Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: August 24, 2016 06:28PM
I have a different perspective on this, because my instinctual position is identifying with your daughter, and her potential feelings about this (whether she voices them or not, which if she is like most kids in similar situations, she will not---and for all kinds of reasons).
When I first went to school, I entered about three weeks before the end of the semester because my parents and I were not yet able to occupy the house my parents were building, and so until we could, we were living with my Mom's sister and BIL in Topanga Canyon...which meant a fairly long, and largely mountainous, drive to where classes for my eventual school were being held. (The elementary school I would graduate from was still being constructed.)
From the first day, I felt independent (the six-year-old kind of "independent" ;) ). School became this wonderful place where I could be ME, without being scrutinized on a moment-to-moment basis by three generations of relatives. It was wonderful and glorious and I still remember the joyous feeling of unexpected freedom, for the first time, to be who I actually was.
If any one of my parents or relatives or friends of the family had decided to volunteer in my classroom, or at my school, I would have felt squashed: under a microscope, unable to be spontaneously the person I was (which, of course, I was trying to figure out at that very moment).
In brief, I would have felt not only constantly constrained, but spied on and judged, no matter what I did or did not do.
In large part, this is (very probably) your daughter's introduction to HERSELF. THIS is the time for her discover, all on her own and without family scrutiny, "who" she is and "what" she is all about, from the smallest things to the largest.
This is HER time...NOT her grandmother's time. There will be other times for grandmother and granddaughter to be together, but school is for HER, and she has a RIGHT to it.
I say: Do whatever you must to keep your MIL out of your daughter's school (EVEN on field trips, because field trips are IMPORTANT!!!), and give your daughter her rightful time to grow without family supervision.
I would have wilted inside in very long-lasting ways if any of my relatives (even the ones I loved intensely) had done this to me.
Everyone needs "alone time"...and (even in a classroom full of kids) this is rightfully your daughter's time to just "be."