Competing with the Other Grandparents
Grandparent jealousy is more common than anyone admits, and more damaging than most grandparents realize. Here's what score-keeping actually looks like—and how to stop doing it.
Updated May, 2026
When my granddaughter was three, she called me Grandma more than once. She usually corrected herself, but I didn't make a big deal out of it either way. We both knew I'm DeeDee. Grandma is her other grandmother.
She loves Grandma. She loves me. And if her three-year-old mind confused two people who love her dearly, she's human. (There is fascinating research on the way we confuse the names of family members, and dogs, but not cats!)
My grandchildren had, somewhat quaintly, just four grandparents. Many of our friends have grandchildren with multiple sets. One of our best friends, Stu, is one of four grandfathers to his grandchildren: Stu, his son-in-law's father, and his step-daughter's father and his husband. That's a lot of names for Grandpa for those kids to keep straight.
I suspect many of you have Other Grandparents in your life. If you are lucky, as I am, they are lovely people with whom you feel fortunate to share grandchildren. But even in the best circumstances, it's inevitable that you will sometimes feel jealous or left out. That's human nature too. The question isn't whether you'll feel it. The question is what you do with it.
Why competing with the other grandparents feels so natural
When you love your grandchildren as fiercely as you do, it's hard not to notice what the other grandparents have that you don't. They live closer. They can afford bigger gifts. They see the grandchildren every week while you see them every few months. They were there for the first steps and you heard about it on a group text.
Those feelings of jealousy, inadequacy, or competitiveness are not signs that something is wrong with you. They're signs that you care deeply about your role in your grandchildren's lives and you're afraid of missing out on it. Understanding why grandparents feel and act this way doesn't excuse the behavior, but it does make it easier to manage.
What score-keeping actually looks like
Here's where it gets important to be honest with yourself. Grandparent jealousy starts being a problem when it stops being a private feeling and shows up in your behavior. Score-keeping looks like this:
Commenting on the gifts the other grandparents give
Pointing out that the grandchildren seem closer to them
Pushing for equal time as though grandparenting were a custody arrangement rather than a relationship
Framing every visit as something that needs to be balanced against the last one
Keeping a mental tally of how many weekends the other grandparents had versus how many you had
None of those things feel like score-keeping when you are doing them. They feel like reasonable observations, or honest expressions of how left out you feel. But to the parents in the middle, they register as something else entirely.
What grandparent jealousy does to the parents in the middle
This is the part that most grandparents don't see clearly, because they're focused on their own experience. When you keep score out loud, your adult child is the one who absorbs it.
They're already navigating the logistics of more than one set of grandparents, more than one set of expectations, more than one set of feelings. When one grandparent regularly signals that they're tracking time and coming up short, parents feel guilty for something they can't fully control. The closeness between their children and the other grandparents isn't something they manufactured: it often comes down to geography, schedules, personality, or simple circumstance. When you make that closeness into a grievance, you're asking them to fix something that isn't broken.
Parents who hear constant comparisons about whose turn it is, whose gifts were more generous, or who seems to be the favorite find it exhausting. One parent I heard from put it plainly: "We spend all our time hearing how we didn't measure up to equal-time expectations. We don't know what to say, because there's nothing we can say." That's not a family dynamic anyone wants to create.
Does it matter if one set of grandparents is favored?
Honestly, no. A child's capacity to love is not finite. They are fully capable of loving every grandparent who treats them and those they love with kindness and respect. If you are one of those people, you will be loved.
This doesn't mean they won't sometimes seem closer to one grandparent than another. But that tends to reflect what the child needs at a particular stage more than how hard any grandparent is trying. Children go through phases where they prefer one parent, and the same is true of grandparents. It shifts. And children's love cannot be bought. The factors that predict a close grandparent-grandchild relationship—frequency of contact, emotional bonding, shared values—take no money and can be achieved even from a distance.
How to stop keeping score and focus on what's yours
There is only one real path to success here: focus on your own relationship with your grandchild, and let the other grandparents focus on theirs. Be the best grandparent you can be, whatever your circumstances, and you will be a loved and important part of your grandchild's team.
That means being a good member of that team — which includes treating the other grandparents with the same respect you'd want extended to you. Even when the relationship with them is complicated. Even when the other grandparents include an ex. There is no version of the score-keeping behavior that makes family gatherings easier, makes parents feel supported, or makes grandchildren feel safe. There is only the version where you take the high road and make more room for everyone to love them.
The rules we try to teach our grandchildren apply here too: Share nicely. Play fair. Don't be mean.
They'll love you for it.
If you're a parent navigating grandparent jealousy or competition in your family, Understanding Grandparents was written for you. It covers the psychology behind why grandparents behave this way, how to tell the difference between normal friction and behavior that needs addressing, and word-for-word scripts for the conversations you're dreading. $17.
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