Your child ignores you and prefers to spend time with Dad, Grandma or even the nanny.
If you’re a mom who spends most of the day away from your child, you could be in for a very painful experience.
The child asks to go to grandma’s or the nanny’s when you come home and want to spend time with him.
Or when he’s afraid of something, he looks for that other person to comfort him.
It can also happen that you’re a mom who spends most of the day with the child, but when dad comes home from work, the child rushes into his arms and never leaves.
As one of my friends put it, “I dress him, feed him, teach him, take care of him all day, then Daddy comes home from work and collects all the reward.”
He gets the most beautiful smiles and the tightest hugs from the child.
It’s always difficult for the mother, whether or not she understands the reasons for experiencing such a child.
The situation isn’t as bad as you think
Imagine you’re at work and your child spends the day with a cold person.
For example, a grandmother, a nanny or a distant or rude teacher, the child will miss you and when you get home, he won’t want to be separated from you.
But if you’re lucky enough to have your child raised by someone who loves him infinitely and is gentle with him during the day, the child will naturally love that person.
It’s natural and normal!
A child is richer and stronger, the more people he has in his life who love him and whom he loves.
It’s always been this way when a child is surrounded by many people of different generations who love, protect and teach him.
If the child only has his mother, he’ll only become attached to her, but that’s not so good for him.
It’s important to distinguish between a child’s show of enthusiasm for someone when they show up at the door and the emotional outpouring of his emotional attachment to that person.
Say, when a grandmother appears, whom the child sees once a year, her hands full of presents, and spends two days with the child, playing with him carefree, buying him anything he wants, taking him to fairs, forbidding him anything, the child will cry like rain when grandma leaves.
But this has nothing to do with the child’s emotional attachment to her.
On the other hand, with grandmothers who are present in the child’s life as a secure support (for example, a grandmother who looks after the child every day while Mom and Dad are at work), both factors are often at work.
The child is also emotionally attached to the grandmother, of course, but he also likes to be with her if everything is allowed.
If at grandma’s house, the child watches cartoons all day, eats sweets uncontrollably, doesn’t tidy up the toys, buys everything the child wants in the store, the child will love her more.
Grandmothers aren’t as concerned about the child’s future as parents are.
Grandmothers think more about the present!
That’s why they focus less on teaching and disciplining children, and more on making them happy in the moment.
Of course, not all grandmothers are the same.
Most parents know how their mothers become completely different people when they become grandmothers.
What they didn’t even dream of allowing their children to do, their grandchildren do.
Maybe that’s how it should be!
A wake-up call
But, if a child looks for someone else when they’re sad or scared, and not their mother, it doesn’t necessarily mean something’s wrong, but it should be a wake-up call.
Mom should ask herself if she’s spending too little time with the child.
If the child is with someone else from seven in the morning to seven at night, this time is not a break in the child’s day.
He develops bonds and feelings towards others during this time.
Someone else teaches him, comforts him, caresses him, encourages him, helps him gain self-confidence, shows him how to solve a problem.
The child adopts another person’s worldview and values.
If he’s lucky, it will be the good values of a few good people.
Mom should also ask herself whether she is being too brutal with the child.
The fact that the child prefers to be where no one bothers him in any way and where everyone laughs is understandable from the child’s point of view, but does it perhaps also indicate that the mother is excessively strict or not very cheerful?
It’s very easy to understand a mother who, after a stressful day at work, comes home and when she’s greeted by a child crying for his grandmother, she no longer has the strength to be a fun, creative mom.
The overwhelming feeling of fatigue, guilt and anger is familiar to all mothers in this situation.
However, it should encourage us to better organize our priorities.
If we got home from work at seven o’clock at night and haven’t seen the child since this morning, washing the dishes and hanging out the laundry aren’t priorities.
Yes, it’s a disgusting feeling when you wake up in the morning and go to make yourself a cup of coffee, only to find a pile of dirty dishes from the night before waiting for you in the sink.
Or on weekends, to be greeted by dirty laundry for a dozen machines, which you don’t know where to lay out to dry.
Because all the drying racks and even the chairs and radiators are already covered with laundry.
Yes, it would be more comfortable for us to do all this in the evening.
But it’s better to spend time with the kids when they’re still up!
But we’re going to sort out the washing and dishes somehow.
On the other hand, we can never compensate the children for not having been with them when they were growing up and needed us most.