Pregnancy
Do Parents "Owe" Children a Grandparent, Even a Toxic One?
"She told my girls that they'd have to take sides."
Posted December 13, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Many adults have difficulty maintaining ties to their families of origin, and having a child or children complicates the problem.
- Many adults struggle with guilt about denying their children contact with their grandparents, even when they recognize abusive behaviors.
- There's little or no cultural support for cutting a grandparent out of a child's life, even though there may be ample reason.
- Each situation is different, and parents should make decisions that are best for their emotional health and that of their children.
This is a question I get asked often, most usually when unloved daughters are pregnant with their first child but often during the holiday season when we’re all bombarded with positive images of extended families. Even when a daughter has set real boundaries with her mother or perhaps both parents, there’s often hopefulness that, somehow, they will be able to succeed as grandparents, despite their obvious failures with her. For those of you shaking your heads and thinking about the tiger not changing its stripes, it’s not as crazy as it sounds because the roles are so different. Grandparents can control how often and for how long they see their grandchildren, and, for some, that’s a game-changer. That was Patrice’s experience with her mother and father:
“Both of my parents are control freaks, and both my brother and I had trouble with them growing up and even as young adults. No disagreement was brooked, and we were effectively put down if we didn’t toe the line. They are both very self-involved, too. My mother needs everything in her life to look perfect so, frankly, kids added in a messiness factor she didn’t like. My father really just wanted to be left at peace and so having to play the disciplinarian when Mom freaked out irked him. But the grandkids are another story. Mom visits them at my house or my brother’s so her place stays pristine. Dad drops in and plays ball or something with them and then toddles off. I can’t say they are fabulous grandparents, but they are good enough.”
But while some unloved adult children are able to figure out how to keep their families of origin involved in their own kids’ lives—most usually when there is the geographical distance between the two households—I am sorry to say that horror stories abound.
How the kid question evolves when you've gone no-contact
Studies show the adult child-parent estrangement is often not a one-and-done step; adult children often cycle in and out of estrangement, especially when they have their first child. Some of this has to do with a hopefulness that the rift can be repaired, especially with a shift in roles, but it may also be a function of feeling guilty of depriving one’s child of an extended family. Never mind that this often requires some serious forgetfulness about past behavior and even makes the adult daughter newly vulnerable to her mother or father’s manipulations. The following story about Darcy is one that I told in my book Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life:
“My husband is an only child with only one surviving parent whom he adores, and he really doesn’t understand the conflict in my family. There are four children in my family of origin, three sons, whom my mother treats well, and me, the scapegoat and disappointment. To make a long story short, I gave in and and allowed my children to see their grandmother, and she filled them with poison about me. But the breaking point came when my husband realized she was scapegoating my kids in front of my brothers’ children. He talked to my mother who called my kids liars and denied it all. My husband’s eyes were finally open.”
They cut all ties with her mother and father.
Weighing the importance of family ties, your emotional health, and that of your children
Sometimes, geographical distance and limiting visits to a few times a year can make it unnecessary to take a stand, but, sometimes, old patterns emerge, and action is necessary. That was the case for Alicia, who lived 400 miles away from her parents and only visited two or three times a year with her boys.
“My mother had always set my brother and me against each other, playing favorites, lavishing praise on one of us, and castigating the other, and our relationship remains uneasy to this day. When my two boys were little, she was fine with them but, when they got older, she started doing the same thing with them and their cousins, my brother’s boys. The kids came home from these visits squabbling like they never did before, and I tried talking to my mother about it. Of course, she said it was all in my head and refused to discuss it. When my oldest boy was 10 or so, he balked at going for a summer visit because he said, ‘Grandma makes us fight, and I don’t like it,’ so he went to a friend’s house, and I brought it up with my mother who told me I was coddling a weakling. My younger boy was picked on by my mother non-stop during this visit, while my brother’s boys were praised to the heavens. Once again, I tried talking to her about it, and she basically gaslighted me. Fast-forward to the next Christmas when my brother’s kids got expensive dirt bikes and jackets, and my kids got tee shirts. She made a point of saying this was what happened to children who disrespect their elders. My boys were crushed and angry and, for me, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It wasn’t good for my kids or me.”
Another daughter I interviewed for my book lived near to her mother, who had always been highly critical of her and how she ran her house and life and raised her children, but Anna was able to partly control her negativity when her two daughters were small, and she was always within earshot. That changed as the girls got older and often visited their grandparents by themselves.
“She’d rattle on and on about what a bad person I was and then started telling them that they’d ‘have to take sides’ because she was telling the truth. I confronted her immediately, and she blew me off. It didn’t take long before the girls wanted to stop going entirely, and when I talked to my mother about it, she said they were exaggerating and that I couldn’t take criticism and never could. She mocked me, too, saying everyone knew I was a slob and the kids were growing up without manners. I set new boundaries which my mother disputed and, ultimately, the girls decided they didn’t want to go over alone anymore. Needless to say, with me present, the visits were tense and dwindled until we simply stopped either being invited or initiating contact. There was no big scene because she wouldn’t listen to a word I said. She choose ‘being right’ over knowing her grandkids, which I think is her problem, not mine. I don’t have either 'peacekeeper' or 'doormat' tattooed on my forehead.”
It’s your decision to make
There’s a great deal of cultural pressure to keep appearances up, even when the happy extended family is no more than a myth, so it’s understandable that many unloved daughters struggle with the decision. Some do get lucky and discover that their mothers make good-enough Grandmas and Nanas, while others have harder choices to make. It’s worth saying that I am not a disinterested observer; I finally cut my mother out of my life after close to 20 years of internal debate (and a cycle of estranging and reconciling, which I alone initiated) when I found out I was having a girl. There was no way she’d have the opportunity to hurt my daughter the way I’d been hurt. For me, having wrestled with the choice for two decades, it was crystal clear.
This post is adapted from my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life, and incorporates details and conclusions drawn from research done over the years.
Copyright © 2021 Peg Streep
Facebook image: fizkes/Shutterstock
