Most parents will tell you that raising kids is a full-time job, and having grandparents around to help can make all the difference. But sometimes, it brings more trouble than it’s worth.
One Redditor learned that the hard way. After letting her daughter spend time with her mother-in-law, the little girl kept coming home in tears. It didn’t take long to find out why: MIL had been telling the 10-year-old that her parents didn’t love her, that her home life was unstable, and even shaming her for liking girls—all behind her parents’ backs.
So the mom finally said enough was enough and cut MIL off completely. Needless to say, grandma didn’t take it well, and the drama that followed was a lot to handle.
Read the full story below.
The woman was furious when she learned what her mother-in-law had been saying to her daughter behind her back
Image credits: Teona Swift/Pexels (not the actual photo)
So she put her foot down and decided to cut her off
Image credits: Koogar_Kitty
Why toxic mothers-in-law behave the way they do
Having a great mother-in-law is a bit like winning the lottery. A genuinely supportive one will be there for your family in ways that actually matter, someone you can lean on when things get tough. But a difficult one can make everything around you more complicated than it needs to be.
And if you decide to have children, brace yourself—because a toxic mother-in-law may see it as an open invitation to plant herself even deeper in your world. As Shirley McPhee put it, welcoming a baby into the picture basically guarantees your in-laws will want to be part of your life in a way they never were before.
“Before you have a kid, you think about your in-laws maybe a couple of times a year (while panic-buying generic Christmas presents) then, as soon as you reproduce, or even announce that you’re pregnant, BOOM—there they are,” she said, writing for Refinery29. “And you can never get rid of them.”
In this story, that presence came with a real cost. The mother-in-law was going behind the parents’ backs, actively trying to turn a young child against her own family and change how she felt about herself. It’s a painful thing to witness in any relationship, but knowing it’s coming from a grandmother makes it especially hard to process.
Which leads to the question most people in this situation eventually find themselves asking: why would someone who supposedly loves their family cause so much damage within it?
In a piece for PureWow, Dr. Lauren Phillips, Psy.D, explains that toxic behavior rarely comes from a place of pure malice. More often, it stems from deep, unhealed wounds carried over from past relationships.
Those wounds create insecurity, and that insecurity has to go somewhere. For some people, it comes out as anger or withdrawal. For others, it turns into a need to control the people closest to them.
That need for control tends to show up in recognizable ways. Clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Cook, also speaking to PureWow, points out that a toxic mother-in-law will often ignore boundaries that have been clearly and repeatedly set, using it as a way to establish power within the family dynamic.
She may constantly offer unsolicited advice, inserting herself into the couple’s relationship in ways that slowly chip away at their dynamic. Dr. Cook describes this as triangulation, where the mother-in-law positions herself at the center of the relationship to ensure her own needs are always being met.
When it comes to handling it, Dr. Cook suggests starting with honest conversations, first with your partner and then with the mother-in-law herself if that feels safe. If nothing changes, reducing contact is a reasonable and healthy response, and having your partner take the lead on enforcing boundaries often makes the biggest difference, even if it creates some tension in the short term.
That said, there are situations where no amount of conversation or boundary-setting is going to be enough. If a mother-in-law is telling a grandchild that her parents don’t love her, shaming her for who she is, and then calling CPS the moment she loses access, that goes well beyond a difficult family relationship.
The mother in this story made a hard call, but given everything that was happening, it was difficult to argue with. Sometimes walking away entirely is the most reasonable thing you can do.
The author replied to commenters’ questions and received a lot of support
Not long after, she came back with an update and revealed that MIL had escalated the situation
Image credits: Polina Zimmerman/Pexels (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Koogar_Kitty
Readers wished her luck and hoped things would settle down soon
