Toddler dad picking up and touching other people's kids at playgroups

@anyolddinosaur "your experience is blinding you to the millions of men who have no ill intent."

Wow that's amazing you know which men are the ones with no ill intent! Could you tell us how you pick the bad ones out of a crowd please? I would say it's pretty feckless to assume all strangers are safe to touch your child without cause. Women don't walk with keys in their fists because ALL men are bad - the issue is that there's enough that the risk is real and there's no way to tell who is harmful and who isn't. So we safeguard BEFORE something bad happens.

Atamlin,

She wasn't bothered that you carried her child over, she was annoyed because other people could see she had neglected to do the same even though she had seen it. Her problem, not yours. I feel sorry for her child.

Yes, some adults will use children for their own ends.

Statistically it is usually men using them for sexual abuse but very occasionally women. It is important for everyone to put child protection first and call out inappropriate gracious.

I don't want to be touched randomly in public by a stranger, and I wouldn't want it for my kid either. Obvious exceptions are emergencies, kid is lost, etc. If a kid approaches an adult and passes them a ball or etc, you expect some interaction, but if a random adult started hugging my child or stroking their back I'd find it odd.

There is just no real need to be touching strangers, and that includes children. Babies are a little different as they're typically being held by a parent, and most people want to stroke their cheek or whatever. I don't mind this, as long as people ask first. I have 0 issues with men smiling at and waving at my kid from a distance either. I'm more than happy with interaction, just not touch.

But anyway. Frankly a lot of men are predators, and commit the vast majority of sexual crimes. If men want society to treat their interactions with women and children with less suspicion, the onus is on men to do better.

And no, I wouldn't feel the same about another woman, because the likelihood of another lone mother in a park being a predator is exceptionally low.

@naunet your experience is blinding you to the millions of men who have no ill intent. "looking out for children" is not restricted to women, men need to do it too - unless you'd rather a toddler drown because their feckless parents were nowhere around. And yes, I know toddlers are escape artists but those particular parents were feckless.

You make children less safe, not more so, by preventing normal men from interacting with them.

To be fair I’m a woman and I certainly wouldn’t be touching/interacting with someone else’s child unless I knew them, same with my DH. I think I’d probably be more likely to if a child was hurt but I know plenty of dads who wouldn’t even in that case as they know it’s not socially acceptable, my DH went to pick up a child who had fallen off his scooter and had to stop himself, his parents were trailing behind.

Op is right to trust her instinct that something is off with him. Having had direct and indirect experience with two men I knew turning out to be child abusers I am highly wary. Neither of these men would have struck you as the "type" if there even is one.

Personally even as a woman I don't touch other people's children unless they are in danger or have hurt themselves and even then I make sure it's as little as possible.

DS2 works shifts so can take DGS (15mths) to his swimming lessons, toddler groups and stay & play sometimes. He absolutely loves doing it. Both he, and DDIL, want DGS to grow up knowing that childcare, housework, shopping etc is not a woman’s job, men are as capable and imo they’re doing a great job.

If he was at a group and a child wanted lifting into a chair, he’d do it, if it was safe to do so. If a child fell off a piece of equipment, and he was the only one around, it wouldn’t be in his nature to leave them. He’s a nurse, he’d absolutely pick them up.

We hear all the time that we need to encourage men to do more childcare, to take on more of the parental responsibility and to share parental leave. Yet in the next breath, if a child needs and that helper happens to be a man, it’s wrong. We can’t have it both ways.

You sound like the yummy who screamed at my late OH for sitting on a bench near the swings, reading his Kindle and not responding to her demands about why he was there for a whole 5 minutes, the idiot threatened to call the police, she was purple with anger! When I turned up with our grandchild, newly toiletted and ice-creamed we had a good laugh about her.

It is a very sad situation and yet look how many parents can be heard saying, "Oh they're so much friendlier in countries like Spaiiiiiiin and Itaaaaly, if only Brits cared about kids like that" 🙄

That 80% stat is if you take the highest global estimate of women offenders. The article you’ve linked is a bit all over the place in where it is taking its stats from. As at least half of women abusers act with men you have to raise the ‘men abusers’ count to 90%. In the UK, it is 4% of women who abuse without a male coconspirator, so a very very small number. When you consider that women are more likely to be around small children (as nursery and primary teachers, nurses, child minders, mothers) it again means the stats don’t represent the true picture which is that your child is almost 100% safe from sexual abuse by women.

There's a big difference in parenting your own child and in touching a strangers child with no reason to do so. At least one of the kids in ops scenario weren't even engaging with this guy, he sought out the contact.

