I agree with this. I also agree with grandma as we have a similar family situation. When my brother remarried he made it clear that his step children where now his children and should be entitled to everything his biological son gets. His step children where very late teens, my nephew was four or five at the time. My parents aren’t rich but they are well off and are very generous on gift giving occasions. One year, they decided to give my nephew a Nintendo Wii and their step grandchildren one hundred dollar gift cards. She wasn’t sure of my brother’s reaction but I said exactly the same thing. Giving is at the givers discretion. If my parents, or myself or any of us excluded his step children, that would have been wrong but I don’t think equal should be mandatory. Along the same lines, my mother in law has never given a thing to my son from a previous marriage and none of us, including him, has thought anything was wrong with that. I will concede that these situations have huge differences in age and if all the children were within the same age group, I may think differently.
What really bothers me about this situation is that the OP admitts the older children get gifts from their maternal grandparents who he openly admitts do not give gifts to their grandchildren’s half siblings. The younger ones are going to realize that the older ones are getting gifts from their maternal grandparents, but that they are being denied presents from their maternal grandparents. This is the kind of situation that can create a lot of resentment and hatred among the siblings.
The solution is for no one to expect any gifts and to express gratitude when a gift is given. It’s not up to you or your wife to dictate gift giving from her relatives.
Denied by whom? And again:
–This is their maternal great-grandparent, my wife’s grandmother. There are no issues with the next younger generation down, or with anyone else in her generation for that matter.
–The older kids do get gifts from their maternal grandparents, and I did acknowledge this as one solid point on the other side. But these are grandparents the younger kids have never met and likely never will; nor are the older kids allowed to bring those gifts to our house.
–I have repeatedly said I would accept a similarly “siloed” situation, in which my wife’s grandmother planned visits when the older two were at their mother’s house, and her gifts and cards to the younger two were not visible when the older two were with us. Then it would be closer to being comparable and fair. But she has never visited with the younger two alone, though she has with the older two–so that logic does not hold.
ETA:
So parents have no say in whether to accept gifts given to their children? If Great-Aunt Bedelia from Alabama gives the kids antique racist dolls, we have no power to refuse? Srsly?
The polite thing to do is to say “thank you” and then throw them in the garbage when you get home. Gifts should be about the intention, not what the gift is comprised of.
If you invited a poor person to your wedding and they gave you a check for $5, would you say, “sorry that’s just not enough”? No, you’d thank them for their thoughtful gift and their generosity with what they know and what they have. It’s decency. IMO, gifts should never be expected. That way there is no disappointment.
The last caught my attention for severity. Seriously, you inspect your kids’ possessions and refuse to have items they might find useful, fun, or have emotional attachment to in your house because of who bought them. Do you keep a spreadsheet containing the prices of all the birthday gifts they have received inorder to be sure everyone receives the exact same amount of presents? Come to think of it how do you handle birthdays? Do you turn away guests unless they bring a present for every one of the children living in your house? If so, I don’t expect many people will be accepting your invitations.
Yes, and the intention is to favor one child over the other, which is poisonous for a family. There is no reason to accept gifts that hurt your children.
This. Perfectly, succinctly, put.
The rule mainly came into play because gifts that were given to them by people from our side of the family went to their mother’s house (where a total of six children live at various intervals) and disappeared into a black hole and were not replaced even by other random gifts arriving from that house. It was a one way conveyer belt that meant we rarely saw gifts ever again after the initial period of their opening, including things like board games we intended as family activities.
But they do have them and they’re old enough to understand that they have a set of grandparents/ of their own , who do not give gifts to their younger siblings. What will you do when/if the younger ones get jealous of the older ones receiving more total gifts? Just because they’re not brought to your house doesn’t mean the younger kids will never find out about them.
Is the timing of the visits entirely up to your wife’s grandmother? It seems to me that you and your wife decide when/if to visit grandma, and you’ve chosen to do so when you have your two older children. And it’s summer, so it’s not as if you visit at Christmas and there’s a house full of people and everyone is opening gifts except your children. In fact, it seems to me from your wife’s email that you are talking about cards and gifts mailed to your home at birthdays and Christmas , which is the opposite of a situation where your older children are the only ones not opening gifts- only the birthday child gets a gift on his or her birthday and presumably , your older children have other gifts at your home on Christmas
If it’s that sort of issue, you’re probably better off throwing them in the trash, but you’re not really looking to refuse gifts. If that’s what you and your wife wanted, you would have refused the gifts if given in person , asked her in the email not to send any gifts at all, or thrown them out when they were received in the mail.What you want is for your older children to be treated exactly the same as the younger ones by everyone in your wife’s family - and you cannot make that happen anymore. And you can’t make life “comparable and fair” for your kids, as much as you might want to.
