Reply to Managing parents expectations about alone time with granddaughter

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Two 10 month old left alone with grandparents who seemed to not have had experience with babies in a generation and that the babies are not familiar with. I wouldn't be okay with that and my kids weren't the nervous kind. 
The fact that the grandparents think this is a good idea and would be likely to shame OP makes me even more not okay with this setup.[/quote]

I left my 11 mo old with my parents so my DH and I could go to a movie, and my mom took the opportunity to attempt to "fix" what she deemed to be an unacceptable cowlick in my child's hair. When we arrived home, my DD was screaming, red faced, on the floor. Her hair was wet where my mom had wet it and presumably attempted to comb down the cowlick, and there were several little bows on the ground with hunks of my DD's hair in them where she had torn them out of her head.

Listen, no one died, but I stopped leaving my baby with my mom after that. And it's stuff like this that gives new parents, and moms in particular, anxiety about leaving their kids. Even people who are technically capable of keeping a baby safe are not necessarily suitable caregivers. And grandparents can be among the worst, because as my mom showed, sometimes they are just so fixated on their own needs and expectations that they do not use basic common sense in caring for a baby. My mom was so obsessed with getting a cowlick-free photo of my DD with a bow in her hair that she could show her friends, that she just ignored the fact that the baby was screaming and miserable. Sorry, but that is not what I look for in a caregiver for my child.

Just take the baby with you, and tell the grandparents there will be lots of opportunities later in life for one on one time with their granddaughter. Grandparents get obsessed with babies but most of them figure out that they do better with, and have more fun with, slightly older kids who have a little more agency and don't need quite such intensive care and attention.[/quote]
Gurl plz, not everyone is as batsh*** crazy as your mom.[/quote]

Many, many grandparents are precisely this level of crazy -- fixating on a specific way of interacting with your kids without making room for anyone to have other preferences or for things to just happen unexpectedly (which is what happens with kids all the time). Kind of like how OP's parents are being very pushy about wanting to spend time alone with OP's DD, and are not really considering that it might not be what OP, his wife, or his DD want. Rigidity and lack of boundaries are very common issues with grandparents, as you might have gathered by reading this forum for any length of time.[/quote]

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