We Told My Mother-in-Law We Didn’t Need Her Help With the Kids. Then I Found Her Staking Out Across From Their School.

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Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My kids started upper pre-K and kindergarten this year. The kids are both absolutely loving school! My husband usually drives them in the morning, and I pick them up in the afternoon. My husband needed to travel during the third week of school, so I adjusted my work schedule to drive them on both ends of the day. Leading up to the trip, my mother-in-law told me multiple times that she was available to help with either pick-up or drop-off any day, as needed. I thanked her and told her I had it covered, knowing I would not contact her for help. We live on an extremely busy road, with very little visibility, within the district’s no-transport-offered range, and I would not be comfortable having her drive the kids.

But more to the point: We do not use her or my father-in-law for child care at all because she has severe anxiety, and he is exceedingly strict and rigid in his behavioral expectations for children. We have never explicitly had a conversation with them about not having them be responsible for the kids; we just graciously turn down offers and don’t ask them. We still make sure the kids see them regularly, though, and they have loving relationships with each. They’re just not a childcare option for us, and thankfully we have multiple other friends as well as a babysitter in the area who can help us when we need it.

Before my husband left on this trip, his mother also told him (multiple times) that she could help while he was gone. He also told her I had it covered, but that we appreciated the offer. The day before he left, she texted him and me a picture of a map she had drawn showing the road she knows we park on for drop-off/pick-up and the entrances she knows of at the school. She asked us to please mark up the picture to show her the path from where we park to the door(s) the kids use, as well as all the time information she would need to do drop-off or pick-up. My husband responded that we had everything covered, so she didn’t need to worry. She said she would really feel better knowing “just in case.” We didn’t answer.

The first afternoon my husband was gone, I recognized her car parked on the road I park on and verified that it was her as I drove past. I chose to ignore her, picked up the kids, and went home. About an hour later, she texted me a picture she had taken of us all walking back to the car, along with this message: “I figured out how pick-up goes! You must not have seen me, but I noticed that you nearly didn’t make it in time, so why don’t I just do pick-up the rest of the week?” I sent the text to my husband and called and talked to him, and he said he would handle it, but it would seem a bigger conversation needs to happen with us all when he’s home, as this is just the latest example of her doing what she wants (that we have specifically asked her not to do) in the name of “just being helpful.” We haven’t wanted to hurt her feelings by saying we don’t feel comfortable with her driving or caring for the kids, but do you think that’s what we need to do to actually shut this down and not have to spend the rest of her life politely declining her anxious offers and watching her escalate?

—Sick of Dealing with This

Dear Dealing,

You have been very kind indeed to your mother-in-law, and under notably trying circumstances. If she were anyone else, she’d have gotten the message by now. The bad news: I’m not sure she’d get the message even if you were completely honest with her. (I am inclined to think so because she doesn’t seem able to hear even the most straightforward statements, such as, We’ve got this taken care of, thanks but no thanks.) She is more likely to dismiss your concerns than to accept your explanation.

However, I suspect that telling her outright will relieve some of your own anxiety about this. If you tell her the truth—either fairly gently (“We don’t feel comfortable having anyone but one of us do this, I’m afraid. Thanks for offering, but we don’t need or want the help. Please don’t ask again”) or more bluntly (“Your extreme anxiety, as evidenced by [supply your own list of evidence here], has led us to conclude that you are not the right person to help with this sort of thing”)—you can at least tell yourself, and periodically remind her as necessary, that you’ve done everything you can to make this stop.

But, as I say, I don’t think it will stop. Because of this—but also because it’s the right thing to do—you and your husband should not only make it clear to your mother-in-law that you will not take her up on any offers of help with the kids, but that you’re concerned about her as well. Even if you go the gentle, not fully forthright route, you can mention that, “for example,” her mapping the children’s route to school after you’d explicitly told her she would not be picking them up, then escalating to driving over there and watching you pick them up, suggests that she may be struggling (or struggling more than she thinks?) with considerable anxiety. I’d stay away from diagnosing an “anxiety disorder” if she hasn’t already been diagnosed with such, and I wouldn’t mention medication; I would just say, “We’re worried about you, and we think you could be getting help with this. How can we facilitate your getting this help?”

