To not want people to feel sorry for my children

These people are your friends?! That's a really awful thing to say.

Your ‘friends’ sound like insensitive arseholes. Who the hell thinks these kinds of comments are ok? They need to be told. Why should they get away with such crap?

They are not your friends
Get new & better ones who hold you up & make you feel good

Your friends sound awful. It's bad enough for them to tell their kids this, but to tell you what they have said is really insensitive.

You don't need friends like these.

@DrCoconut you're completely right. I see it too. I work in the NHS and there are so many bright, capable, ambitious mums who want to be nurses, social workers, OTs but chat afford to study and lose their UC. I was so skint as an MA student. It was only some loans from family and the fact that I have fairly cheap housing which allowed me to do it.

@HeyDrake UC has been devastating for student parents trying to improve their life. I was so lucky I managed to go to uni in a kind of golden age when the childcare grant had just come in and before UC. I now regularly see students crying in the wellbeing office and using foodbanks. I did a study in my MA and worked out that supporting a single mum to do a degree and get a graduate job works out better "cost to the tax payer" wise than keeping her on lifelong low pay and benefits. Obviously there are some assumptions there such as she gets the graduate job and progresses in it, buys a house so has no rent in old age etc but disincentivising studying/training is a really bad move long term.

Bottle fed children have a greater chance of ending up in prison than breastfed children?

That's a new one...

Your friends are rude.

However, you say your children want for nothing - that’s not quite true, is it? They want for a decent father. That’s not your fault, but it just jumped out at me.

(Obviously their lives are better without a bad father in the picture.)

Why just boys?

Do you not think girls benefit from having a loving father present in their life?

If it bothers you, you need to tell them.

Maybe for boys there is something positive about having a male role model. Doesn't have to be a father though.

You don't miss what you never had. As someone who had grandparents who were too far away to see regularly, I don't have any concept of what a loving grandparent in your life would be like. I don't feel I missed out though - others who experienced it value it highly.

There's no particular reason a father in the home is any more important - apart from societal stigma which is getting less and less. Biologically children do not need involved fathers - that's a societal construct. Actually from an evolutionary point of view most modern children are missing out on a variety of female relatives and children of different ages being around all the time. The nuclear family is a very recent thing.

I’ve noticed that for many women any kind of “reliable father figure” (and by “reliable” I mean living with the children) is better than none, even if that father is shit, makes the mother unhappy and she’s staying for the sake of the children. So many families are like this and if the women are feeling smug because they are not single mothers, god help them. Their children are more likely to be messed up than the ones living with just a good, reliable mother.

Fuck your so-called friends.

Statistically at a population level but not in every case.
That's a bit like saying bottle fed children do worse than breastfed children.
Overall it's true. But pick an 18 year old from a line up and you won't know how they were fed as a baby or whether their parents are still married.
In addition, once you remove socio economic factors, both feeding and family type have a negligible effect

Yes this is why. People always make these comparisons when something about their own life is off. Probably they are unhappy in their marriage or feeling bad because the kids prefer dad over mum or they struggle with kids behaviour. Loads of people are in unhappy relationships.

When I was single, pre kids, in my 30s, people used to say things like "you must find it hard to compromise and that's why you're single" and "I guess you're too old to have kids now". The former was thinking of leaving his wife. The latter was a friend's dad. The friend had cut him off because of allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards children! At the time I thought these comments were really rude - when found out the context I was much more understanding

I would say something like "we have a peaceful happy home and my kids know they are loved - that's the most important thing" and mean it.

They are so awful to do that and say that in front of you!! I have said this to my children about other kids, but they know well enough to never repeat that. I would never say that to a friend.

Neither of those two women are your friends

They speak to you like dirt in order to feel superior to you and know you feel embarrassed about your situation as a single mother.

Would they speak to you like this if you had been widowed and were a single mother? Of course not.

Drop the pair of them and engage with people who do not serve to bring others down so that they can build themselves up.

You can’t change how other people feel. Some will feel sorry for your kids. Some will envy you and them - you got out of your marriage when perhaps they are stuck in a toxic situation themselves. Some will be indifferent.

You can’t control any of that, so just crack on with life, happy as you are and leave them to theirs.

The misplaced comments were probably attempts to empathise/sympathise. You didn’t like it. But people say stuff all the time that we don’t like. Shrug it off.

Your friends are a couple of nasty bitches.

They'd lose their shit at a couple I used to know. A lesbian couple, with two kids. The horror!

I would have told them to think before they speak in future. The nuclear family is one type of family. Many other types exist, usually with good reason. Oh, and they are not your friends.

I was a single parent-my adult kids are thriving, solvent and happy. I would’ve been devastated had my friends said that to me. You either need better friends or if you want to stick with them, challenge them. Tell them that life throws up less than perfect circumstances sometimes and part of your role is setting your kids the example that life can still be very good. Parenting can be lonely as a single-but often, the house is more harmonious than with 2 parents who dislike each other. Christ-some of my friends’ parents were brought up in the 1950s with single parents-their dads had been killed in war. They would’ve given ‘friends’ comments like these short shrift.

Your friends were incredibly rude to give their opinion to your face.

However, you saying 'my children want the nothing' is a bit naive. Money, time with mum, activities etc cannot replace a loving, involved father and the positive impact it can have on children throughout their lives.

Better no dad than a deadbeat one.
Tell them to fuck right off and keep going

Yes this.

What dire friends you have @cadburyegg