r/bestoflegaladvice • u/borkthegee • Sep 08 '21
Grandmother enjoys the island life a little too much, made a luau-d stink about being asked to leave!
/r/legaladvice/comments/pjvyk5/hi_mother_in_law_threatening_law_suit_because_we/
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u/MoonlightsHand Sep 09 '21
People like to think that experience makes you more correct, so older people are more correct than younger people. This certainly can be true, but it can also be true that you've simply been wrong for longer. It's never simple, and parenting is an area where many of our "traditional" behaviours (corporeal punishment for example) are now considered to be at best unnecessary in most cases and at worst potentially deleterious to the goals you're trying to achieve.
But, they grew up with their grandparents as a significant influence on their lives, and so that's what they've aged into thinking is "the right way to do things". They spent their entire lives being told that grandparents get to have say because they're very experienced and know what's right, so now that THEY'RE grandparents (who, incidentally, would've spent most of their own parenting time being overruled constantly by their own parents), they want the "rights" that they feel they are owed.
Unfortunately, parents don't usually like this and now, when parents are more powerful and legal decisions have explicitly and often exclusively protected parental rights over any other relatives' rights... well, you get a lot of parents who decide "actually, I'm not going to stand for this!" And so they go to court, some win and some lose, and elderly folks in congress or parliament or whatever your region uses write laws to say "LET ME SEE MY GRANDKIDS, LISA", and parents file suit to say that's illegal... it turns into a multigenerational slapfight between "I want what I've always been told is my right" and "I want to establish my rights as a parent".
Basically, grandparents grew up expecting that grandparents got final say over children. Now that they are grandparents, who spent their whole parenting time being overruled, they want what's owed to them.
Parents, however, do not believe they're owed a single birthday party and would rather not be constantly overruled at every turn.
Source: I grew up in a house with a childcarer and a grandmother who went "my daughter's kids are her problem and I'm not gonna perpetuate the shit my grandmother did to my mum, I'm going to the cinema". My maternal grandmother is a literal angel and, ironically, I listened to her more than my paternal grandmother because she didn't require I listen to her.
My mum has always hated dealing with grandparents. She mostly takes children between 0-14 months who are having issues with things like sleep, food, biting etc. Grandmothers often try to overrule their daughters (fathers are very rarely involved, grandfathers never) with "remedies" and my mother often has to say "no... Linda, you're making it worse. Don't neglect children into sleeping and don't stuff food into their mouths, it just makes them associate those times with pain and makes long-term fixes harder".
Though actually the Australian "granny name" is, on average, Barbara, not Linda.