agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

Recently my 10-year-old daughter, “Sarah,” visited her grandparents in another state for a week. This was a big deal for both of us: for me because these are my ex’s parents and due to his addiction issues my relationship with them has been strained for several years. And for my daughter because she has never been away from home for a week or flown on her own.

I had limited contact with my daughter while she was gone as I tried to respect her time with her grandparents. Her grandma did send me pictures and texts about their activities, which was nice. One day during her trip I didn’t hear anything so decided to call that next morning to check in. Sarah answered the phone and told me something happened. She was afraid to tell me, but eventually revealed that the day before she was riding an ATV and it flipped and she hit her head. She was wearing a helmet, but after the accident she vomited twice.

I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that I was hearing about it the next day, and only because I happened to call. I got Grandma on the phone and told her she needed to take Sarah to urgent care. Grandma insisted she was fine—she thought she vomited from drinking bubbly water. She said she’d looked up all the signs of a concussion and she had none. She tried to change the subject and I cut her off, asking her to please let me know when they arrived at the doctor. She did take Sarah to the ER several hours later. She had a CT scan and was cleared by the doctor.

I understand accidents can happen. But I cannot believe I was not old immediately. My ex’s mom has a history of undermining my parental authority and ignoring my instructions. I still have yet to receive any apology or acknowledgement that not contacting me was just wrong. I am torn, as my daughter did have a wonderful trip, but how can I trust them after this?

–Angry About ATVs

Dear Angry,

I’d be upset too! Your daughter was riding a vehicle that flipped over and not only did they not tell you, they didn’t have the impulse that any caregiver should have at that moment: to take the kid to the doctor. (What does she mean, Sarah exhibited no signs of having a concussion? SHE BARFED TWICE!) Alone, each failure is troubling; together, they created a situation that endangered your daughter.

It’s great that your daughter had a good time with her grandparents. But they showed an appalling lack of judgment, one that would stop almost any parent I know from allowing a repeat visit.

So what can you do about it? You can just resign yourself to the idea that any future visits with these folks will be chaperoned. That would be a totally fine solution. But you can also—I would say should also—talk to them about what happened, and make clear why you were so upset.

In a few weeks, give Grandma a call and tell her that while Sarah had a wonderful time, you can’t allow her to visit again unless Grandma understands a basic ground rule. Grandparents should follow the elementary school model of parental over-communication in case of any illness or physical mishap. Would a nervous school nurse call about this injury? If so, then so should Grandma. And if they can’t get hold of you after something major happens—or, rather, something that you would think was major—they should err on the side of overcaution.

Now, one could argue that even a grandparent who had never had these rules spelled out to her should still have known to take a child who just flipped over on an ATV and is vomiting to the doctor. So it’s difficult to say that agreeing to these rules will ensure your kid’s safety on any future visits, so you’ll have to trust your gut once this phone call is over.

One other rule you should institute, by the way: Tell her that ATVs are no longer an authorized activity, given the extremely clear headline on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ ATV info page: “ATVs Aren’t Safe For Kids.”

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The advice is fine, letter is fine, I really only posted this as an excuse to share this anecdote from when the kids, my niblings, were a baby and a preschooler:

We'd gone to the Brooklyn Children's museum one cold day, snow on the ground. The baby was still a baby, and I guess the older one was not yet three years old.

It was time to leave, so I sat on the bench outside the bathrooms and carefully bundled up the baby. I put on her hat, I put on her hoodie and pulled the hood up, I put on her snowsuit and pulled the hood up on that, at this point I'm starting to worry about heatstroke, and when she's all bundled up I put my hand firmly on the baby so she couldn't fall off the bench and turned around to the older sibling so I could zip their jacket - and the baby fell off the bench! And landed right on her head!

I have no idea how that happened, but she seemed all right, so I picked her up, calmed her, and called her mother, my sister. And my sister was panicking saying "Don't let her go to sleep" to which I say "It's nap time" and my sister hung up to do some frantic googling. Then I called my mother, and do you know what my mother said?

"The baby will be fine, but why did you tell your sister? You shouldn't have done that, you'll only worry her."

I'm laughing now, because on the one hand she was very right, I did just worry my sister - but on the other, wtf Mommy? Of course I'm telling my sister her baby fell on her head! That is the most messed-up advice ever.

(The baby was fine, and if anybody is interested the advice for the past 20+ years is that if concussion is a possibility you do let them sleep because sleep is healing, you just wake them up periodically to make sure they wake up.)

ATVs are very dangerous---kids have died or been gravely injured in rollovers frequently! Ten is too young for an inexperienced ATV driver to be doing it on her own.

Grandma will say whatever she thinks will get them more unsupervised visits with Sarah, and she will work on Sarah to deceive the LW. So I'd say, no more solo visits, and no whining about that during the visits they do have. Much simpler than figuring out what loopholes Grandma is going to find ("You didn't say she couldn't weld by herself!").

Sarah answered the phone and told me something happened. She was afraid to tell me, but eventually revealed that the day before she was riding an ATV and it flipped and she hit her head.

A child should never be afraid of telling their parents they got hurt. This right here is good reason for LW not allowing future solo visits with the ex's parents.

My ex’s mom has a history of undermining my parental authority and ignoring my instructions.

And, I suspect may have instructed Sarah not to say anything to LW about the accident.

> A child should never be afraid of telling their parents they got hurt. This right here is good reason for LW not allowing future solo visits with the ex's parents.

Sometimes kids can be reticent about saying things to make their adults worry. About a decade ago the kids went to the park and one of them fell and hit their head pretty badly on a stone step, and they went through amazing contortions to hide this fact until the next day.

