All one mom wants is for her daughter to have a healthy body image â but her mother-in-law recently said something to her pre-teen that was crushing. During a recent family get-together, her MIL completely destroyed her daughterâs self-esteem by telling her that she needs to lose weight and needed surgery to fix her features. Livid, now the mom is left to clean up her MILâs mess.
Raising teenagers isn't easy, and the Letter Writer (LW) and her husband have two daughters, ages 12 and 15.
âI am white, and my husband is Korean,â she explained in a letter to the Care and Feeding advice column.
They both come from big families, but his is âtighter-knit than mine, and they all live close by.â
âOf his four siblings, three have kids, and our daughters are close with their cousins,â she wrote.
Naturally, they wanted to see each other â so the family held a socially distanced family picnic.
It was as they were saying their goodbyes that her MIL started making trouble.
"My mother-in-law started commenting on how nice our older daughter looked," the LW recalled. âBut then, she started telling my younger daughter that she needed to start losing weight if she wanted to look like her sister, and if she was in Korea, she would have taken her to get her eyelids and nose 'fixed' much earlier 'because when you do it now it wonât look as natural.'"
Her younger daughter was "mortified."
And her older daughter was completely silent.
"I was shocked and tried to bring it up in the car, but my older daughter just said it was 'how Grandma always was' and my younger daughter didnât say anything," she continued.
Later, the parents again tried to talk to their younger daughter about what happened.
But she told the LW what her older sister had said, repeating that this is just the way things were â "that she was just old."
"We are both very angry at my mother-in-law, and are worried about how this impacted our daughtersâ self-esteem," the LW wrote. "What can we do to get them to open up, and how can we confront Grandma?"
Unfortunately, this wasnât the only grandmother who has said something hurtful about her granddaughterâs weight.
One commenter had this to say:
"My mother in law has been obsessed with weight her whole life. She has always battled her weight. She put my sister-in-law's 8-year-old daughter on Weight Watchers. When our daughter was 9 my mother-in-law put her on a scale and told her the next time she came to visit she had to lose 10 pounds. I was furious and so was my husband."
"My mother-in-law would make cookies and pies and have it sitting out on the counter for all the grandkids," the commenter continued. "The grandsons could eat how ever much they wanted but the girls no. If grandmother thinks someone has a weight issue then no desserts for anyone. We all eat healthy. She was just cruel."
Someone else agreed. "You and hubs should've spoken up at time, however, you did not so water under the bridge (although not speaking up in the moment is something you both may want to examine).
"Your husband needs to have a conversation with his mother and give her some guidelines and set some boundaries," the person continued. "It's moderately understandable if it's a cultural thing but that's not an excuse that's gonna fly any longer."
Columnist Rumaan Alam advised that the mom needs to try to fix the damage â not focus on what her MIL said.
Yes, what her MIL said was not great, "but she said what she said, and itâs a challenge to now undo the effect of that on your daughters beyond pointing out the obvious: that itâs ridiculous, itâs her opinion, and that losing weight or plastic surgery (!) are not something either of your beautiful children ought to be thinking about in the least," Alam wrote.
Luckily, the LW does have a leg up in this situation.
"Youâve been communicating to your daughter for years â explicit and tacit messages about your belief in their worth and intellect and yes, their beauty too. One unkind remark from their grandmother canât undo that, or entirely shatter their self-image," he pointed out.
The LW should also pull her MIL aside and tell her that she's not to say anything about her daughters' appearences again "and that if she does, there will be real consequences in terms of her ability to spend time with her granddaughters."
"Cultural and generational difference is at play here, but thatâs no excuse; stick up for what you value as parents, and stick up for your kids, too," he wrote.
