AITA: Asked Son To Help With His Kids While His Wife Is Induced

When your a parent of multiple children and pregnant with a baby on the way, it makes sense to organise who will watch the kids while you're in hospital.

A grandmother who offered to help in this situation, took to Reddit's AITA (Am I The Asshole?) board after asking her son to come home and help with his children while his wife was being induced...

Read the main post below...

"I (71 female) have a son (39 male ) whose wife (36 female) gave birth to their fourth child nine months ago. All of her births have taken a long time, and she has been induced the last two times, including this one.

My husband (72 male) and I were babysitting the three older kids (5 male, 4 female and 2 female). She was induced at eight in the morning, and by one in the afternoon, there was not much progress, if any at all. Since the kids are a handfull, I told my son he needed to come home to help for a few hours, since it looked like it would take a really long time.

Since they live half an hour away from the hospital, he could go back if anything happened, so it is not like he wouldn’t be present when the child was born, which I ofcourse understand is a big moment for him and his wife.

My son took great offense to my request and told me to suck it up, bribe the kids with treats or whatever worked for us, and that there was no way he would leave his wife’s side, unless there was an emergency with one of the kids, like they were admitted to the hospital or something.

I told him that the kids were their responsibility, and that they couldn’t expect us to babysit around the clock if this took days. He told me we should not have said yes to babysit at all if we wouldn’t stick it out, since one never knows how long a birth will take, but that he would get someone to come and then he hung up. Three hours later someone showed up and we went home.

We offered to babysit for a few hours the next day, but our offer was declined, because the people who came to relieve us, stayed until the baby was born and my son came home.

After this they have not asked us to babysit once and has hired a sitter instead, which we feel is a waste of money, since we are available for free. We get to see the grandkids if we visit them, but they very seldom visit us, compared to before.

I tried talking to both my son and DIL, but they said they felt we didn’t respect them at all since we wouldn’t “even let her give birth in peace”. My husband and I agree that they are overreacting, since she did not, in fact, give birth until seven the next morning, 23 hours after being induced, and our son could very easily have helped us with the kids for a few hours.

So AITA like my son says I am, for helping us with the kids, even if his wife was being induced, but had little to no progress?"

Read the full Reddit thread here

What was the general consensus?

The poster was voted YTA (You're The Asshole). One of the top comments said:

"YTA. Why are you surprised that your son isn’t asking you to baby sit anymore when you couldn’t fulfil the responsibility to begin with?

It was a big moment in his life and he was, kindly, trying to support and stay by his wife’s side; for you to call him back completely defeats the purpose of getting someone to look after his kids. If you couldn’t handle it, you shouldn’t have put yourself forth as an option.

A half an hour ride is enough to miss a birth btw… it depends and differs between people. If he could come home, he wouldn’t need you there.

YTA for offering yourself to help, yta for doing a half-assed job and not knowing why he’s upset and YTA for even thinking that you would be considered again for a job you couldn’t even handle the first time."

While another commented:

"YTA! How can you possibly think you aren’t the AHs here? Let’s recap:

1. You offer to watch your grandkids while you son and DIL are in labor, but after a few hours decide it’s too much for you…

2. So you demand that your son leave his wife, who is in labor, to come watch them

3. Then you have the nerve to belittle their feelings about the whole situation

You aren’t reliable, and have made it clear you aren’t capable of baby sitting for even a few hours without causing drama. Why would they ever trust you with their kids again?"

 Our verdict...

You can't put a time on how long it should take to labour a baby. So when you have offered to watch children while that happens you should expect be watching the children for atleast a full day, if not through the night too! We think the Grandmother shouldn't have offered if she couldn't follow through with it, the parents trusted her to take that worry of childcare away and she majorly let them down. It's no wonder why they haven't asked her to babysit since then. when after five hours she needed the Dad back to help.

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