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China Elevator Stories
Is Your Chinese Mother-in-Law Plotting to Steal Your Children? Early Warning Signs
I used to have frequent fights over the role of the parent with my former Chinese mother-in-law.
11/01/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
She offers to take care of your children
My mother-in-law often offered to take care of my children, starting from birth. She saw nothing unusual about having babies live with her instead of their parents. While we lived in Shenzhen, she even suggested our baby son should stay with her in Northeast China.
When she helped with childcare, she didn’t return the children on time. My older son, for example, would come back hours late, crying for half an hour because he wanted to spend more time with me. She didn’t seem to care about his emotional needs or my desire to spend time with him. She would also manipulate my children so they would spend more time with her and less with me.
During my pregnancy, I relied on her help with my older son. She and my father-in-law would pick him up from kindergarten but wouldn’t bring him home. Instead, they’d take him to their house or let him play elsewhere for hours. When I asked them to return him earlier, they ignored my requests. I had certain health issues during my pregnancy that prevented me from picking my son up from kindergarten myself. With my husband siding with his parents, it became nearly impossible to get my son back when I wanted.
She insisted on picking up my children whenever I went to their kindergarten, despite my requests not to. She was stealing precious time that I wanted to spend with them. When I went to pick them up, she would often show up unannounced, snatch my children from me, and make sure they only paid attention to her. She would spend all her time with them and frequently asked them to go somewhere with her instead of coming home with me, where I had dinner prepared for the three of us as a family. Even though my ex-husband didn’t come home to eat with us (he was spending more and more time outside and didn’t care about having a family life or spending time with me and our children), I still wanted my children to experience what it felt like to be a family and eat together at home.
One time, when both my sons were already in kindergarten, my in-laws showed up ten minutes early and “kidnapped” my children. I couldn’t reach them by phone and later found them at a small park, where they had hidden from me so I wouldn’t find them or the kids.
My Chinese mother-in-law was so jealous of me she would once go to the kindergarten and tear down photos of me and my husband with our children, which the kindergarten had asked the children to bring, and hang up photos with her and my children instead.
And no, I kid you not!
She tried to prevent me from spending any time with my children, and when I did, she constantly tried to steal that time from me. She would show up unannounced and make sure I couldn’t speak with my children. She interrupted every sentence I tried to say, spoke so loudly whenever I began talking to them that I couldn’t be heard, or otherwise disrupted our conversations. She would take them somewhere else to play when they were engaged in another task with me, or come up with other ways to interrupt and redirect their attention solely to her.
She suggests your children should live with her
My mother-in-law frequently suggested that my children live with her. I always declined, but she kept pushing. One time, after my son stayed overnight at her place because my husband thought she might feel lonely, she didn’t want to return him the next day. Instead, she suggested he could live with her permanently and sleep at her house every night.
She takes your children without asking
There were times when my in-laws would take my older son without asking for my permission. This happened often, especially when I was busy caring for my younger son as a baby. They would use my reliance on their help as an excuse to spend as much time with the children as they wanted. I often had to fight to get more time with my own kids. To make matters worse, my husband frequently brought the children to his parents’ house without asking me, making the situation even more difficult.
My ex-husband had given them his door card, so they could enter our flat—and would enter our flat—whenever they wanted. It drove me nuts!
She wouldn’t just enter our flat when I was home; she would also come in when I wasn’t. She treated it as her own home and felt welcome, whether or not anyone had invited her in. She often commented on our home and how I did things. At times, I discovered that she had gone through my private documents, replaced the beddings with her own, changed my children’s pillows, cut holes in their clothes, hidden items so I couldn’t find them, taken belongings from our place to hers without asking, and swapped good items for bad ones. She created clutter and chaos, ensuring our home could never be clean, quiet, or clutter-free.
She tried to forbid me from sleeping in the “European way,” using normal pillows. In her eyes, this would make the pillows “dirty,” and she insisted that I put towels on my pillows while sleeping. She claimed the towels would help with sweat. Now, I don’t tend to sweat much! But if I do, I simply wash the pillowcases. I’m far too sensitive to sleep on towels.
I also like to keep my home decorated with simple colors and patterns, avoiding anything too loud or busy. She, however, wanted to control everything. She wasn’t sensitive (not a highly sensitive person) and didn’t understand that some people need their surroundings to be simple, quiet, calm, and harmonious. Her style involved shrill and loud patterns, which might be fine in her own home, but it’s not acceptable to change someone else’s home in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable in their own space.
I’m one of those people who can’t fall asleep if the bedding is a shrill red and has a strange, busy pattern. To others, this might seem unusual, but it’s completely normal for someone who is highly sensitive, which includes being sensitive to colors and patterns.
