It’s rather difficult to use loaded terms like “common decency” when dealing with what can be complex and anxiety producing family conflicts. You might see this as a simple notification. The daughter might see this as avoiding a manipulative parent’s desire to criticize. The mom might see this being excluded from a family event out of spite.
Looks like you giving your kids money is not making either you or your kids happy. So why continue?
This Christmas, give as you would have (i.e. cash, and equally), but announce a new policy. Going forward, your kids (& grandkids) will get a tangible gift. If they can’t tell you what they might like, you’ll try your best to come up with something. At the same time, you will put some money aside for the college education of grandchildren. The exact amounts won’t be known until college time, but tell them to expect it to be modest.
Learn about the ability to switch money between family members in 529 funds. That way you get the tax savings (depending on your state), but retain the flexibility to move money between grandchildren depending on need or merit. But never outwardly link contribution to desired action by child or grandchild. That way lies misery.
As someone with a manipulative, controlling mother (whom I no longer talk to), I still think the problem here is communication. Grandma is angry because she’s assuming daughter’s reasons for stuff, and daughter is angry because she’s assuming grandma’s reasons for stuff. After enough frustrating attempts at communication, the easiest way to minimize frustrations is to minimize communication. Which seems to be going on here.
My brother, by the way, avoids overbearing mom by telling her he’ll have to check with his wife on everything. My mother therefore assumes SiL doesn’t like her. Just like the OP’s situation. Of course, my brother still talks to my parents, so maybe that’s a better solution for the OP.
Regardless, it is obvious that neither the OP’s daughter nor the OP’s wife has been able to communicate to the other what they are thinking/feeling, so it looks like a bad idea to assume either is correct about what is going on. In this case, though, the daughter’s POV is driving her decisions, so that’s probably the one to focus on understanding.
As an adult I always got along better with my parents than my sister did - like, twenty times less drama, and that’s not at all an exaggeration. It might be an understatement.
I never could figure out why that was - I wasn’t the favourite as a kid - until she mentioned that clearly Mom and Dad were angry at her because they hadn’t called “in a couple of days.” I didn’t understand; so what? It was then I learned that she spoke to them on the phone like five or six times a week.
I was genuinely amazed. Five or six times a week, I asked… how the hell do you find the time? What on earth could you even be talking about? I call them once a week and there’s no time to argue about anything.
This is getting off topic, but I’m curious: are you the younger sibling?
It’s like my brother and I have different parents, and I’ve always wondered why (I tried to keep him out of the skirling drama). When I told him “I’m out of this”, I found out that he’d observed how I got treated as the older kid, and simply removed himself as much as possible to avoid the same fate. Hence, his relying on my SiL to run interference (doesn’t work for me, as I’m single).
To answer your question, you’re not obligated to give them anything. You’re not obligated to be fair. You’re not obligated to play by the same rules and expectations that they were used to while growing up.
Your kids are adults. They are free to refuse the money, they are free to move away, they are free to accept it. What I wouldn’t tolerate is my kid saying “You control me with money” while holding her hand out for a check.
I have a fifteen year old with whom I made the same bargain. She accepted it, knowing that going to a private school will be better for her than the public options available to us. But she is aware that there are performance expectations from us and that we monitor her grades closely (I have charted her Iowa scores since the 1st grade, so this isn’t unusual behavior in our house).
If she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t have to go. She understands that as well.
The one who accused you of controlling her? Nah, she’s allowing herself to be controlled. Again, she’s an adult - financially, you no longer “owe” her a thing.
I never had kids, so maybe I’m not the best person to answer this, but having had siblings I’ll agree with the majority here – give them all the same amount.
Not to open up another can of worms here, but I’m curious – what does this daughter get you and your wife for Christmas? What do your other children get you?
Now, I’m not saying you should compare the gifts from each of your children to those given by the others – each child has their own situation with regards to time and monetary resources. But gift-giving among adults is a two-way street, and you may be able to tell quite a bit about the relationships by what they give you.
This. A thousand times this.
I think you need to consider that your daughter has a point.
