Woman ‘Completely Thrown’ When Mother-in-Law Tells Her to Get a Babysitter on Christmas — Despite Asking for Grandkids for Years

A mother says she was left “baffled” and “hurt” after her mother-in-law told her to find a babysitter so her children wouldn’t attend the family’s Christmas Eve dinner.

In a post shared on Reddit, the woman explained that she and her husband have two kids — a 10-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son — whom she described as typical, generally well-behaved children. They can get excited and loud, she admitted, but nothing out of the ordinary.

So when her mother-in-law invited the couple over for Christmas Eve and specifically asked them in advance to arrange childcare, the request caught her completely off guard. In her view, the whole point of a holiday gathering is that it’s a family event — and her kids are family.

The situation felt even more confusing, she added, because her mother-in-law had spent years urging the couple to have children. The woman said she and her husband were the first of her mother-in-law’s five children to become parents, and now their two kids make up two of her three grandchildren. Yet instead of feeling welcomed, the woman said it often seems like her children are treated as an inconvenience.

She also stressed that she rarely asks her mother-in-law for help. The last time she did — requesting that she watch the kids briefly while she got a haircut — she said her mother-in-law looked visibly disappointed, to the point that she stopped asking altogether.

Her husband, she wrote, believes his mother has already done her parenting and simply wants to be finished with kid-related responsibilities. While she understands and respects that boundaries exist, she still struggled with the contradiction.

“She’s retired, single, has a busy social life. I respect her time,” she wrote. “But you don’t get to desperately want grandchildren and then treat them like party crashers at Christmas.”

Because they couldn’t find a babysitter on short notice, the couple ultimately asked again — and received permission — to bring the kids to dinner. Still, the woman said the earlier request cast a shadow over the evening. Although her mother-in-law remained polite, the woman felt awkward and out of place, and ended up staying mostly in the living room with the kids while her mother-in-law cooked in the kitchen.

“It didn’t feel right,” she wrote. “It felt like we were uninvited guests.”

She added that her sister-in-law also attended with a newborn, though she didn’t ask whether the same “get a sitter” rule had been applied to her.

Afterward, the woman asked others if they’d ever dealt with a similar dynamic — and what she should do, especially when it comes to explaining the situation to her children.

In the comments, many readers reacted strongly to the mother-in-law’s request. Some said they wouldn’t have gone at all, arguing that excluding children from a family holiday is both unreasonable and hurtful. Others felt the woman’s husband should be the one addressing it directly with his mother, noting that there’s no “neutral” position when it comes to a parent’s own kids. A third theme also emerged: several commenters suggested the grandmother may have been enthusiastic about the idea of grandchildren — but only when they were babies — and lost interest as they grew older.

Overall, the consensus was clear: if children aren’t truly welcome, the gathering isn’t really a family celebration.