Woman stops mom-in-law from babysitting after she overstepped the boundaries, sparks debate

While grandparents have a say in how their grandkids should be taken care of, they should respect certain boundaries set by the child's parents. Overstepping these boundaries could lead to big problems with the child's parents and cause unnecessary drama to unfold. A woman who goes by u/ThrwayMILDiaper shared a story of how their mother-in-law got banned from babysitting her child. The post has got 2.4K upvotes and 696 comments with people supporting the mother's decision.

The 29-year-old woman shared that she and her 31-year-old husband had a baby son who was 3 years old, and she was pregnant with a baby girl. She writes, "As a baby, my son developed a severe allergy to diapers. He'd get awful rashes that took way too long to get better, and nothing we did helped much." They wanted to help their son, so they decided to begin potty training him early when he was 18 months old.

The couple consulted their pediatrician on this and began to use cloth diapers more. Their approach began to work as the boy soon grew out of his allergy, but the couple did not use diapers on him. She states how the young boy was presently fully potty trained and very rarely had any bathroom mishaps. The problem was that her mother-in-law was firmly against potty training their son early.

She suggested that it would lead to the baby having irritable bowel syndrome and that they should continue putting diapers on him till he was at least 3 years old. The mother-in-law tried convincing the couple many times on this issue, but they stood their ground. Sometime in early December, the woman had a doctor's appointment and left her son with her mother-in-law for a few hours. She got a call later from her mother-in-law informing her that her son had a bathroom accident.

The woman writes, "He hadn't had one in months. I instructed her on how to proceed, as well as where to find the spare clothes I'd packed for him." She picked up her son an hour later and returned home. The little boy complained that he was feeling "itchy" on the way back home. The woman didn't pay too much attention to this till she was getting him ready to take a bath and discovered that he was wearing a diaper.

Fortunately, he didn't get any rashes, but it turned out that the diaper was not his size and he had not worn one in a long time, which probably caused him to feel uncomfortable. The boy told his mother that her mother-in-law said that he was "still a baby" and put him in a diaper. The couple confronted the mother-in-law about what she had done and she got extremely defensive and refused to apologize for what she had done. The couple decided that the woman would never babysit their son again.

The woman writes, "She didn't think we were serious until we went to her place on Saturday. We had to go to the hospital, and rather than leaving our son with her, we took him with us." It dawned on the woman that the couple were being serious and accused them of being "dramatic" and "ungrateful." She also said that they were "alienating" her from her grandchildren.

Even with all this drama, the mother-in-law kept insisting that she was right about early potty training being a bad idea and was only trying to help the couple. The woman concluded by stating that she didn't think they were in the wrong but that it all felt too dramatic. Her brother-in-law thought they were right to be angry but thought that they were overreacting by refusing to let the mother-in-law from babysitting her grandson.

People sided with the couple's decision in the comments section. u/TheBronzePrincess03 said, "NTA. Not only did she disrespect your parenting decision, but she doubled down; therefore, you can't trust her not to do it again. Tell her she can see him during family functions and she can visit when she wants, but she won't be asked to babysit him anymore. That's not alienation, by the way. She's just being dramatic and trying to guilt-trip you into changing your mind."