Why Won't My Mother Grow Up? The Two-Year-Old Granny

Stamping feet. Demanding attention. Furious about not getting their own way. If you swapped the nappy for a handbag, you'd never know the difference.

Short version: Some parents don't mellow with age, they just get more brazen about the same behaviour they've always had. Real research tracking personality traits over time found grandiosity often fades with age, but entitlement and lack of empathy frequently stay exactly the same, or get worse. Toddlers grow out of tantrums. Some grannies, apparently, grow into theirs. Find it funny, or it'll drive you round the bend.

You've spent your whole adult life waiting for the mellowing. The bit where age, wisdom, or just general tiredness finally softens the demanding, tantrum-prone version of your mother into someone reasonable. Here's the plot twist nobody warns you about: it might just not be coming, and there's actual research backing up why.

The science of the two-year-old granny

Some traits fade. Others don't. Research tracking personality over time found that grandiosity and the need for admiration often decline with age, but entitlement and lack of empathy frequently remain stable, or intensify.

Toddlers throw tantrums because they haven't yet developed the tools to regulate big feelings, and, crucially, they grow out of it. A genuinely difficult older relative isn't working with an undeveloped brain, they're working with a fully mature one that simply never installed the update. As one expert memorably put it: children grow out of their tantrums. Certain grown adults just grow into theirs, with decades of extra practice.

Signs you might be dealing with a two-year-old granny

• Full meltdown if the attention in the room isn't on them within roughly ninety seconds
• An Olympic-level ability to sulk without ever explaining why
• Genuine outrage if anyone else's news is more exciting than theirs that day
• Zero memory of the thing they did five minutes ago, total recall of the thing you did fifteen years ago
• Everything is either "the best thing that's ever happened" or "the worst betrayal of my life," with no setting in between

You wouldn't tolerate any of this from an actual toddler forever, either. You'd just expect them to eventually grow out of it. The difference here is you might be waiting a very long time.

How to survive it without losing your mind

Find the funny in it, deliberately, on purpose, because the alternative is letting it genuinely wear you down. Treat the tantrums with the same energy you'd treat an actual toddler's: acknowledge it exists, don't take the bait, and don't expect logic to work on a feeling that was never really about logic in the first place.

The party that says it all

Here's the one that sums the whole thing up perfectly. Every year, for her birthday, she cooks her own birthday meal, sends out the invites herself, and hosts the whole thing, start to finish. Half the guests only turn up for the free food. She still walks away with a pile of gifts at the end of it. Genuinely, if it's your birthday, you don't throw your own party. Someone else is supposed to want to do that for you. The fact that nobody did, and she simply built the party herself and collected the presents anyway, is the whole two-year-old granny phenomenon in one perfect, ironic, slightly tragic scene.

Love, Vikki x