This is such a valid point. People are cautious because there is reason to be. We cannot go about pretending all men are nice guys who innocently enjoy playing with kids. By that logic there's also zero reason for men to be kept out of female spaces because we don't want to blame the nice guys for the bad guys behaviour. Even though we actually can't tell the difference.

I also think that what everyone is forgetting here is that sometimes it's not WHAT someone does it's the fact it gives us the ick that matters.

I work in safeguarding and i don't just teach my ds the swimsuit rule, I teach him that if anyone touches him in a way that HE doesn't like or makes him uncomfortable (be it a pat on the head or a touch to the arm or just standing too close) he has the right to speak up, say no and look for help. The action itself doesn't matter. So perhaps while this guy hasn't done anything obviously 'bad' or predatory maybe there is just something that op is sensing about him that is giving her the ick. And not one person here can say that she should ignore that. And let's remember that most predators start off with innocent play and groom the adults around them as much as the children by playing the role of the safe kid magnet.

I asked my DH. He said he'd be terrified of the parent's reaction if he touched, talked to, or even interacted with another kid.
He said that in the past, when he used to take our DS's to the playground, he'd actively avoid other kids, unless he knew the parents.
He said sometimes toddlers would just start talking to him, and he'd feel really uneasy.
Whereas when I took them, I'd just get stuck in and talk to whoever. Young or old.
It's a sad situation.

It’s actually 96% of abuse by men sorry I didn’t add the ‘both’ to men count.

Of course, you're right, crime stats are a good indication, but they are just crime stats. They don't give a true or full picture, or look at the differences in male and female patterns of abuse. Ie female abusers tend to abuse younger children and are less discriminatory about their sex.

theconversation.com/women-also-sexually-abuse-children-but-their-reasons-often-differ-from-mens-72572

It does seem likely that at the very least 80% of sexual abuse against children is by men though, with the most likely offender being a male friend or family member and by far the most likely victims girls.

You do realise that this kind of attitude towards men caring for children in public directly impacts how many are crap dads in private too. It's easy to be passed off as "women's work" as long as it's weird for a man to do it. The weaponised incompetence creates itself.

A man touching a kid on the back in public is not a crime.

Again, I'd say its nonce's making society far more unpleasant, not people responding to the fact nonces exist and keeping an eye out for their kids.

I was abused as a child, no one looked out for me, so damn right I look out for other children, and you suggest that it's me that's the problem?!

It’s not 50/50 or anywhere close, incidences of sexual abuse of children by women are very rare. In the UK (according to ons 2019) the statistic for women committing sexual abuse alone is 4%, a further 4% involves male and female perpetrators acting together. So even if you count both those groups 92% of sexual abuse of children is by men.

I don’t think this particular man patting a baby on the back and touching a hat or whatever is particularly sinister. But the 50/50 claim is insane.

The sad fact is that there are so many dodgy men around that the police don't even lock then up for having loads of images of children being raped. This man has been handsy with multiple children. Tragically, we can't just assume that he's no danger - that simply isn't the world we live in.

How many times have we all seen on here when women have said they think something is up with their husband's behaviour - they can't put their finger on it but they know something is up? They are nearly always right that it's an affair. It's because we have evolved to instinctively pick up on tiny signals.

It's never a good idea to tell women to ignore our instincts.

No, we need to stop blaming innocent people here, put the blame where it belongs, on all the men who DO abuse, not innocent people trying to protect their children. These men are the reason other men may feel they can't help children.

My husband is like this. He loves kids and they always gravitate towards him because he engages with them. He forgets that theres weirdos in the world and people are wary of men they dont know because he just thinks of all kids like ours when they were small and he misses that!

He would definitely help a kid down from a climbing frame or lift them up onto a swing if they asked etc

As a mum i see it from both angles.

Its just sad that there are so many men in the world that hurt kids and make us so suspicious of any man that enjoys normal interactions with kids.

This is absolute nonsense, easily disproven by crime statistics. Almost all sex crimes are committed by men. There's no good justification for insisting we view men and women with the same level of suspicion.

My friends DH was a SAHD, brilliant with the kids. Unfortunately, the kids didn't get to go to many groups because of the reaction from the women there. Where kids are late teens early 20s now and he does a job where he is around a lot of children and they still gravitate towards him like he's the Pied Piper of children. He's just a nice bloke.

People like you and others on this thread are making society far less pleasant.

Reminds me of the comedian Bill Burr saying how he loves kids - absolutely loves them but is afraid to touch them because of people like you. He put a kid in a chair etc...it's hardly peado behaviour is it?