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For over a decade, you posted about raising your kids and I–and others–told you you were too strict, too inflexible. This is the little girl who was too scared, at 12, to tell you that she fucked up a blanket, so you cancelled the whole family’s ski trip.
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For over a decade, you’ve posted threads trying to understand the humans, most especially asking why other people use stupid ways that you don’t understand to show affection. You don’t value signs of affection from others if they seem useless to you–in fact, you rather resent people when they do things like bring you flowers, because you can afford your own flowers and have better taste. You do not seem willing to show affection to others in a way that is meaningful to them.
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You feel a moral imperative not to celebrate kids or make them feel special for “minor” accomplishments. You chided another father for giving his daughter flowers after a dance recital. Even now, when you talk about your kids, you undercut their accomplishments–they’ve never impressed you or gone beyond your expectations. You are, at best, pleased at how they’ve turned out.
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You use long boring discussions strategically. You are always willing to talk about things and “listen”, but you grind away at other people’s objections and find little points to disagree with and then when people give in and do what you want, you think you convinced them, enlightened them, when really you just wore them down–and now they have to bear the added humiliation of having to pretend you were the smart one and they were just being illogical. * Understand that this makes people quit talking to you and start making bullshit excuses instead. *
I know you love your kids and it seems like your way worked fine with the older two, but the younger one was more high strung and had pretty complex emotional needs that you did not meet. Rather than look for a lot of random people to validate you in the short term, you should seriously consider if some of your core axioms about parenting were flawed, at least for this one, and you need to repair the damange.
And apologize to her for the damn ski trip. Without asking her to first fess up to fucking up the blanket.
That’s a gift to the grandchild, not to your daughter.
I consider rules along the lines of “my house, my rules” and “so long as you eat the food I buy, you will follow my rules” to be perfectly appropriate. Heck, the fellowships I got from my government required keeping a certain GPA to be renewed: I don’t think of that as “my gummit controlled me with money”, I think of it as “fellowships should go to people who actually make good use of them”. You weren’t “using money to control your children”, you were exercising the control you had over them in multiple ways, some of which happened to involve money.
I’d gift all children equally, unless there happened to be someone with special needs.
Oh, and: that daughter and you guys appear to be pretty incompatible, but the incompatibility appears to be even worse with your wife than with you. Each of those three individuals can help fix his or her part (or have the occasional big revelation), but neither can change the other two.
Both my brother Ed and my mother will hold a grudge. No, not “hold”: hug. They hug them, and stroke them, and water them carefully. They make sure those grudges grow strong and mighty, able to resist any storm of niceness. If the offender doesn’t even know he’s currently the center of a grudge and keeps trucking along as usual he’s being insensitive; if the offender figures out something has their nose out of whack and tries to find out what then it’s “now he asks!” (Mom) or glares and shown teeth (Ed). The original offense may even be something completely imaginary, but if a third person tries to explain this, the most common responses will be “pfaugh!” (Mom) or glares and shown teeth again (Ed). You know who can end those grudges? Only the ones holding them. It’s been known to happen, but if Jay or me ever figure out how come we might have a bestseller in our hands.
After reading this I went back to look at some of your older threads and think that there definitely is a pattern there, or at least some deeper context. There have been multiple threads where there have been either miscommunication or misunderstanding because of a conflict between advice and discussion. Control has come up as an issue in the past and this appears to be a continuation of that same pattern.
Thanks all. Man, some of you have long memories. Not that it will change your opinion of me and mine, but this recent post concerns my oldest daughter.
I didn’t expect all puppies and rainbows when posting this, but to state the obvious, the fact that I tend to post and seek opinions in moments of difficulty does not necessarily paint a complete picture of my and my family’s entire lives and relationships.
But thanks to everyone. I think I’ve got enough now to go on from here. Continue or not as you wish.
people who have been reading your posts for a decade might just have more insight than you are comfortable with.
I’m going to strongly argue that this is not correct. It is as much a gift to the parent as it is the child,
My mother contributes to a tax-sheltered education fund for my daughter. I absolutely consider this is a gift to me. The fact that she is doing this, by extension, reduces how much I have to worry about setting aside. (and in fact makes anything I were to save more costly, since the tax advantages have a maximum allowable contribution per child and further contributions would not be as cost effective.) I cannot deny that while my kid will be the one who gets the education, I get some financial benefit from it.
