The grandchild from hell!

[mtlouie]

Let me tell you....

Old people ...geesh.

My mom recently moved in with me and my 2 kids. All she ever does is nag the shit out of them for stupid ass crapola.

No no don't stand there, don't sit there, don't eat like that, don't wipe your ass like that ......I know how about you fuck off and stop naggin the poor things?! WTF ..ever heard of pick your battles?

I asked her ..exactly how they were supposed to DO, in her book, any of the above and that shut her trap right quick.

Nothing better in your life than to boss 4 year olds around?   

When Galt (my daughter who occasionally posts on the forum) was almost three, the aunt who raised me ( a mean old bitch if ever there was one) came to visit and I was almost insane by the time she left.  I was pregnant and there wasn't ONE thing Galt could do to please her.  Or me either, for that matter.

To finally top it off, Galt got into her brother-to-be's bedroom, got the baby powder down and went wild.  When I walked in she had it everywhere, including all over herself.  It was hilarious.  I laughed my butt off, but my aunt went wild.  "SHE NEEDS TO HAVE HER ASS BEAT!!"

Of course, she trained me not to touch those ugly-assed doilies that people used to have on their coffee/end tables by putting straight pins in them so I would stick myself.  Nice, eh?

Again, there is a reason 60 year-olds don't have kids.  Or shouldn't. 

Of course, there should be a reason 20 year-olds don't either, but sadly, that isn't the case.

[Chickengirl]

ReddDogg, that was an awesome post..

...except for the part where you said the parenting of the 3yr old in question was poor 


try and remember, everyone, that the only info we were given about the parenting of the 3 yr old was given by a very cranky MIL, who clearly thought her DIL was doing a very bad job 

and remember too - especially those of us who have been DILs -  exactly how THRILLED we were/are when our MILs inform us how to parent "properly", and how we are obviously making huge mistakes and ruining our children, and "I don't know, things were never like this when I was raising *fill in partners name*" 

To me it just sounds like the 3yr old was having a bad time. Perhaps he wasn't thrilled with going to his grandparents (didn't sound real thrilling to me  ), perhaps he was nervous about going away from mum and dad for so long, perhaps he just had a crappy day - like the rest of the population has at times.

But refusing to feed a kid because they didn't do what you thought they should? telling them how horrible they were, and that you didn't want them to come back? That is not going to do much to encourage different behaviour, is it 

There are ways and ways, yanno?

If a three year old (and this works on just about anyone, no matter their age  ) is doing something you really don't want them to do, why not try distracting them with something else? "Hey, let's not kick the door, but I DO have a ball over here..lets kick that!" or "we don't push people in our house, why don't we read a story instead?"

Kids are easily distracted. You can use it to your advantage in situations like that.

Expecting a 3 year old to know what is acceptable and what is not is expecting WAY too much. Most adults are incapable of knowing that, so why would a child? And I agree with the idea that if you expect a certain level of behaviour in your home, then you need to model it - kids are smart, and pick up fast on the "how come THEY aren't doing what they say is right?". Monkey see, monkey do is much more effective than "Do as I say, not as I do".

Perhaps I'm just a liberally minded softie raising future delinquents  but I firmly believe in treating children like they are people too, and that they deserve our care AND our respect - we chose to have them, after all. This doesn't mean no rules or discipline. But if I wouldn't do it to an adult (hitting, swearing, namecalling, yelling etc), then I shouldn't be doing it to a child either.

Does it work? I'll let you know when my kids are grown  but so far we are having good results. And no, I don't get it right every time, but both DP and I work on it every day. Our kids deserve parents who treat them like they matter, and try to show them how to be the best people they can be.

[HungryRaven]

Seriously...... again i ask did you take ANY delight in this child at all for the whole weekend? was there not any saving moment?

Bless your heart!  You are determined to find a silver lining somewhere.  Well, the pajamas I bought him (4T) fit good.

Occasionally Grandmas buy things like this for my kids.  I always appreciate it.  Just so you know your DIL is probably appreciative.  Meanwhile if the 3 year old boy is like most boys the receipt of clothes was interesting as an momentary activity instead of getting smacked around but was as desired and appreciated as much as a lump of mud.  Actually less because 3 year olds like lumps of mud.   My son seriously would have been equally happy with a burlap bag for clothes.   As presents there was never a look of joy over receipt of clothes.  Oftentimes just a look of letdown if the givers said there is a gift and the kid got their hopes up for a surprise.   Iff trying to make your grandson happy clothes make the mother happy not the child.  Unless it is something like a batman cape.   

