I’m Not Looking for Gratitude, I Swear. But My Relatives Are Just So Ungrateful!
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My granddaughter has three children, ages 7, 8, and 11. They live several states away, and I have always sent birthday and Christmas gifts to all of them. It’s like playing 20 Questions to get my granddaughter to acknowledge that she received these gifts, much less show any type of gratitude for them. I don’t care so much about the gratitude, but I do want to know that they received them and how the children like them.
I texted her, asking if she received them, and when she didn’t respond, I kind of nagged her about it. She blew up at me, saying I don’t respect her boundaries and I was trying to guilt her. I don’t even understand what she meant by all of that. All I wanted was a quick text saying, “Got the package, thank you.” I don’t even know if she tells the children that it was us who sent them. I told her I was getting older and was old-fashioned about getting acknowledgment that something was received. Am I wrong? What should I do?
—Confused Great-Grandma
Dear Great,
Are thank-you notes necessary in the 21st century? Opinions differ. My opinions differ: I never expect anyone to send a thank-you note, yet when I get one my heart is warmed and I’m inspired to greater acts of generosity.
You say you “don’t care so much” about receiving gratitude, but your reference to the thank-you your granddaughter doesn’t offer suggests otherwise. That’s fine! It’s totally normal to want gratitude. But you’re not going to get it from this family—they’re too busy or too solipsistic or simply aren’t wired that way. You’re unlikely to be able to change that, and continuing to nag your granddaughter is not going to help. Even if you’re nagging her to do something as simple and (frankly) not-onerous as letting you know the package arrived.
So you can either keep giving the gifts and resign yourself to not knowing what happens to them, or you can stop giving the gifts. To decide, I’d suggest you first ask yourself: Why do I give these gifts in the first place? Is it because you think children deserve gifts and you simply wish to make them happy? If so, keep on sending presents, note the delivery date and time at www.usps.gov, and rest assured that at that precise moment, those darling youngsters were experiencing joy.
But perhaps you actually give gifts for another reason—to forge a closer relationship with these kids and their mother, several states away. If so, I wonder if you could find a different way to do that. Send them postcards with beautiful pictures on them or YouTube videos of hippos farting like motorboats. Call them on the phone and hear a little about their day. Travel to wherever they live and babysit for the kids so their hardworking mother can go out for the evening, perhaps wearing the nice top you brought along with you. I think you’d find any of these a more satisfying way to connect than stewing about whether you’ll ever get that thank-you you crave.
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My 3-year-old daughter is a happy, social kid and makes friends easily. However, she has recently started to become quite wary around men, especially young men. At first, I was validating this because: Yeah, girl, trust your instincts. But it’s now interfering with everyday stuff. If her swimming instructor is a boy, she will get very scared and nervous. At preschool this week, there was a substitute teacher who was male, and she refused to go. How can I balance getting her to trust her instincts around certain adults and also realizing that sometimes we do have to inherently trust adults in certain situations, like school?
—Some Men Are Fine
Dear Some,
Your letter made me laugh. Congrats on your tiny misandrist! I can see her now, happily drinking from a sippy cup labeled MEN’S TEARS.
I would not suggest stressing “trusting your instincts” with regards to adults your child has never met before. Children’s instincts are not that good! For instance, when I had a 3-year-old, her instinct upon finding a Magic Marker was to use it to draw all over her face. You should, of course, still listen carefully to how she views people she spends time with; sure, if she develops a sudden anxiety about spending time with a regular preschool teacher, it’s worth exploring that situation. But a brand-new teacher, for whom you readily vouch? That’s another story.
I think many reasonable parents differ on how they hope their children will interact with new people. We’ve come a long way since the child-snatching panic of the 1980s, but Hertz still rents white panel vans, and you still gotta teach your kids to exercise caution when approached by strangers. Nonetheless, pretty much every parent wants their child to feel comfortable trusting anyone the child meets alongside the parent, whom the parent designates as “an OK dude.”
That can be hard for preschoolers! Anecdotally, I know plenty of children, including my own, who have gone through periods of feeling shy or uncomfortable around grown men. Such behavior is backed up by this 2020 study, the veracity or trustworthiness of which I am in no way qualified to judge but which does appear to have been published in an actual academic journal. Why is this? Who knows. Maybe it’s because men can seem big, loud, and hairy. Maybe it aligns with some toddlers’ ever-changing preferences between Daddy and Mommy so that they may shy away from men when they’re in a “Mom-only” phase. Surely someone has pitched some baloney evolutionary-biology thing about hunter-gatherer Homo erectus men being more likely to, I dunno, dangerously leave spears sitting around the cave.
Most likely it’s that small children are irrational and can truly be depended on only to do things that are A) cute and B) inconvenient. So consider building an extra five minutes into drop-offs at preschool, swim lessons, etc., to allow you, the parents, a little time to interact in a friendly, cheerful manner with whoever the adult in question might be. If your daughter sees you behaving just as nicely with the men as you do with the women, it might remedy the problem in the short term, and will definitely help build a healthy understanding of how to treat human beings in the long term. But actual change just may take a while, until her weird 3-year-old brain finds something else to be afraid of (lint, ferns, Oldsmobiles).