Your mother-in-law would benefit from seeing professionals, like a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist (who could prescribe anti-anxiety medication, for example). You would be doing her a great favor if you could persuade her, and even help her, to do that.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My twins (age 10) are in 5th grade. In our district, this is the year before middle school. They recently took a field trip to the middle school to learn about what life as a middle schooler may be like. This seemed like an early and rather pointless field trip to me! But it did get our family talking about one particular thing.

In our town, foreign language education is required starting in 6th grade, with the option to switch to a different language in 9th grade. Our town offers Spanish, French, Latin, Mandarin, and Italian; German and Portuguese are also options in high school. My husband and I decided early on to raise our children to be bilingual in English and French. (My husband’s family is French, and his parents speak French at home. Our children have grown up speaking French fluently.)

The kids want to take French in middle school—the foreign language they’re already fluent in!—for the easy A. My husband thinks this is a great idea. I want to push our kids to learn a different language. They could become trilingual! A lot of people speak Spanish or Mandarin in our city—it would be extremely useful for them.

—Who Cares About An Easy A?

Dear Easy,

Unless the children have been raised reading and writing in French as well as speaking it, I don’t think it will be an easy A. I think they’re going to struggle in a very particular way in their French classes, since they seem to assume they already know everything they need to know (a recipe for disaster in school). Of course, if I’m wrong—if they have excellent French reading and writing skills—then yes, taking French in school would be a sneaky shortcut to a good grade.

But even if it is, given that this is middle school, I say, so what? The transition to middle school comes with any number of challenges, and if one of their classes out of the half-dozen or more they’ll be taking is easy for them, it’s not a big deal. It may make their overall transition a bit easier—and that’s a good thing. (What I would do, however, is make it clear to them now that once they start high school, they will have to choose another language to study.)

Given that it would be fairly unusual for children this age to have equivalent reading and writing competency in both languages they’ve grown up speaking, though, I think that formally studying French—learning the grammar, working on reading comprehension, and being required to write sentences and even paragraphs in French—will be immensely helpful to them: It will make them truly fluent. And this will make it easier for them to become fluent in a third language, come high school. (Note of caution for the future: Do not tell them they have to study either Spanish or Mandarin. Let them choose. They’ll be teenagers by then. You’ll need to pick your battles even more carefully than you do now.)

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My kid is 4, turning 5 later this month. Half the time she is kind, compassionate, and thoughtful. The other half of the time, she is violent, especially with her language, and mean. She keeps getting in trouble at preschool for literally telling kids she is going to kill them. She jokes about giving classmates foods they are allergic to. She says, “I’m going to poke you in the eye with a sword,” “I’m going to bomb you,” and “I’m going to shoot you with my gun.” It’s honestly quite frightening. The more negatively people react—and the more of them who react negatively—the more she does it.

At home, we’ve been trying to ignore her when she says such things, knowing that when we react, this behavior increases. But the school, understandably, reacts very negatively to her saying these things. We are at our wits’ end. We don’t have any toy weapons at home, and we don’t watch or read violent things (our kid gets one hour of TV per week, and we mostly watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Magic School Bus). What do we do here? Consequences have not worked at all. I do wonder if she is neurodivergent and lacking age-appropriate impulse control, but so far her doctor says they won’t even assess her (for ADHD, for example) for at least another year. Please help!

—Parenting A Violent Girl

Dear Violent,

Your daughter is not too young to see a pediatric psychotherapist. Please don’t wait until your general practice pediatrician refers her to a pediatric psychiatrist to assess her for ADHD. Something is going on—I have absolutely no idea what—but I wouldn’t wait to get at the root of it. A good therapist specializing in the treatment of young children (and for this, I’d recommend a pediatric psychologist, if it’s possible to find one you can get her to) will be able to help with this. It is very troubling. Don’t wait and hope it will get better; don’t punish her or ignore her. Get her help. I’ll be thinking of you and her. I hope you’ll let me know how things go.

—Michelle

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