[FilterFeeder]

"You are a mean little boy and I will be glad when you go home"

I swatted at him, but missed (regretfully).

I refused to give him anything to eat until lunch time.

I refused to go

his grandfaher gave him a couple of swats on the butt


You degraded him verbally, your husband hit him, you tried to hit him but missed and you let him go hungry.

Do him a favour and keep away from him. He doesn't need that sort of treatment. He's only 3 years old for Christ's sake. A baby.

No wonder this country doesn't stand a chance.

And then they posted their fucked up parenting skills on an internationally popular interweb site in the hope that other fucktards might agree with them and dispel that lingering feeling that they had really gone wrong somewhere along the line

[honeydee]

ReddDogg, your post absolutely rocked. 

[olympia]

Ah, kids.  Such infuriating little bastards. 

I'm not a parent, although I've done my share of time taking care of other people's kids, and more significantly, took care of a lot of old people in my tour as a nurse's aide.  Kids, I've come to realize, are pretty much small demented old people.  I believe they need to be handled in much the same way.  You keep yourself as calm as possible no matter what shit is going down, you maintain a sense of humor (ESSENTIAL!), and you make concessions for your own sanity's sake when necessary.  My mother recently told my sister she wished she'd let us watch more TV.  This strikes me as sound advice in retrospect.  Yeah, if everything else were equal, more TV wouldn't have been good for us.  Being that our well-being was undeniably tied to the well-being of our parents, though, it would have quite good for us to have parents who perhaps weren't quite so frazzled because we were spending some time killing brain cells in front of the screen.

[Grower]

I'm sorry we ran Observer off. I commiserate with her completely. I wouldn't be in the same house as a child like that either. Because as a grandparent, there is precious little you can do without support from the parents.

In my house, the only thing my then-three-year-old needed to "understand" is that I am the boss and she was not. I am the arbiter of good behavior and bad. And there are swift and consistent consequences. When I say stop, I mean stop NOW. When I called her, I expected her to appear before me immediately. If she wanted to rant, she could do it in her room (to an extent), but if she gave me one foul look, she was in for it. I simply will not tolerate rudeness or disrespect in a child. She got a few swats (esp. when she did something she deliberately knew she shouldn't do and was testing us), and she got time outs, loss of privileges, and lectures. Not all that often, because by the time she WAS three years old, she pretty well knew the ground rules.

She's 23 now and finishing a master's degree researching biofuels with about $15,000 in the bank, rather than in debt. She's getting serious with a nice, hard-working boy. Most of it she did on her own, but I like to think she got a little good DNA and quite a bit of parental consistency at an early age. She also got tons and tons and tons and tons of love, too. If I sound a little draconian here, please realize that the larger context was one of unending love and care.

Folks, I think you were a little harsh on Observer, practically calling her a child abuser. If you have strong feelings about child-rearing, that's fine. I have them, too. But there is a lot of room for different approaches, without one approach being the "right" one and others being criminal.

Observer, if you are monitoring this thread, please consider joining us again.

[Chickengirl]

What is wrong with respecting the way the parents choose to parent though? Or if you are concerned they may be having trouble, offering to support them, rather than simply telling them they are doing a shitty job, and walking away?

It is something I battle with every day, I have to admit, because I have had lots of comments on my parenting skills over the years by well meaning relatives, especially when I was single.

They  mostly agree now though that the way I have chosen to parent my DD and now my DS as well seems to be quite effective.

I have similar expectations to you, Grower - I expect my DD to turn up pretty smartly when I call her, and generally she does.

I'll put up with a certain level of "discussion" about something, but being obnoxious and abusive is not what we do in our family.

There have been smacks in the past - I find them very ineffective with DD, she has always responded much more positively to talking with her. But I have smacked her before. We don't do it anymore, simply because we as parents wouldn't smack each other, so smacking a child would be hypocritical.

