I hate reading about situations where a child is stuck in the middle of adult problems. It is common to use children as bargaining chips in conflicts that have nothing to do with them, especially regarding visitation rights and blended families that they never asked to be born into. This makes it easy for children to internalize and worry about problems they didn’t cause and couldn’t solve, even if they supposedly did «everything right.» 

The teenager in this story is stuck between a rock and a hard place regarding the conflicts his mom is having with her late husband’s parents. They had a blowout fight shortly after he passed, and she tried to prevent them from ever seeing their grandchildren again. The grandparents won partial custody (and by that, I mean one day of custody a month), and now the mom is singing a different tune about their involvement.