“Every cricket know its nest,” says popular wisdom. Know your place, don’t stick your head out, don’t exceed your authority, this is said to someone (or about someone) who behaves inappropriately for his position, who interferes in something other than his own business. From the point of view of systemic arrangements, we, each person, have our own place in the field of male-female, child-parent and other relationships. Violating the position of someone in the system, violating the hierarchy, is fraught with the emergence of internal and external conflicts and health problems. And this is true, a wife must obey her husband, and not her mother, just as a husband must respect and honor his parents and his wife, and, nevertheless, make decisions independently, coordinating them with his wife. Reflecting on this topic, in connection with frequent requests on the topic: “Place in the system,” this article was born. And this article is about the place of the grandmother in the family system. The eldest in the family - the grandmother - takes someone else's responsibility and begins to look after and, sometimes, completely, begins to take care of her grandchildren, thereby taking away the rightful place from her child, that is, she takes the place of the parent, “I know better than you,” and I’ll do better.” What do grandmothers do - good or evil? We are now thinking about the role of the grandmother, does she give security to her grandson?! Then, when the grandmother pushes aside the real parents, she deprives him of security and safety. It is important for a child to receive a resource from his parents, and the grandmother is right there, speaking and demonstrating her intelligence, her experience. “I’ll teach you, I’m better.” Grandmothers, it seems, prolong their lives by taking the lives of their children. Do they bring order and love - no. In my practical work, I have seen tragic cases of such choices by adults. What makes them accuse their children of failure and insolvency as parents, make them doubt the right to raise their children? Such grandmothers are usually authoritarian in the style of their communication, they have the ability to convince of the correctness and effectiveness of their actions. To put them in their place and present the true The state of the situation, sometimes, is not very simple. What gets in the way is their conviction that they are right, that they know better how to do it, and what gets in the way is their deep feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves, a feeling of uselessness, hopelessness. They complain about the failure of their children, about their fate, about the fact that they have to organize and decide everything for everyone. And in fact? The truth is that, leaving everyone with their own, they will be left to themselves, left alone with their feelings and experiences, from which they run into youth, into roles that are not theirs, into things that they really do not need. They don't know what they will do, they don't agree with their age. They don’t say “Yes” to their age. They want to be needed and important. They are not happy with knitting socks. They are not satisfied with walking with equally elderly people. They don't want to deal with their lives. It's scary to meet your age. With my old age. A case from practice. The grandmother decided that her daughter, somehow, was raising her son and her grandson in the wrong way, and decided to “help” - the daughter went to work, and the grandmother was right there. She supervises getting up, breakfast, and so on until the age of 18, she controlled everything, “took care of it.” Only now the daughter cries, “my mother doesn’t trust me,” and the grandson says, “if only my grandmother would get married.” The grandmother replaces the role of the mother and, with her hyperprotection, suppresses the child’s initiative, lowering the mother’s authority. And the mother, the daughter, doesn’t even want to live anymore. Recently at a reception there was a woman with the request “What should I do with my mother?” Her mother strives to be the mother of her child herself and does not want to let her near him. “I feel like a nanny in front of my own child, and an inept nanny at that.” “It seems to her that I do everything wrong: I feed her wrong, I dress her wrong, I raise her wrong!” That is, the grandmother, the mother of her daughter, begins to think that you are unworthy of being a mother. Of course, this has nothing to do with caring for the child, but concerns your relationship with your mother, who has now become a grandmother. This is how grandmothers usually behave