Leaving children with Aspie Grandparents

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Hi, kind of an off shoot from the growing up with AS parents thread. Im having problems at the moment with leaving my DD5 with my Mother in Law (MIL). She lets my daughter do anything she wants aswell as encouraging her to do things she wouldnt have thought of doing herself and does not need to know how to do until shes older and more capable.

Daughter and husband are AS and we suspect MIL is AS too but she is in total denial about all of it so we cant mention it without causing an argument, also she has the rest of her family backing her up, who all think we are awful to think our DD5 has anything "wrong" as shes so "lovely" and therefore she cant be AS... but thats another story

The main problems are:

Encouraging her to make cups of tea without help.
Chopping raw vegetables with a sharp knife, unsure if anyone is physically helping with this or if shes left to it on her own.
Riding horses without helmets, then when we insisted she wore a helmet she rode wearing an adult helmet with a wooly hat underneath to make it fit better.
Allowing the dog to sleep in her room despite us asking for her door to be shut and the dog kept out.

All of the above is unacceptable to me, yet these things and others like it continue to happen despite having stern words with the MIL about it. If one problem is sorted another new one crops up, that we would never have predicted so we cant do anything about it until its happened.

Anyone else have problems with grandparents who may be on the spectrum themselves not believing the DX? Or problems with grandparents not understanding how the child has different needs? Or even grandparents that just dont seem able to care properly for the kids.

Thanks


Edit: Yes she is 5 years old. Im happy for her to stir cake mix and so on, its just encouraging her to drag a step ladder over and get knives to cut very hard raw carrots etc that bothers me, shes quite clumsy and we all have accidents from time to time. I am always eating her burnt/raw cakes happily lol, thats all fine

Lol no Im not looking for the best deals on step ladders thanks.., whats with all the green links?!

Is your daughter 5 years old? I can understand that the riding is dangerous, as well as the hot water, but there has to be a way she can help in the kitchen.

I also cant say anything without knowing how old the child is. But normally around kindergarten you should be able to handle knifes and scissors, because of the tinker. We also made fruit salad and other stuff in the kindergarden and had to help my mom in the kitchen.

So i dont really see the point about the asperger. Seems to me, like a pretty normal daughter/mother in law discussion, where you are argumenting that you are the childs mother and she will be argumenting that she has got more life experience and so on... If that was about asperger then 80% of all mothers in law seem to get asperger when their children merry. ^^ Sorry, but i think, you will have to argue it out like every other person with your mother in law instead of hoping to flee a normal family conflict with the asperger argument.

I also do not think this is an AS thing. NT's can be stubborn and sure they are right, too, even without diagnosable rigidity. . They figure they raised kids without managing to accidentally kill them, so they must have been great parents and know more than you, a relative newbie.

Sometimes it is relevant in terms of the diagnosis. Often they see themselves or at least their tendencies in the child, and so to admit the child has issues means they would have to admit they do, also. The rigidity does not help, here, either.

I would not leave my child with anyone NT, AS, whatever, who would not respect me enough as a parent to follow what I think is best. I know that can get messy with in-laws. What does your husband think? Do they look after your child because you need the daycare or because they feel entitled to have alone time with your child?

I would try to get alternate arrangements and tell them you "appreciate" their help, but you do not want to "burden" them any longer with it. In my experience you are not going to persuade them what they do is unsafe.

My M-I-L would attempt to pull this sort of thing in front of my face, so there is no way I would ever consider letting her take care of my son even supervised, much less unsupervised. She would even do this stuff with her own daughter's kid in front of her daughter's face, as well as behind her back. People who are untrustworthy are not going to change. Stubborn people are hard to persuade.

I don't trust my in laws to take care of my kids. My husband and I don't even go out to a movie or anything when they are visiting because I just don't see that they are capable of keeping them safe. I have NO IDEA how my husband and his sister managed to survive growing up with those two people. Perhaps they were a little less self-centered when their kids were younger and they've just forgotten how much attending to young children need. When we visited their house for Xmas one year when youngest was about 2, she said she "child-proofed" the house. This consisted of her putting a flimsy little gate across the top of the steep basement steps. They made no attempt to put up or put away tons of breakable items that were right within DS's reach and there was electronic equipment (multiple stereo components) on the floor with wires going everywhere! I had to be on top of DS every second he was awake as he was getting into everything. It was exhausting. If I was in your situation I would be tempted to say that MIL doesn't get alone time with DD5 unless she can follow your ground rules. That's just me though, I can understand how that might not be so easy to do in some situations.

I can so totally relate to this! From day one my MIL has been a problem. It started with her insisting on holding/cuddling/swaddling my DS when he absolutely hated it it and strongly preferred to be alone in his chair. She acted as though he was crying because he wasn't being hugged enough, and could not comprehend that he didn't like it. Then a few months later, she tried to drive with him in his infant seat (on a dirt road) without seat belting it in . Shortly after that she was trying to allow him to be around her large dog that has a history of biting. By this time, we started getting pretty fed up with her behavior, and stopped visiting for 6 months. Finally we decided to give it another try this past Thanksgiving and to my absolute shock and horror, I chased my son down a hall way to find him standing not even 5 feet away from a GUN! (they insisted that it wasn't loaded) Of course, there were words, and she had the audacity to try to tell me that they practice "gun safety" and defend her rights to own it! I didn't even try to argue, I just simply told her that he's not stepping foot inside of that house again unless the gun is locked up and we left as soon as possible.

I frequently feel like I'm the only one who has a brain in my head!

My likely autistic grandmother and brain damaged grandfather took care of me from the time I was born until I was three and we moved out of their house. They were verry merry berry good grandparents who let me do what I wanted.

Actually this seems pretty normal. I have read posts at Babycenter by other moms who also don't let their own parents or in laws watch their kids because of things they allow them to do they don't approve of or how they do their job watching them. if your MIL is unwilling to follow your rules, don't let her watch your kids.

We manage grandparents via invitations to our home (although they have to get a hotel room; we don't have enough room for them to stay and they are disruptive, too.) and via family outings. Nobody's completely happy with the arrangement, but it satisfies everyone sufficiently.

I teach firearms safety and that is not acceptable.

I think it's possible to have problems with grandparents, whether they're on the spectrum or not. I don't speak to my MIL these days. But, the last time we left our daughter with her (she was no more than 3yrs), we just nipped round the corner to get a pizza and bring it back to her house - she refused to cook vegetarian meals, so we always had to do bring our own food. When we returned, our daughter was standing in the porch holding a tub of ant killer, with the lid off. My MIL was lying on the settee, as usual, watching TV and half sleeping. She's NT. My parents, on the other hand, are very trustworthy. My Mum very probably has ADHD and has some autistic traits too. She's very like my daughter. But, when my parents babysit, I know she's safe.