Dear Abby: My husband’s parents always choose his twin — will they ignore our children, too?

A woman writes in worried that her in-laws' decades of favoring her husband's twin over him means her own future kids will get the short end too, and Abby tells her to see a family therapist before letting that fear decide whether she has children at all. It's good advice, honestly, and it's also a small window into how much of modern life has been outsourced to professionals who used to just be your mom, your aunt, your pastor.

There's nothing wrong with therapy. But notice the reflex here. A woman has a completely normal, human worry about favoritism in a family, the kind of thing people have talked through over kitchen tables for centuries, and the instinct is to route it through a licensed intermediary before she trusts her own judgment about her own marriage. That's not a knock on Abby, who gave sound counsel. It's a comment on a culture that has quietly decided ordinary people can't be trusted to sort out ordinary problems without a session on the calendar.

The deeper issue in the letter is the one Abby sidesteps a bit: grandparents who play favorites are making a choice, not committing an unavoidable family tragedy. If the husband's parents have spent years favoring one twin, that's a values problem in that family, not a mystery requiring a clinician to decode. Sometimes the honest answer is a hard conversation with the in-laws themselves, not a referral.

We'd just say this: trust yourself a little more before you outsource your gut to a stranger with a notepad. Therapy has its place. So does having the spine to tell your husband's parents, plainly, that their grandkids will be loved equally or they'll see less of them.