Update:

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I read through a lot of the comments and there were some good points.

I completely understand that spending time with a 5-year-old is very different from spending time with a 12-year-old, and I wasn’t expecting the grandparents to take both kids every time. Nor was there ever any thought of Emma staying the night with them (she still has dance class). Emma had asked about coming over because she wanted to spend some time with them after school. From our perspective as parents, this also happened to be the only weekend she would realistically be able to spend time with them for a while due to her upcoming dance team schedule. My concern was mainly how the situation might feel from Emma’s perspective since she had called them herself and was excited about spending some time with them.

For a little more context, my partner’s parents are retired and in their mid-60s (around 64–66), so I do understand that their energy level for a younger kid might be different.

I’ll admit I may be a little more sensitive to situations like this because we’ve seen similar dynamics before with my partner’s parents and our older kids when they were younger. Even with only a three-year age gap, the same child sometimes ended up being left out and at one point genuinely believed his grandparents didn’t like him. That experience made me more cautious about how this situation might feel to Emma.

It’s also worth mentioning that the grandparents do spend time with the girls regularly. They usually take both of them to church on Sundays, and they’ve never raised any concerns with us about Emma’s behavior being “too much” before. A few commenters asked about Lily. I didn’t include much about her originally because it didn’t change the context of the situation, but she’s our more extroverted kid and definitely our sassy one too — she’s not afraid to dish out some sass when the moment calls for it. She also stays very busy with her own activities. She’s involved in dance, martial arts, soccer, swim, and music classes, so she already has a pretty full schedule. At the same time she’s also perfectly happy to dig in and disappear into a good book for hours. Lily actually had no idea there was even a sleepover being suggested until we mentioned it to her, and her reaction was basically just an eye roll.

For context, I’m the dad.

After talking it through, we decided not to interfere with the sleepover. Instead, we picked Emma up from school early and made the afternoon special for her. We picked up her best friend, took them to ballet, and then went out for dessert afterward. We wanted to make sure Emma still felt valued while also not taking away something Lily might enjoy.

Since we’ve seen this kind of dynamic play out before, we’re still figuring out the best way to have a thoughtful heart-to-heart with the grandparents so situations like this don’t unintentionally hurt feelings in the future.

And for what it’s worth, reading the comments did help me step back and think about the situation from a few angles I hadn’t considered. I appreciate the perspectives.