How do I deal with in-laws who don't respect me?

Mostly through your partner. Your partner's family is your partner's to manage. You can be civil and present, but the lines about visits, comments and the children need to come from their child, not from you. If your partner will not hold them, the problem you have is with your partner, and that is the one to work on.

Is it OK to limit contact with my partner's family?

Yes, if the two of you decide it together and your partner carries the message. Less contact is a reasonable response to people who make visits miserable. Cutting contact completely is a bigger step with costs of its own, especially where there are grandchildren, and is usually better as a last resort than a first.

What if my partner always takes their family's side?

Then say so plainly, once, outside an argument: 'When your mum criticises me and you say nothing, I feel on my own.' A partner who hears that and starts to back you up is fixing it. One who hears it and tells you that you are oversensitive, every time, is telling you something about the relationship rather than about their mother.

Articles › Relationships · Family

Dealing with difficult in-laws

Why the in-law problem is almost always a couple problem in disguise, how to agree a united line and hold it, and the one version that is about something else.

Your partner's mother has opinions about how you load a dishwasher, raise a child and spend a Sunday, and she shares them. Your partner's father talks over you. Your partner's sister arrives unannounced. Or none of that, and it is simply that every visit leaves you drained and quietly furious, and your partner seems not to notice.

In-law trouble is one of the oldest problems there is, and most of the advice about it is aimed at the wrong person.

It is a couple problem

The in-laws are rarely the actual difficulty. The actual difficulty is almost always what happens between you and your partner when the in-laws do what they do. If your partner backs you, most in-law behaviour is survivable: an eye-roll shared in the car home, a line held together, a visit cut short by mutual agreement. If your partner does not, the smallest comment becomes a wound, because you took it alone.

So the question to ask is "where does my partner stand". Everything else follows from the answer.

Their family, their job

A useful rule: each of you handles your own family. A line drawn by a parent's own child is heard as a line. The same line drawn by the in-law is heard as an attack, and it makes everything worse.

That means your partner says "Mum, we're not discussing how we feed the baby" or "we're coming for lunch, not the weekend". You stand next to them and are warm. It is unfair that you have to be the pleasant one while they do the hard bit, and it is what works.

Agree the line first

Before the visit, not during. Decide together: how long, what is off limits, what the signal is for "we're leaving", what you will say when the comment about your parenting arrives. Then hold it as a pair. Families push hardest where they sense a gap between the two of you, and most difficult in-laws have an unerring instinct for the gap.

If you want to think about what a line that actually holds looks like, rather than one that gets announced and then abandoned at the first sulk, Lines that hold is about exactly that.

Grandchildren

Grandparents raise the stakes. They want more access than you want to give, they have views, and they often have a quiet belief that they did it right and you are doing it wrong. Decide what you can live with and offer that, warmly and without apology. Regular, predictable contact that you control is far easier for everyone than contact negotiated afresh every fortnight. The children will do fine with grandparents who are a bit much. What they do less well with is watching their parents fight about it.

Gifts with strings

Money from parents is rarely only money. A deposit, a car, help with the childcare bill: these are kind, and they come with an understanding, said or unsaid, about what the giver is owed. Before you accept, agree between yourselves what you are and are not willing to give in return, and whether you could, if it came to it, give the money back. Help you cannot afford to refuse is help that has a price.

Different families, different rules

Where one of you comes from a family that lives in each other's houses and the other from one that visits twice a year, the problem is one of translation rather than rudeness. The same is true across cultural and religious lines, where expectations about elders, duty and who decides can be deeply felt and completely unspoken. The conversation to have is between the two of you, about which rules this household will run on. You will not please both families. You can be clear, together, about what you have chosen.

The version that is about something else

Most in-law difficulty is the ordinary kind, and everything above applies. One version is not ordinary, and it is worth naming once.

If your partner's family is used as a reason you cannot see your own, if you are told your family are a bad influence and the visits dry up, if your partner's parents are enlisted to monitor you or to deliver criticism your partner then disclaims, or if the demands of their family are the stated reason you have no money or time of your own, then the in-laws are the instrument rather than the problem. That pattern has a name and a page: What is coercive control?.

For everyone else: car home, eye-roll, debrief, done. It gets easier, and the dishwasher can be loaded however you like.

Where this leads

Updated 2026-10-28. This page is information, not legal, medical or clinical advice. Clearr is a paid reflective service run by a company, not a charity or crisis service.