quote]

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