Shouted at someone else’s child, WIBU?

Ignore the preachy posters who think calling a nasty little bully what they are is a horrific sin only a nasty person would commit.

If a little brat like that hurt my daughter I'd tell their mum exactly what I thought of her shit parenting and no, I wouldn't feel bad for upsetting the little shit. Nasty children grow into nasty adults if no one puts them in their place.

Two reasonable adults would have been ‘sorry about George, he can be so boisterous’ ‘oh no problem, sorry for snapping, I just got a shock’ sort of exchange.

Good grief. No wonder teachers are leaving the profession in droves. A child of 3 or 4 is perfectly capable of understanding that he should not kick a baby. If he is the sort of child who is given to this kind of behaviour which you call boisterous and I agree with the OP is an early sign of bullying, his parents and carers should be right with him all the time. If in spite of that he still hurts another child the response is not a tinkly laugh and attempt to minimise what he's done - profuse apologies are required, and then take him home. As for the suggestion that the OP was somehow in the wrong and should apologise - WTAF!

I thought there were some ineffectual parents with poor control over their children back in the early 90s when my children were tiny. Things seem to have got much worse since.

I don’t think you have anger issues. Just a bit of a bully.

Not agreeing with how someone went about something doesn’t make someone a goady fucker. I don’t think it’s right to call a preschooler a little bully; in fact, I think it’s horrible. But it is pointless going around in circles here and the OP obviously does just want people telling her how right she was and how wrong the other mother was.

@wooooooop ignore all the goady fuckers who have come along and are baiting you, so they can turn it on you being irrational and angry. There is nothing wrong with sharply intervening when another child is behaving badly.

Which she did because you called her child names. To be honest though the posts are littered with contradictions and ‘no I didn’t say / what happened was.’

I am generally a tad suspicious of posts where an OP has behaved in a way that is beyond reproach while the other individual has been so wholly unreasonable as to take one’s breath away, just because it’s not the way life goes. The OP gave the impression of a preschooler accidentally, albeit carelessly, hurting a baby, to which you responded to by snapping. I don’t think either of those things are ‘wrong’; you were both behaving in a normal and understandable way. Two reasonable adults would have been ‘sorry about George, he can be so boisterous’ ‘oh no problem, sorry for snapping, I just got a shock’ sort of exchange. As it was, it spiralled into name calling and unpleasantness on both sides and it’s turned into a malicious attack without provocation.

I also can’t pretend I care if I scared him

Charming. That is very unpleasant of you.
He's a small child FGS.

He was wrong to hit your baby but you need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around your son, and that things like this happen fairly often at playgroups.

I’m definitely not a perfect parent! But there is a huge grey space between ‘perfect parent’ and ‘not yelling and causing a scene at a toddler group’!

A 4 year old should know better and absolutely not be kicking a baby! Supervised or not. His mum sounds terrible and good you stood up for yourself, it should be called out.

Probably a sharp ‘no, we don’t kick.’

I can honestly say in nearly five years of being a parent I have never had a loud altercation with another mother in a playgroup or toddler class, ever, and I’ve never witnessed one either. I don’t know why you’re huffily acting as if it’s what anybody would do; it isn’t. Children sometimes are mean or unkind, or don’t fully understand what they are doing and snatch or take toys, hit, push, bite even. It is fine to tell them not to do so; it is fine to tell the adult they are with what they’ve done or that their behaviour isn’t acceptable. Shouting and calling a preschool child names isn’t OK, though.

This and the fact that I suspect he is more like 2-3 as a 3-4 tends to be at pre school and out of the age range

yes the parent should have been watching, yes his behaviour was wrong but yours is frankly awful too

Shouting and calling him a bully was too much

a loud “ don’t kick “ and walking him back to his mum should have sufficed

Four year olds can be mean. It doesn’t mean it’s all right to yell at them in the middle of a playgroup (or anywhere, but anywhere frequented with young children makes it worse.)

Think David might have lost attention half way through that softly softy monologue