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Dear Care and Feeding,
My 9-year-old daughter, Ava, is a really active kid who loves running around. She does rec soccer and dance and has taken lessons in swimming, skating, skiing, and horseback riding. Unfortunately, she just broke her leg while playing soccer. It will take six to eight weeks to fully heal, the doctors said. She’s in a wheelchair now and is absolutely miserable. Aside from her not being able to participate in her favorite activities, we’ve had to turn down invitations from her friends for things that sound cool that Ava is just not able to participate in. We’ve given her unlimited screen time, found ways for her to still be active, and invited her friends over, but she is not having any of it.
Instead, she’s taking out her anger on her older sister, Rebecca, who’s 11 and usually gets along really well with Ava. Ava is pushing Rebecca around, calling her names, generally treating her badly. This is all very out of character. Trying to separate them is difficult since they share a room, and Rebecca feels bad for Ava and keeps trying to help, only to get anger in return. I’m not really sure what to do here. All of my efforts so far to separate them or correct Ava’s behavior or even just talk to either of them about the situation have been futile. I’m just tired of all the yelling and fighting going on in our normally peaceful household.
—Broken Leg, Shattered Peace
Dear Shattered,
Oh, I feel so sorry for poor Ava! There is no misery quite like the misery of an active, energetic child trapped in her room as other kids are out having fun. It’s totally understandable why she’s taking her anger out on her family, particularly her very sweet older sister, who just wants to make her feel better and is catching a lot of strays.
That long list of activities Ava’s tried out suggests to me that the girl likes being busy as much as she likes being active. She can’t run around in the way she’s familiar with right now, but she can still do things. The ideal scenario, of course, would be for a murder to occur in one of the courtyard apartments Ava can see through the rear window of your Greenwich Village flat. That would keep her busy for quite a while: buying binoculars, piecing together clues, setting up elaborate booby traps to stop the murderer when he breaks into your apartment.
Barring that, though, I suggest you find some activities Ava can participate in outside the home (and away from Rebecca). Dance performances, high school soccer matches, horse shows—aim for events during which she can enjoy the excellence of experts (or at least high schoolers) without feeling upset that she’s not out there doing the activity herself. I’d also reach out to her friends’ parents and encourage them to help out with some group activities that do not exclude Ava while she’s laid up.
And try to find a way to do some of these things with Ava alone, while Rebecca, perhaps, is spending time with a friend or doing some other fun thing. You don’t necessarily want Rebecca to feel excluded, but part of a parent’s job is to leap in front of our kids to take the shrapnel hit. You’re much better equipped to absorb Ava’s frustration and anger for the next few weeks than Rebecca is.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My 9-year-old will not believe me when I tell her that the big emotions she’s feeling will not look nearly as bad if she would just eat something! I’ve come to believe she’s a DFK, and I have amazing radar for when we need to talk about feelings and when she needs a snack. She, of course, rejects my advice as “That’s not it!” I want to tread lightly around policing her food; I’ve seen a little bit of weird vibes around food (after I found out she would just not eat hot lunch at all if she didn’t like the options) and don’t want her to learn to use food to manipulate emotions, hers or mine. Any advice about getting her inner monologue to check in with herself to question if she’s hungry when she starts to feel her big feelings?
—Just Eat Some Fruit!
Dear Fruit,
You’re a good parent having a bad time! Watching our kids hysterically reject the obvious solution to a very simple problem can really make parents tear their hair out. My niece recently rejected every post–Girl Scouts snack she was offered, getting angrier and angrier at the idea that she might be hungry, before finally shouting, at a volume that would strip a cabinet, “I’M NOT HUNGRY AND I’M NOT FRUSTRATED!!!!”
She was hungry, and she was frustrated.
You’re clearly an extremely engaged parent: You’re worrying about your daughter’s relationship with food, you’re closely observing the contours of her emotional responses, and you’re reading your Dr. Becky (the origin, or at the very least the popularizer, of the term DFK, which stands for “deeply feeling kid”). I would gently suggest that you might be considering in such detail the ramifications of every single parental action that you’ve thought yourself into a little bit of a maze. Of course you do not want your child to develop a complex about food, but it is not damaging to acknowledge, and to help her understand, that hunger has real effects on our moods. That’s not “manipulating emotions”; that’s listening to your own body and learning to interpret what it’s telling you.
And I don’t think you’re going to have much success altering her inner monologue, no matter how hard you think about her deep feelings. Let yourself off the hook a little and embrace the mystery of a 9-year-old who at one moment will seem totally rational and logical, like a 45-year-old accountant, and at the next will respond to a minor setback with the aplomb of the Tasmanian devil.
The circumstance in which your child is very, very upset but refuses to agree with you about the cause of that anger is a great occasion for you to clear the hell out of the room and give her some time on her own. She’s 9: You can leave her with books, toys, or craft supplies that may occupy her attention, as well as with the actual solution to her problem (a bowl of strawberries that cost the equivalent of a developing nation’s gross domestic product). Eventually, if you let her come around to it, she’s likely to reach the same conclusion you did—or, at the very least, to idly stuff some berries in her mouth and, coincidentally, not at all relatedly, suddenly feel way better about everything.
—Dan
My oldest, who is 9, is very creative and bright, but is perhaps prone to hoarding a bit. She draws and cuts out creative pictures. She keeps magazines she wants to read, and interesting bits of recycling she will use for art later. When she was younger, I would just throw away most stuff. (She didn’t remember or care.) Now that she is older, I want to respect her desire to create and keep her own stuff, but I am also finding myself driven crazy by the mess! How can I balance my minimalism with the desire to respect her autonomy?
