Wife Fed Up With Mother-In-Law’s ‘Negative Comments’ About Daughter’s Piano Skills So She Stops Inviting Her To Performances

Apr 28, 2022 by apost team

Parenting can be challenging, especially when it comes to raising teenagers. These are incredibly important years for kids as they are beginning to pursue more hobbies that pique their interest and really work on developing their own personalities. However, these years can be difficult as emotions can run high, and receiving any kind of negative criticism can even be damaging.

For one mother, she wanted to do everything she could to help raise her 13-year-old daughter’s self-esteem. She went to Reddit on April 19, 2022, to talk about an issue she had regarding not feeling much support from her husband and her mother-in-law when it came to appreciating her child’s talents.

The original poster (OP) explained how her daughter had found an interest in playing piano when she was just 9 years old and has continued taking piano lessons ever since. She has even played piano in a few different productions both in and out of school.

While OP has been incredibly supportive of her daughter’s creative ambitions, her mother-in-law has not been as polite. In fact, the mother-in-law typically criticizes her granddaughter’s performance every time she attends a recital or play but doesn’t offer much room for improvement.

This has become a huge issue for OP, but her husband refuses to do anything about his own mother’s insensitive comments. Since then, OP has had several disagreements with her husband about no longer wanting to invite her mother-in-law to her daughter’s performances and has turned to Redditors for their help on the matter. Let's take a look.

Starting off her Reddit post, OP explained that her 13-year-old daughter has participated in plenty of plays in and out of school for playing the piano. However, she had a problem with the fact that her mother-in-law came to every performance and would almost always point out how the teenager “messed up.” OP said:

“My daughter has picked up on these negative comments and her self esteem kept getting low and by extension, her performance kept getting low as well. I told my husband his mom needs to either stop putting our daughter down or stop coming to her plays. He said his mom is the grandmother and should be included in these events as ‘support.’”

At the start of April 2022, OP’s daughter had a performance and her mother-in-law decided to attend. Unfortunately, nothing on her end had changed. OP explained:

“Once the play was over and after we got a chance to see our daughter who looked nervous and shaking – mother-in-law looked at her and said, ‘Let me just say that today’s performance was disappointing.’ My daughter was in shock and I was floored completely. My daughter started crying and rushed away.”

The mother-in-law conveniently had to leave shortly after, but OP was quick to express her distaste for the comments that were just made.

“I was fuming, I told her what she said to my daughter was not OK and that she made her upset,” she said. “She said something along the lines of ‘just telling it how it is’ then left.”

After the family returned home, OP and her husband got into an argument about whether the mother-in-law should be invited to their daughter’s performances in the future. 

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While OP’s husband just said that OP was being “over dramatic” and that his mother was offering “constructive criticism,” she argued that it wasn’t fair to their daughter to constantly be put down. “My husband said I was way out of line and shouldn’t use our daughter in my fight with his mom,” she added.

Since then, OP turned to Reddit users for their advice on how to best handle the issue going forward. Fortunately, many people commented with their ideas. One Redditor commented:

“Remove your husband from receiving the information on your daughter’s activities. He is the same as his mother. He doesn’t see anything wrong because that was how he was raised.”

Another user even suggested that OP end her marriage, and said:

“I would really consider a divorce from this man, he clearly is a bad husband and even worse father. Do whatever you can to get her away from both of them, because it isn’t going to get any better.”

OP later updated her post to add some more context and give a bit of an update. “My mother-in-law and I don’t talk due to past disagreements,” she said. She also explained how both her mother-in-law and her husband want her daughter to become a doctor and not waste time playing the piano.

However, it seemed that the situation wasn’t getting better. “My husband told me he’ll keep inviting his mom over and over and over again til I learn to stop using our daughter as a tool to fight his mom with (believe me, I’m not),” OP said.

What do you think this mother should do regarding her mother-in-law’s incessant criticism of her daughter? Let us know, and be sure to pass this along to your family and friends to find out what they think, too.