The Unspoken Wedge Between Parents and Grandparents

One of the sweetest parts of being a grandparent is being invited by your own adult children to spend time with your grandkids. But the invitation comes with a few conditions, and in even the most loving families, grandparents ignore these rules on a regular basis. For many reasons, they can’t help overstepping the boundaries, whether because of a prickliness at their own kids telling them what to do, a sincere belief that they know more about raising children than their kids do, or, more poignantly, a resistance to the harsh reality that they’ve aged out of the cherished role of family decision maker.

The result can be fraught encounters that can make or break a relationship.

“It increasingly feels like my parents are spending a lot of time trying to instill Christianity into our son,” says a 34-year-old editor who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young boys. Neither she nor her husband is religious, yet their older son, age 3, “often comes back from time spent with [his grandparents] singing church songs and saying things like ‘God made us!’ and ‘God watches us!’” she told me.

At first, this mother (who requested anonymity to avoid offending her parents) and her husband were “sort of alarmed” about it, she said. But now they’re just a bit flummoxed—and, on a good day, amused. “I think we both have a sense of humor about how funny it is for