While grandparents will always want the best for their grandchild, their way of thinking is a generation apart from yours. The child likely receives conflicting instructions on how to lead her life from you vis-à-vis from the grandparents. The parents are also likely to leave various instructions with the grandparents for the child, but they may not be able to carry out all of them –either due to physical inability to enforce the rules or due to leniency they want to show to the grandchild. This leads to confusion in the mind of young children and they react aggressively when faced with day to day situations. For instance, the grandparent may have allowed the child to watch more TV than is allowed in the afternoon. But when the child does that on the weekend the parents disallow it. The child reacts with anger. Or when working parents want to take the child to parties or any such social engagements-the child reacts angrily and does not want either of them to go. The real reason may be that she does not get enough time from the working parents and would rather spend the weekend with them.
In the case of children who spend the day with caregivers at home or in daycare centers, the reasons may be different. Caregivers will either follow instructions to a tee (because they are paid to) or they will show leniency (to make their work comfortable and less demanding). There is mostly no love and emotional bonding in such situations (caregivers may even change periodically and that makes the emotion even lesser). Such children yearn for parental attention and may exhibit aggression to attract attention to themselves. Working parents may indulge such children out of guilt-and that only makes things worse because children receive material things in place of love and attention.
Children growing up with grandparents and caregivers may need extra attention from the parents and they need to understand the reason for this behavior and address it sooner than later.