For people like me, this is common knowledge. However, if you’re not familiar with high sensitivity, you might not realize how much colors and patterns can affect the sleep of an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) (Neurolaunch):
“Now, let’s talk about the visual aspect of your sleep environment. For HSPs, the colors surrounding them can have a profound impact on their ability to relax and drift off to dreamland. It’s not just about aesthetics – the right color palette can actually help calm your overactive nervous system and prepare your brain for sleep.
So, what colors should you be eyeing for your HSP-friendly bedroom? Cool, muted tones are generally your best bet. Think soft blues, gentle greens, and calming lavenders. These colors have been shown to lower heart rate and blood pressure, helping to induce a state of relaxation. Imagine drifting off surrounded by the soothing hues of a misty mountain morning or a tranquil lavender field. Sounds pretty blissful, doesn’t it?
But here’s the thing – color preferences are highly personal, especially for HSPs. What feels calming to one person might be stimulating to another. That’s why it’s crucial to tune into your own reactions. Spend some time in different colored rooms and pay attention to how you feel. Does that pale blue wall make you feel serene, or does it leave you feeling a bit chilly? Trust your instincts – your HSP superpowers give you valuable insight into what works for you.
When it comes to patterns and textures in your bedding, less is often more for HSPs. Busy patterns or highly textured fabrics can be visually overwhelming, making it harder to wind down at night. Opt for simple, subtle patterns or solid colors with interesting textures.”
I found that both my children were easily overstimulated by her as well.
Another thing she did was to always check what I had thrown away, inspecting the contents of our trash bin. Because she tried to forbid me from discarding certain items, I eventually had to hide what I was throwing away and dispose of it in a way that prevented her from discovering it.
Now, if such situations happen occasionally, it may not be a big deal. But if they happen all the time, and if you’re dealing with in-laws who constantly overstep boundaries, don’t see you as the parent of your children, and refuse to recognize your authority and your privacy, that’s an entirely different matter.
My Chinese mother-in-law would also snatch the stroller from my hands and refuse to give it back, then run off and take my children to her place. She would show up wherever I was and wouldn’t allow me to go for walks alone with my children. She created constant chaos and was not a safe person! She would push the stroller in the middle of the street, ignoring that she was putting my children’s lives at risk.
Refusing to accept your authority as the mother of your children
She wouldn’t buckle up when riding in the car with us, and she was like a shadow, following us everywhere! It took countless fights before I could regain even a little privacy. However, she retaliated by conspiring with my Chinese husband to separate me from my children forever.
She would take our children out of their car seats on the highway when my husband was driving, and later, encouraged that they didn’t buckle up. She thought that car seats were no big deal and that children didn’t need them to be safe. She also wouldn’t change her mind once I showed her videos of car accidents.
Whatever I asked her to do to protect my children from harm or violence, she would deliberately do the exact opposite to provoke me. My children and I didn’t really matter; all that mattered to her was winning and retaliating against me.
She also encouraged my former father-in-law to push my children home on the back of his bike while he was drunk, without a safe bike seat.
This is just an overview of what my former Chinese mother-in-law did. I’ve heard plenty of awful stories from other Western women who were married to Chinese men as well. Some mother-in-laws went to the hospital after a baby was born and took it from the mother, who wouldn’t see her baby again for hours until her mother-in-law brought it back. Others had to deal with overbearing mothers-in-law who followed them like a shadow and wouldn’t let them spend time alone with their baby.
Now, there may be situations where you can easily get your children back, but there are also situations where you cannot—like if you’ve just given birth and can’t simply leave the room to look for your baby.
I may have gone slightly off-topic, but I believe these examples still illustrate how my former mother-in-law violated boundaries, disregarded others’ needs, ignored others’ rights, and prioritized her interests over what was best for my children—remaining with their mother rather than being separated from me and never seeing me again.
I am writing this article while sitting in my flat in Vienna, with two photos of me and my children decorating the wall. One shows me with my older son when he was 4 years old, in a café in Siping. My children are with my ex-husband and my mother-in-law. I don’t know where they live exactly, and the last time I had a video call with them was about four months ago. Before I began receiving biweekly video calls from the court, my ex-husband and his mother had cut off all contact for three and a half years.
Shortly before doing so, he made sure to move to a new address so I wouldn’t know where my children were. During the video calls before his move, my children were living with my in-laws in their flat, against my will. I never wanted my children to end up with their Chinese grandmother as the primary caregiver, as she is a selfish person with no conscience.
I haven’t been allowed to participate in their lives at all. I don’t know what school is like for them, I’m not allowed to celebrate Christmas with them, and I’m not allowed to watch them grow up or visit them.
Do you have a similar experience?