I was pretty pissed when I found out, actually, because I absolutely would've taken the kid to the ER right then if I'd known they hit their head and blacked out for a minute, but that's apparently why they didn't tell me, they didn't want to go to the ER and also they didn't want to stress me out while my mother had cancer.

Sometimes kids can be reticent about saying things to make their adults worry.

True, but younger kids usually also don't have enough experience or judgement to know what's "okay" vs what's "worrisome but can wait", vs "you need checked out now." Kids are usually resilient, but if they go down, they go down fast.

I was pretty pissed when I found out, actually, because I absolutely would've taken the kid to the ER right then if I'd known they hit their head and blacked out for a minute, but that's apparently why they didn't tell me

Kids may mean well, but imho they also have to learn that waiting to tell their adults something serious almost always causes more stress for everyone, not less.

Yeah, I did try to calmly explain that to them at the time. They're all adults now, anyway.

>> Kids may mean well, but imho they also have to learn that waiting to tell their adults something serious almost always causes more stress for everyone, not less.

Unfortunately, from experience they only learn this if the adults find out every time. three times the grown-ups never know + one where the grownups get really stressed is still on average less worry for the grownups...

Why can't adults be grown enough to not use children as battlegrounds?! I feel bad for LW, who absolutely cannot trust her inlaws and who knows they'll make her the bad guy, and Sarah, who may feel like being forbidden future solo trips is a punishment (I would have advised LW to gently explain to Sarah that it is not.) And I'm appalled at the grandparents.

The advice is all good, but I do want to add that based on my experience visiting cousins as a kid, this is likely a culture mismatch that needs taken into consideration. ATVs *aren't* safe for kids - so anyone in a community where kids riding ATVs is common is probably also in a community where kids flipping an ATV is considered no big deal. (And in a community where, say, the mailbox may be two miles up a dirt drive, and ATVs are used as utility vehicles not recreation, the calculations involved in letting kids use ATVs are different too. And in a community where urgent care may be multiple hours of driving each way plus a long wait, especially on a working farm where six or eight hours dealing with urgent care might mean animals not being cared for, the calculations for that are different too.) If my rural cousins' parents took them to urgent care every time they did the equivalent of flipping an ATV, they would have spent their entire childhood summers driving back and forth to urgent care.

That is not to say LW is wrong! LW is absolutely right, and the best solution might be that grandparents' visits are always accompanied by parents going forward. (My parents certainly never would have considered leaving us with the cousins without them for a week!!) But if LW did want to try to approach the grandparents about this in a different way, the best way might be to come at it from the point of view of a culture clash where they really may not have understood this to be a big thing the way LW did, and the goal is to convince them that they need to abide by LW's city-person overprotectiveness, not berate them for not doing what any reasonable person would know to do.

My parents certainly never would have considered leaving us with the cousins without them for a week

My parents sent us overseas for the summers, and I know other people who made somewhat more affordable trips to stay with relatives for the summer if only because it was the cheapest form of childcare available.

I only say this because your exclamation point made it sound like you think this is a strange thing, and if that's the case I find *that* a strange thing.

I mean it more in the sense of "these were the cousins that we knew flipped ATVs and got infections from stepping barefoot on barbed wire several times a summer, they are not who my parents would have gone to first for childcare!" Frankly at that age I would have loved the chance to get tetanus, but my parents were *not* part of the culture that was willing to let us.

I do actually come from a culture/class/region where elementary-aged kids living with other people for more than a couple of days at a stretch, for anything other than sleepaway camp or custody agreements, is unusual outside of emergencies; going to relatives' without the parents for a week or more was something the kids I grew up with thought of as impossibly romantic and exciting, emphasis on "impossible", and when letter-writers treat it as a social obligation to send their kids away I always double-take. But I acknowledge that's not everyone's experience - and if we'd had non-"barbed wire tetanus" options, we might have even been able to nag our parents into it. But parents from any culture are allowed to not do this regardless of what the relatives want.

If LW really does need to send the kid to the grandparents for free childcare (or if visiting unaccompanied is really the only way the kid can ever see the grandparents, and LW thinks it's that important) than they may have to accept that the grandparents' community does have different standards than hers.

Edited 2024-08-05 19:18 (UTC)

Interesting. I was thinking this was Ex-MIL undermining LW's parenting, but presenting it as a cultural difference sheds a whole new light on it.

Speaking of cultural differences my parents sent me away to my grandparents more summers than not, admittedly because they could trust my grandparents (in fact my maternal grandmother and aunt treated me FAR better than my parents did and are my benchmark for unconditional love). One of my cousins was raised by said aunt, to whom she is not related (this aunt is my mother's sister and this cousin is my father's niece). All of this was normal (and probably helpful to more kids than just me) where I grew up.

I think it's probably some of both - the sudden lack of the usual contact after the accident implies that the mother-in-law at least suspected LW would be upset, and wanted to keep her on an information diet. But I think the fact the accident happened in the first place makes it at least reasonably likely that it's also an expectations mismatch, especially given that the grandparents have to know they were on probation already, given the backstory we have.

And yeah, kids being brought up for long(ish) periods of time by grandparents/aunts was pretty common here too - one of my mom's friends is currently primary carer for both her great-grandkids and her mom, after already raising the grandkids too. (Telling Mom I would be happy to have kids if she was willing to do that was a great way to shut up the "where are the grandkids" questions, gotta say.) But that files different for me than "going on a weeklong visit without the parents" (or grandparents in that case.)

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