Mom Says Her In-Laws Kept Scolding Her Kids on Vacation — Then Told Her Daughter To Move While She Was Eating Dinner

A mom says a family vacation with her husband’s relatives turned stressful after her young children were repeatedly corrected, delayed at meals and treated like they were constantly in the way.

The woman shared the situation in a Reddit post, explaining that she was on a New Year’s vacation with her husband’s family. The trip had been paid for by the in-laws, and she said she was grateful for that. But once everyone was together, she started feeling like her 4- and 6-year-old children were being treated unfairly compared with the baby in the family.

Her brother-in-law and his wife had a baby a few months earlier, and this was the first time the poster’s children were meeting their cousin. According to the mom, the kids were excited and tried hard to be careful. They washed their hands before touching the baby, stayed gentle and were careful not to cough near him. But even with that, she said the adults kept correcting them for small things.

The poster said her children were scolded for not coughing into their elbows, even when they were not near the baby. They were also corrected for running around or being noisy while the baby was sleeping on the floor in a common area. That part bothered her because she said the adults themselves got loud later in the evening while the baby was still sleeping in the room and while her own children were nearby trying to sleep.

Food became another issue. The mom said if one of her kids said they were hungry and she told them to grab fruit, another adult would step in and tell them they could not have any. She later clarified that she had bought the fruit herself, which made the correction feel even more frustrating.

Dinner timing made the trip harder, too. At home, the family usually eats dinner together around 6:30. On the vacation, she said dinner kept getting delayed until after the baby’s mother finished pumping. The poster said her kids often did not eat until 7 or later, and in an edit, she clarified that they had been there four days and were told each day dinner would be at 6:30, but the adults did not eat before 8:30. Because of that, she often had to make the kids something quick, which meant they were not really getting family meals together at all.

The moment that finally pushed her over happened during dinner. Her daughter was in the middle of eating when her mother-in-law told the child to take her dinner and go somewhere else because the adults were about to eat and she wanted to set the table. The poster asked why her daughter could not finish eating there. Her husband also asked whether it could wait until the child was done, but his mother got irritated, and he ended up telling their daughter to move down the table instead.

The mom said she was livid.

Later that night, after the children had been put to bed and the adults had eaten, her daughter came downstairs. The poster said she heard her sister-in-law reprimand the child for getting out of bed without even asking why she was up. When the mom checked on her, she found out the girl had come downstairs because her brother was making noise and she could not sleep.

The poster asked Reddit if she was overreacting, but commenters mostly told her she was not. One commenter said they would leave early or take the kids to a hotel nearby, especially one with an indoor pool where the children could actually enjoy the trip instead of being watched for every little thing. Another joked that she should “take the fruit” with her, since she had bought it.

Several commenters said the adults were expecting too much from little kids on vacation. One person said family trips with young children are already difficult because routines are thrown off, kids get hungry and tired, and extended relatives often see them only in those harder moments. Another commenter said children that age should not be expected to sit quietly around a sleeping baby in a shared space all day.

Others focused on the fact that the baby’s actual parents were not the main problem. The poster clarified that her brother-in-law and his wife were “totally chill” and only asked that the kids wash their hands, which she said was already a given. She said the tension was mainly coming from her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, with her father-in-law somewhat involved too.

A few commenters told her to stop waiting on the adults’ meal schedule and simply feed her kids at their normal time. One person said if the children are hungry, they eat, and if they are tired, they go to bed or leave the room. Another said the parents needed to treat their own children’s needs as the priority instead of trying to keep the whole vacation running around everyone else’s expectations.

The strongest reactions came from people who said no one else should be disciplining the kids while both parents were right there. One commenter said they would not accept other adults correcting their children after being told not to, while another said the relatives should bring concerns to the parents instead of snapping at the kids directly.

By the end of the thread, the vacation sounded less like a relaxing family trip and more like a week of the children being treated as a problem to manage. The mom was grateful for the paid trip, but that did not make it easy to watch her kids get corrected over food, noise, coughing, bedtime and even where they could sit while eating dinner.

For her, the issue was not that a new baby needed care. It was that her own children were still little, still hungry, still tired and still learning how to behave around a baby. And after days of watching adults bend around the newborn while expecting a 4- and 6-year-old to act older than they were, one plate of dinner being moved down the table became the moment everything finally boiled over.