For at least the last decade, when my parents have visited (or when we've visited them), we've had arguments about paying for stuff. Specifically, my mom really wants to pay for everything: in restaurants, she'll regularly tell the waiter to give the check to my father (my mom is blind, else she would take it herself), and she'll say things like "your credit card isn't good here".

This largely comes from a good place: she wants to provide, she wants to be a nice guest. But there's also a power dynamic going on (whether intentional or not I don't know); and when it transitions from her paying for restaurant meals to wanting to come along grocery shopping so she can pay for groceries, it becomes something that I can't explain in terms of gifts or in terms of a nice gesture.

This has actually gotten somewhat better recently; we've established that we'll alternate turns paying for restaurants and that we'll pay for our own god-damn groceries. On this visit, they let us take them out to a quite nice restaurant with no pushback at all; I appreciated that.