But the most effective tool in my parenting bag is simply treating my child with respect - we are making a really conscious effort atm, after a few comments DD has made to change the way we have been speaking to her. After listening for about a week to how DP and I have been interacting with her, I had to agree that we weren't being very pleasant - we were cranky, tired, snappy, yelling  and she was cranky, upset and yelling right back 

after a few days of making a real effort to speak more pleasantly to her, there has been a huge difference. She gets her chores done in the morning. When we ask her something, she happily wanders off to do it, and we don't have to ask over and over and over again... and if she is up early enough, and gets her jobs done, she can watch a dvd or something till it is time to catch the bus. Usually she ends up outside  And she doesn't feel like all we do is yell and nag.

I like not having to yell and nag so does DP. And it is such a small thing, but such an important thing too.

(and yes, we do listen to and accept what DD has to say about our parenting - we don't alway agree with her and she knows that, but she knows that we will listen, and not just brush her off)


Some of my rels still think we are crazy for parenting the way we do - we dont do it the way THEY think we should.

But they are OUR children. We know them better than they do, we know how they react, the ins and outs of their personalities, what fits with our beliefs, and what works for our family. And we also are happy to allow for having a bad day - parent or child 

I would be devastated if one of the grandparents said those things to one of my kids. It would indicate to me that perhaps they were not really prepared for looking after a small child, or not prepared to respect how we are raising our children.

And I stand by what I said before - it is pretty common for MILs to have problems with how their DILs parent. But if *their* MIL had said terrible things about they way they parented, they would be really offended and hurt.

[ReddDogg]

Chickengirl,

The reason I say the parents are not doing their job isn't the description of the child's behavior nearly as much as trusting the few observations Observer gives of the parenting her son and daughter in law provide.  Key is:

No, I don't agree with his parent's parenting style.  They let him do whatever he wants.  I was at a family dinner a month ago at a restaurant.  He continually waved his fork around and almost poked his cousin's eye out.  His father spoke to him nine times about it before he finally took the fork away.

One of the mistakes parents make is to say one thing, and have their actions say another.  Kids often hear the English words, but they don't know the meaning behind those words until you show them, repetitively.  When my child does something wrong, I ask them to stop.  When they continue, I count to 3, and if they still don't' stop, I stop them.  Sometimes that means timeout.  Sometimes it means taking away what they are playing with.  Sometimes it means taking them outside or away from the situation.

This one example given, combined with the child's behavior and unwillingness to listen suggests strongly that the parents do not follow through when they say stop, or don't do this or that.  Unless this child has a true behavior problem caused by genetics (which most kids don't, despite the masses of them taking drugs as if they do), then it is caused by poor parenting.  I might be wrong, but I am not just blindly assuming, because Observer did give us this bit of data.  I am trying to see things from her point of view.

[Dot]

Chickengirl,

The reason I say the parents are not doing their job isn't the description of the child's behavior nearly as much as trusting the few observations Observer gives of the parenting her son and daughter in law provide.  Key is:

No, I don't agree with his parent's parenting style.  They let him do whatever he wants.  I was at a family dinner a month ago at a restaurant.  He continually waved his fork around and almost poked his cousin's eye out.  His father spoke to him nine times about it before he finally took the fork away.

One of the mistakes parents make is to say one thing, and have their actions say another.  Kids often hear the English words, but they don't know the meaning behind those words until you show them, repetitively.  When my child does something wrong, I ask them to stop.  When they continue, I count to 3, and if they still don't' stop, I stop them.  Sometimes that means timeout.  Sometimes it means taking away what they are playing with.  Sometimes it means taking them outside or away from the situation.

This one example given, combined with the child's behavior and unwillingness to listen suggests strongly that the parents do not follow through when they say stop, or don't do this or that.  Unless this child has a true behavior problem caused by genetics (which most kids don't, despite the masses of them taking drugs as if they do), then it is caused by poor parenting.  I might be wrong, but I am not just blindly assuming, because Observer did give us this bit of data.  I am trying to see things from her point of view.

You bring up some fair points, however ..if your sat in a restraunt with the Mother In Law from hell who is so critical of everything as to actually COUNT how many times you ask your child to stop your really NOT going to do anything RIGHT at all in that situation are you??
If you take it away and the kid cries ..well then aren't you the shit mother for disturbing all us decent folks who are trying to eat in peace? next it will be ..'Can't you shut your kid up?'
Oh I know, let's just follow Grandma's and Grandad's lead and smack the kid in the restraunt, see how far that gets you eh? Oh but then when child services are called in and you get to say a big fat 'I TOLD YOU SO' to the nitpicky granny well ..no one really wins do they?

