Stop taking advantage of the grandparents

I think families can often take advantage of each other. I think that the biggest culprits are children who get married and have children of their own. They have children but seem to want to not have them around them. They don’t want to look after them and often pass them off onto aunts, nieces and their own parents.

It’s obvious that they don’t even want to pay for babysitting services. Instead they ask their parents. Yes grandparents love their children and their children’s children. But do they want to be their full-time babysitter? Probably not. So one grandmother says that she charges her two daughters for her babysitting services, because that’s what she’s doing! And I am delighted to say that she made £25K in one year providing what can only be described as a combination of day-care services when the daughters are at work and babysitting services when the daughters wanted a night out.

The infuriating thing is the gall of the daughters who accused her of being selfish! My question is, as was the grandmother’s, why on earth would she do it for free? If she wasn’t around they’d have to pay someone, right? Doing it once or twice in a blue moon is one thing and the grandparents charging for it might have been considered a bit much, but this was a regular occurrence for this grandmother. Who is actually selfish here?

The way I see it, the daughters tried to take advantage of their mother’s love for her grandchildren. They wanted something for nothing!

There is such a thing in the West called giving your children pocket money. Now pocket money comes in two guises. One is the parents giving children a weekly or monthly allowance, for practical reasons such as buying lunch, bus fare and making emergency calls and, of course, so that they can buy their magazines, personal products and anything else they need.

Then there is money that’s often given to children for doing chores around the house. Clean the garden, get paid. Mow the lawn, get paid. Take out the rubbish at night and get paid. Clean your own room, get paid.

Hang on. Clean your own room, get paid? Does that sound fair to you? But that is what parents do to encourage their children to clean up the messes they make in their own rooms. In the West, it’s often very difficult to get children to make their beds, tidy up, wipe down surfaces and vacuum their floors. Parents tell them to do it a million times but children try to get out of it so many times to the point that parents end up doing it themselves.

Now that ends up setting a bad precedence in which case, parents resort to a form of bribery. Clean your room and I’ll pay you and that does the trick. Children want to go out with friends and buy themselves stuff and the only way to do that is to get paid from somewhere, even if it means their own parents.

Why is it that children do not lend the same courtesy to their own parents? They forget that they never did their bit around the house that they lived in unless they got paid for it, even if it was to clean up their own messes.

The other elephant in the room is that notion that when children have children they automatically assume that their parents will take care of them, for free. What kind of selfish thought process is this?

The other question I have for any parent intending to ‘use’ their own parents as babysitters on a regular basis, how would they feel if their own children were to start using them in the same way? I guarantee they’d either say no or charge them for it as well. I am glad the grandmother took a stand. In fact, I am of the strong belief that parents today are more than happy to get their children out of the house for a few hours no matter how young they are! As long as the kid is out of their hair, he’s someone else’s problem.

Birjees Hussain