Our daughter has been home with us almost nine months. She is 20 months old. Her attachment has progressed very well, although we've experienced normal setbacks along the way, and expect more in the future. Our biggest issue with her has been inappropriate affection, flirting, and manipulating of strangers and extended family members. We are not around our extended family often. Our daughter sees my husband's parents about once every three weeks, and my parents less often than that. Aunts and Uncles are even less frequently. We've limited as much chance as possible for our daughter to act out inappropriately, but she still is not 100% healed, and I know it could take several more months, maybe years.
Here's what I'm really infuriated about tonight.
My husband's parents came over tonight for a visit. We have always had the most problems with them understanding our rules, and all the attachment issues. My daugher was really in a hyper mood, very engaging, flirty, and coy. These are not people she sees very often, so she doesn't know them as well as most babies her age might now thier grandparents. She doesn't really yet even understand what to call them.
My FIL has a bad habit of just sitting on the floor rather than on the sofa. This is an open invitation for our daughter to interact with him more closely and intimately, and he knows this. Tonight she was constantly in his lap, hugging him over and over, laying accross him, all things that were inappropriate. I finally pulled her off him and told her "enough" and my Dh and I held her close to us. Many people might look at how long she has been home, and consider that it is her grandfather, and think her behavior was perfectly normal. Both my husband and I knew it was not.
I finally took the baby in for a bath, during which time my husband proceeded to explain to his parents that it was inappropriate for our daughter to have been interacting the way she was with her Grandpa. His parent's reaction was something like this:
"Oh, no, that's perfectly normal behavior for a grandchild. Grandparents should be considered as a second set of parents. Children should come running to the car when they see their grandparents pull in the driveway. There was absolutely nothing inappropriate about how she was loving on her Grandpa, etc., etc., etc." Well, this may be true for a child that we would have given birth to. There would be no reason for concern if this were our bio child, and she didn't have issues from living in the orphanage her entire first year.
The problem is that my husband's parents are naive about a lot of things. We've given them articles about attachment and we've asked them to limit the type of interaction they have with our daughter, because this issue is really big for her. We've also struggled with them during the last nine months to hear and understand and accept what we tell them about our daughter's emotional limitations and needs. They just don't get it! Which means, they aren't very inclined to help us heal her!
I don't know how else to get through their heads. So, if anyone has any suggestions I'd be very grateful to hear them. Thanks for letting me vent.