All children need their grandparents, right? You can’t deprive your children from seeing them. Our culture tells us this long and loud, and of course we believe it.
And so we can find ourselves in the trap that even if our parents are toxic or abusive to us, we feel obliged to let them have access to our children.
The problem is that our toxic parents are just as dangerous to our children as they are, or were, to us. This applies no matter the toxicity – my own area of interest is in narcissistic parents/grandparents, but it applies to abusers of all sorts. My motto is: Too toxic for us, too toxic for our children.
I know that you can feel guilty when you think of depriving your children of their grandparents. But the correct word isn’t ‘deprive’, it’s ‘protect’.
We not only have the right to protect our children from any toxic and abusive people, no matter how closely related they are, but as a parent we have the responsibility to do so too.
The grandparents we’re ‘depriving’ them of are not the cuddly, apple-pie-making, smiling, rosy-cheeked grandparents of popular culture and even our own imagination. They are, in this case, toxic, manipulative abusers. Even if things look good on the surface, along with the apple-pie making or the fishing trip will be a dose of manipulation and brainwashing and digs and sly hurts. If not worse. This can leave our children very confused as they too have the cultural imagery of kindly grandparents, and the abuse can be subtle so they’re not sure what’s going on.
Toxic grandparents can often seduce our children too, not necessarily sexually unless that’s the form of the abuse, but emotionally and psychologically. Depending on the dysfunction, they might try and seduce our children away from us by being more permissive and generous than us, for example. Many parents have literally lost their children this way because as soon as the children are old enough they move in with the grandparents, either literally or metaphorically.
If you do decide to restrict your children’s access to your abusive parents or parents-in-law, be prepared for your children’s reaction. Depending on the exact circumstances, they might be relieved, but equally likely they might have been seduced enough that they want to see their grandparents and can’t understand why this isn’t possible any more.
For them it’s a real bereavement and can be hard to handle. It’s hard to see our children in pain, but like a lot of parenting decisions we are inflicting the smaller pain now to save the bigger pain later.
Try to explain in age-appropriate terms why they can’t see Grandma or Grandpa any more, and comfort them for their loss when they are upset. They might well be angry with you too, because you’re the one stopping this relationship, and that’s a price you’ll have to pay for protecting them, unfortunately.
But protecting them is ultimately our job, and so we do it.