Just curious do you keep files on all of us, or just Dinsdale? 
I’m gonna take Manda Jo’s comments at face value and agree that there may be a bit of truth to her characterization of your historical parenting style. But you are the only parents she’s got.
Well, it depends. I think you are a gracious and thoughtful person, so naturally you feel appreciative of something that is obviously a benefit to you as well as to your child. You are presenting a best case scenario.
I think the idea of the gift being a gift for the granddaughter is tied to a worst case scenario, the idea of “do you want to essentially punish a grandchild for something the parent has done?” Some people might be okay with this. The recommendation that people are making is to look at it as ultimately a gift to the grandchild and leave the parent out of it as much as possible, rather than to withhold the gift entirely.
So I would strongly argue back that in a best case scenario for a family with strong relationships, sure, it is a gift that imparts kindness and good will to both parent and child, BUT there is nothing at all wrong, and in fact is probably advisable, for the giving grandparent to consider a gift to a grandchild to be separate from the relationship with the child’s parents if that relationship is fraught.
I think the college fund is somewhat of a mixed gift. In part, I very much think the gift is aimed at the parents, to relieve them of some of the stress of having to save for something so pricey so far off. But - as I hinted at above, I wonder about the possible impact such a gift will have on parents who may not be acting as financially conservatively as I would expect/respect.
Then, there is the aspect of gifting someone, when you really don’t know who they are going to be in 16 years. What if the baby grows up to be a fuck-up? Or the parents - for whatever reason - poison their attitude towards you?
Yeah, I’ll admit I may overthink just committing myself to gift 10s of thousands of $ over a decade or more. Because - of course as we all know - there WAS that incident in the park that i posted about 15 years ago… 
Had brunch w/ dtr/gdtr this a.m. Went extremely pleasantly. Dtr asked my wife if she’d help her sew together a stocking she was making for gdtr. I chickened out about saying we would need to discuss what she said to her mom. I tend to trust people to intend the words they say, so I’m presuming she has some serious issues with her mother, our parenting, our marriage - perhaps more. But if she is content to have a superficially pleasant relationship with us and let us see our gdtr, well, I guess I have no need to risk that in the hopes of a more authentic relationship. Hell, the authentic relationship might turn out to be quite unpleasant!
Neither my wife nor I particularly care for SIL, and see no sign he cares about us. So we’ll likely extend invites to my dtr and gdtr, and expect nothing in return. Brunch/lunch during days that I work at home when SIL is at work seem a good option.
Just more than a little disappointing to have put so much well-intentioned effort into childrearing, and not end up with a closer relationship.
That’s going to depend on your particular circumstances/philosophy. Gifts from the grandparents would not have saved me a dime. I was able to pay the tuition at the city university and they would have gotten that amount from me no matter where they went - if they chose to attend somewhere more expensive, they would be taking the loans, not me. If they somehow had gotten full scholarships, they still would have gotten the money I put aside in their 529 (minus the taxes I would have had to pay if it wasn’t for further education). The only way it would have been a gift to me is if my parents were able and willing to fund my children’s entire college education no matter where they chose to go and how many degrees they wanted to get - and sadly, I didn’t get those parents ( willing, maybe but absolutely not able)
- BTW, you might want to check on this. As far as I know 529 plans don’t have a maximum contribution per beneficiary - there’s a limit to how much a year I can give a single beneficiary before I run into a gift tax return, but how much my mother puts into a 529 doesn’t affect a separate 529 that I’m funding unless there’s more money than is needed for educational expenses. If that happens there may be unqualified withdrawals at some point. If you’re not talking about 529, it may be different.
You may always mean what you say and never say something you didn’t intend to- but the rest of us sometimes get emotional and say things we don’t really mean and even things we do mean but didn’t intend to say.
I have some feelings about something my mother did a couple of years ago. I've never told her about them because there's simply no point. I don't intend to ever tell her, because again, there's no point. Doesn't mean it might not come out someday if some other issue brings it bubbling up.