Where was all grannys 'concern' sat in the restraunt counting? Did she try to distract the kid? Race him in a coloring contest? Teach him a story or song while everyone waited?

[Aussie]

I'm sorry we ran Observer off. I commiserate with her completely. I wouldn't be in the same house as a child like that either. Because as a grandparent, there is precious little you can do without support from the parents.

I'm sorry. but I just can't agree with you on this. It's not a matter of having strong views as a grandparent, but a matter of trust. The parents of a little 3 yo trusted the grandparents to take the 3yo for a weekend. I'm fairly sure the parents expected that the vist to grandparents was to be a positive experience. The grandparents obviously didn't make it a positive experience for either themselves or the child and (by Observer's own admission) smacked and verbally abused the child. It didn't sound to me like this was done in a loving way, it sounded like Observer was angry and even hateful of the little 3yo. Observer may choose whether or not she is in the same house as this child, but I don't believe she has the right to inflict her own brand of discipline in such a way at obvious odds to the way the parents are bringing up their child. It's simply a breach of trust.

Observer chose to place this post in the public domain, probably expecting that she would get support for her treatment of this child. Unfortunately some people disapproved of the way she handled the situation - and so she got all offended. Well so be it. If she chooses to flounch off all offended, well, that's her choice, and if she chooses to come back, well, that's her choice too.

I am a grandmother now, and I would never dream of overruling my daughter in the way she chooses to discipline her child. I certainly would not breach the trust of my daughter and the child by taking the child for a weekend and then treating him in a way that the parents would disapprove of.

[Chickengirl]

You bring up some fair points, however ..if your sat in a restraunt with the Mother In Law from hell who is so critical of everything as to actually COUNT how many times you ask your child to stop your really NOT going to do anything RIGHT at all in that situation are you??

I'm going to agree with this, ReddDog, and also ask - what is the chance that Observer, who has stated that she doesn't agree with how her grandchild is raised, was exaggerating to make a point (we all do it - "I had to tell him a thousand times to stop hitting the floor with the cup"  ) ? there is a pretty fair chance here that the child was asked only a couple of times before the fork was removed.

We were given a few examples by someone who is admittedly biased - how do you trust those examples to be a fair representation of how the child is parented?

Who has had a child who was perfectly behaved in every situation? We were given two examples - a dinner out, and a weekend, where the child didn't behave any worse than many adults I've seen. That hardly constitutes evidenced of crappy parenting - dealing with a normal  3 yr old at the dinner, and perhaps less than prepared or tolerant caregiving over the weekend, again with a normal 3 yr old.

the rest, like the "they let him do whatever he wants" isn't evidence of crappy parenting either - but it is evidence of a difference in opinion. And obviously he ISN"T allowed to do whatever he wants, because his parents HAVE stopped him from doing things. Maybe not how the grandma thinks it should be done, but then he isn't her child, is he?

And that brings up one last thing. Would you accept someone else disciplining a child in a way you have consciously chosen not too? Would it be ok for someone else, say, a stranger, to hit your child, not once, but a couple of times, refuse to give them food, and tell them not only how awful they were but how they couldn't wait for your child to be gone?

What difference is it if it is a stranger, or a grandparent who does it? How a child is raised, fed, disciplined, schooled, clothed etc is up to the parents (usuall disclaimer about saftery and/or abuse). If a grandparent has a concern, bringing it up with the parent is how it should be handled. And understanding that the parent may not agree should also be part of that.

We generally parent in a way that reflects how we were parented ourselves (or in direct contrast, in my case  ) - very rarely do we fall far from the tree in this aspect of our lives  something else to consider?

[wiccawench]

.......and the thing that i noticed the most was the obvious lack of affection and love.

I didn't hear one thing the child did right or a single HINT of cuteness or anything..... it bothered me... more the what was NOT said part of it.

 

[pamela]

you know, it has got to get to where it's ok in our society for people to just say they don't like kids.
some people don't like little kids and if they could say that without feeling like they were a pariah, maybe less kids would be put into places where they could get into trouble.
there is nothing wrong with not wanting to spend a lot of time with a little kid.
I like kids myself, but, my husband is not a kid person. And that's ok.
I respect that.
so, if a person doesn't feel like they are up to the stress of being around children, they should be able to say so without others believing that they are monsters or something.

[Grower]

I used to be, but I am less and less a kid person. When parents let them run wild, I simply don't understand it. Maybe I'm not a parent person.