NEED TO KNOW
- A woman says her mother-in-law entered her child into a “toddler of the year” competition without asking her first
- Now, she wants the Internet to weigh in, explaining the situation in a post shared to Reddit
- “Am I overreacting or is this odd?” she wants to know
A woman is asking the Internet to weigh in after her mother-in-law entered her child’s photo into a “toddler of the year” competition without asking her first.
In a post shared to Reddit, she writes that her mother-in-law “just forwarded an email to me where my daughter has been accepted into this ‘toddler of the year’ competition, and told me she already entered her and sent them a photo of her, and that it’s up to me if I want to pursue it or not?”
Noting that the forwarded email was the first time she had heard about the competition, she added that her response back was: “Hey there – I’m not interested in this. Please don’t send pictures of (my child) without my permission to websites like this. I appreciate the notion, but I wouldn’t have done this myself.”
She adds that she doesn’t expect to get a response back, writing, “we will all pretend it never happened because she avoids conflict like the plague.”
“Am I overreacting or is this odd?” she asks, noting that her mother-in-law has previously done similar things, like planning her daughter’s 3rd birthday party without letting her know what the theme would be.
“I had to set a hard boundary at that time as well, letting her know that I am her mother and I need to be involved with planning my children’s birthday parties. She obviously learned nothing from that,” she writes, adding, “My husband and I are going to through a divorce right now, and he is just completely unbothered by all of it.”
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Others on Reddit say the mother-in-law went way too far.
Writes one commenter: “This would be a hard no for me and likely less access to my child. That’s totally overstepping. The birthday party thing is weird and would bother me as well.”
Advises another: “Contact the organizer to inform them your child was entered without permission and to remove her photo from the contest. I’d also no longer allow my child to be alone with that side of the family.”