There will always be something they see as unfair - maybe the younger ones will think it's great that the older kids don't spend a long enough block of time with you for everyone to get on each other's nerves, maybe the older ones think the younger ones have it better because they don't have to move from one parent's house to the other's.Maybe your finances were better earlier or later, so one set got better vacations than the other. Maybe you were more protective of one set or the other, so that one set was allowed more freedom at a younger age- but those ones think you expected them to be more responsible than the other set at the same age. Or maybe it won't be older/younger- maybe it will be split boy/girl. Or one kid gets mad that you don't treat them "exactly the same" while the other is insulted when you do. Maybe one kid has a generous friend whose parents invite him or her along when they go to the movies or the beach and the others don't. I can't tell you which issues it will be, but I can pretty much guarantee that each of your kids will think he or she got the worse end of the deal in some way no matter what you do. And it has nothing to do with being half-siblings - it's just the nature of kids.
Any issue in life can be nitpicked. We can’t make women as physically strong as men on average, but that does not mean the ERA is pointless.
The ERA is pointless and never got passed plus it wasn’t written explicitly to be be about women’s rights specifically and could have had some opposite effects for all we know. It is a still a great analogy though. It was a Don Quixote measure just like yours that will not achieve good results for anyone at all despite a proudly valiant and determined stand.
But it *would* be pointless to pass the ERA if the goal were to make women as physically strong as men on average.
What’s your goal? To make life fair and comparable for all your kids? Not happening.
To avoid the younger kids getting gifts from a person who doesn’t gift the older kids? Tell the woman not to send any gifts, and if she does anyway trash them.But be aware that it may backfire when they find out the older siblings get gifts from people who don’t give them gifts and that you didn’t allow the reverse.
The thing is , it looks like your goal is to have the woman keep sending gifts, but to all the children. It’s not greed, because you don’t have a problem with her spending the same amount divided four ways instead of two. You either want to make her feel the same about all four kids , which isn’t going to happen or you want the kids to think she does which won’t work for much longer if they’re 10 and 13. Even if she doesn’t send any gifts, the older children will soon know she feels differently about the younger two if they don’t already.
I say all of this coming from a family that keeps a stash of extra Christmas gifts in case someone shows up unexpectedly and all of whom buy Christmas gifts for not only my nephew’s fiancee but also her sisters who celebrate Christmas with us. But it would never occur to me to send my niece’s half-siblings birthday or Christmas gifts. I see them perhaps once a year but it’s not at Christmas or their birthday - if it was, I would of course give them gifts.
That we agree on its being a great analogy despite disagreeing about the respective merits of each is fascinating and suggests that we are coming at this from two sides of a great ideological divide.
ETA:
You have reminded me that there is now a new issue. I want to send back the $25 (cash) she most recently sent our youngest who just had his first birthday; my wife is more keen on splitting it up to buy things for all four kids.
Oh, please. Poisonous? If gifts are that important to a family, I would think there are more serious issues of consumerism and entitlement going on.
Look, I know about unequal gift giving among family members. I have one daughter from my ex-husband and one daughter from my current husband. They have different extended family members but I would never, ever dream about dictating who should buy what for whom. How could you possibly know the intention of a gift giver?
Children aren’t stupid. They can understand that blended families have different gift giving traditions. There’s no reason for everything to be fair all the time - these sort of situations teach good life lessons. If feelings of resentment arise, they can be dealt with within the immediate family. I see no reason to confront and manage a person’s generosity.
What’s saddest about this situation is that the issue with gifts (things) is now preventing anyone in this family to focus on what really matters (personal relationships and spending time together). Is it really worth it?
This isn’t really about gifts, it’s about the need for children to be accepted, or at least treated, like full members of the family they happen to be, despite their poor planning in checking the blended family box when they were born. 10 and 13 year olds are still very much children with many years of close family life ahead. They crave and need, above all else, to belong to that family.
Of course people have favorites. Parents have favorites too. But part one of the responsibilities of being a grown up is not letting your personal feelings hurt kids.
Disagree. This is about the parent feeling put out, not the kids. The OP stated that the kids hadn’t even realised there was a possible ‘inequality’ in gift giving.
And for what it’s worth, my grandmother gave our family a group gift (like a tin of biscuits) every Christmas, whilst my cousins received individual gifts each. My grandmother didn’t approve of my father marrying my mother. I’m sure my parents felt very hurt about it, but they didn’t show it to us, they just explained that was the way Nana was, and we accepted it and moved on with our lives.
I’d say that’s a pretty different situation than living side by side in the same nuclear family with a sibling who is favored. “Nana doesn’t like your mom” doesn’t have the same emotional effect as “Nana likes your sister, but doesn’t care about you.”
The half-siblings in blended families with full bio kids already deal with complex feelings. Even if the step-parent is an absolute angel, it’s impossible to entirely shake the suspicion that you are the odd man out, the third wheel or otherwise an unwanted reminder of a past failure that is just getting in the way of the happy bio family. It helps- a lot- that step parent takes active steps to advocate for you.
Because of course evebody not thinking like you is an uncaring psychopath…
No. Any other question and implied insult?