It's a very sad article. I feel for the grandparents. They sound completely besides them selves at the grief. It's so very unhealthy, to wrap ones own happiness up in someone else's life and child.
What I don't understand is how they cannot see their own culpability in any of it.
One mentions she held her son's daughter in her arms right after she was born and saw her every day until the parents cut her off. Did she not see how inappropriate it was to insert herself into a new family like that?
Stories of grandparents mourning the loss of a grandchild, but ok with the loss of their own child. It's baffling.
Expecting a DIL to come to your dinner table weekly for "family dinner" regardless of her own wants, needs and time management. I know this will go over like a ton of bricks here but it's rude and presumptuous.
When you son or daughter get married you are seeing them form a new family. Not an extension of your family. You are no "gaining a daughter or son". You are witnessing your adult child form their own new family outside of yours. Sure, there is still a relationship, but it is drastically changed.
Again, I know i've said it before, but it's all about expectations. When adult children get married and create their own family, then welcome their own children it's a tight knit circle and bond between them.
Maybe you welcomed your parents and inlaws to be part of your nuclear family. That is wonderful if you did and enjoyed it. But I just don't understand the villainizing these DILs because they don't do what you did or what you want.
There is an epidemic of entitlement in our society. Some of these Grandparents feel they have "ownership" or rights to other people. And anyone who tells them different is not only wrong, but mentally unstable.
It's just terribly sad. All of these families put under so much outside stress from people with their own expectations. And as the article (pretty onesided, speaking to their audience for sure) says, it's breaking up larger extended family groups.
I wish articles like this we balanced and could be used to help people, rather than fuel the fire.