Grandparenting and Gift-giving: A Holiday Dilemma

When it comes to gifts for the beloved children in our lives, how do we negotiate conflicts between our own gift-giving desires and those of their parents?

My friend Alice was complaining that her children had put a limit on the number of presents she was allowed to give her grandchildren over the holidays.

“That’s how grandparents show their love,” she said. “I don’t care what my children say. I’m going to give my grandbabies what I want to give them.”

While I empathized with her gift-giving impulse – it is so hard to walk into a children’s store and not just keep buying all the delightful gifts for the grands – I wondered what that approach would do for her relationship with her children. And I thought, how is that loving?

It reminded me of the battle I had with my mother-in-law over sweets when my son was little. She saw baking and feeding as an act of love. I wanted my son to live his first couple of years, at least, without sugar. She would say, as she slipped him a bite of her (okay, yes, delicious) coconut cake, “one little bite won’t hurt him.” And then she’d slip him another. And a spoonful of ice cream. This did not feel loving to me. It felt hostile, competitive, and disrespectful. Although I knew she was right, that one little taste wouldn’t hurt him, I couldn’t help but feel that she was doing something harmful to my son

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As a grandma myself now, I understand the impulse to step in and indulge a beloved grandchild, perhaps as our own grandparents indulged us. Shopping trips to Alexander’s Department Store with my grandmother were one of the great joys of visits to her in New York City. Alexander’s was a huge discount store in the days before big box stores and Amazon, and the trips were amazing. Grandma would talk about her time as a personal shopper for Saks Fifth Avenue as we dug through piles of sale items to find outrageous and delightful, if often useless, gifts. The “fun fur” coat Grandma bought me one year was just one example. My parents were outraged that she had wasted money on something so frivolous. Not only was the fun fur an inappropriate gift for a little girl, I was never able to wear the coat because the weather back home in North Carolina was never cold enough.

As I understand it now, the problem was complex. My parents struggled financially and must have been hurt by Grandma’s unthinking gifting of items they could not afford for their children. The gifts themselves, like the fun fur coat, were always from discount stores and the five and ten, so never expensive; but still, I imagine they had a million other things they would have liked to do with the money. They probably felt hurt and perhaps ashamed that they couldn’t afford to give us treats, and perhaps competitive with Grandma for our love. In our eyes, she was the fairy godmother who brought joy to our home and fun toys to us. She was never the disciplinarian and never, ever got angry at us. When we visited her, if we wanted bagels and cream cheese and lox for every meal, we got it.  

I think that what neither my grandmother nor my mother-in-law recognized was that by ignoring the requests of their grown children and their spouses, no matter how innocent the indulgence might seem, they were also creating a rupture in their relationship with their offspring. Doing something we have been asked not to do is disrespectful and often hurtful. It is also childlike.

As I was pondering this issue, I noticed in the November issue of Real Simple magazine a letter from a woman with two children, ages 7 and 9. The kids had been asking for a dog for ages, and the parents had made it clear that they would not be getting one. Then one day, without checking with her son or daughter-in-law, the children’s grandmother gave them a puppy. The daughter-in-law was writing with a request for advice about what to do.

I thought the advice from author Michele Buteau was excellent and to the point. After expressing her outrage at this behavior, Michele wrote, “You need to have an in-person, heart-to-heart conversation about boundaries with your mother-in-law. You and your husband should come up with a game plan so that you’re a united front.” She gave some suggestions, and then commented, “Of course, you’ll be the bad guys for a good while if you rehome the puppy. Maybe she can take it herself so the puppy can still be in the kids’ lives.” And finally, she says, “No matter what, have a sit-down with her. I hope you all can get on the same page.”

In this situation, four key issues exist. Three are important: respect, boundaries, and adult conversation. But the fourth issue is crucial: relationship. A relationship with our grandchildren is enhanced by our relationship with our children. By respecting our own children’s wishes and boundaries, by having adult conversations with them when we differ, we are also giving our grandchildren the best gift of all: that of modeling healthy, productive, and meaningful relationships between adults, even adults who don’t agree on everything. Just consider what that model could do for a teenaged grandchild and his or her parents.

We can model what we believe to be a healthy, caring, and connected relationship, or we can model a dysfunctional one. In even the healthiest of relationships, disagreements and differences will arise. This is what we can teach our grandchildren, through modeling. If we think our children are doing something bad or wrong, we can talk with them. If we just don’t agree, we can talk about it. And if it’s just that we want to do something they don’t want, we can talk about that, too.

A healthy disagreement models something that children don’t see all that much in this world. If you want some suggestions about how to have a difficult conversation with your grandchildren’s parents, take a look at the book Difficult Conversations: How to Talk About What Matters Most by Douglas Stone and his colleagues. It’s well worth the read. One day your grandchildren might thank you. And your children might as well. What a gift that would be!

Please share your own stories, thoughts, and comments in the comment section!!

And have a happy holiday season, whatever you’re celebrating!

Warmly, Diane

Photograph credit: shutterstock image #2317559951