DD’s friends have absolutely destroyed my carpet.

Fine to be angry this happened but you allowed the toys in the house. Their parents can’t be responsible for choices made when in your house.
You could have confiscated them or made them go outside if they wanted them. You didn’t and that’s on you I’m afraid.

It would be different if they deliberately damaged your carpet or broke something but sounds like it wasn’t.

Not sure why you’re minimising your own responsibility OP, but you definitely are. You are the adult. You saw the potential for your carpet to be ruined and yet you still allowed it to happen because watching TV was more important.

I think you did well chucking them out. And sad that none of the parents offered to pay towards carpet cleaning. Those kids have incurred your calm anger. They wont do it again.

I can understand not confiscating the toys as they’re twelve not 6. But I don’t know if the parents will pay up. You could broach it.

id ban friends over for a year and dock pocket money as long as well. Especially as dd didn’t come and fess up immediately.

how is it looking today?

what have you used to try to get rid of it? With any of these things the best thing to do is put water on it & absorb with towels (preferably white to avoid colour transfer)

have you booked a clean? If they haven't been yet, get them only to use water. Most long term staining is done by the chemicals reacting with each other. Carpet cleaners won't know what reaction it will have until it's too late. It usually goes green or orange.

(the science of carpet cleaning was my business in a previous part of my life)

the good news is, if it needs replacing it's only the hallway, rather than a larger area. It may not even be worth claiming on insurance depending on your excess.

i wouldn't blame the girls. You are the adult, you could anticipate this outcome much more than they could. You knew they were jumping on them as well as squishing them. It was up to you to tell them it was the garden or nowhere they were not to be played with in the house. Frankly, I wouldn't have let them play with them so roughly as well as the carpet, I would've been worried about what would happen to their skin if they burst them.

I think it was over the top making their parents pick them up at that time of night for something that you should've been responsible for.

i'm not exactly sure how I'd word an apology because what I want to say is 'I'm sorry your carpet got damaged when you allowed the girls to do something stupid inside on a cream carpet'

Why? You allowed them to play with the toys having seen what they were doing. Does your daughter not know right from wrong at 12?

You can't expect the parents to pay op.

Your DD was part of it, you were present, and it's your carpet, yet you still don't feel you should pay. Why on earth would they feel they should?

The poor girl trying to clean burst into tears and you marched downstairs. Read that again but put yourself in the girl's shoes. Poor thing, she must have been terified. Where is your empathy, why didn't you try to comfort her? Is just a carpet, there are solutions. And if not, well, parenting. Your daughter was involved, what responsability did she have? She was the one who should have been trying to clean, as is your (and her) carpet. Did your daughter apologise? If I would lose my shit, I would lose my shit at my daughter, not her friends. She was the host, she had the power to say, no we need to go outside. You need to teach her responsability. And so did you, actually. Accidents happen but the way you treated this make you look as an as**e.

Exactly. Nothing wrong with expressing annoyance given they were warned, but there is a difference between making sure kids take responsibility and don't do something again (they probably learned that lesson already from it happening AND from trying to clean it up) to this ridiculous drama, banning DD from having friends over for six months, getting their parents to pay or whatever other absurdly OTT suggestions were made.

You should not put your kid in the position of having to police their friends. They don't have that capacity at 12 and it puts them in an awkward social position. That's what parents are for, until they're a little older. You know, to teach them stuff and provide guidance?

Our kitchen table was bought when eldest was a baby

25 years later and it’s covered in scratches , glitter that for some reason just won’t come off, paint splats , dents , etc.

it’s clean . I’ve scrubbed it to death but some things just won’t budge.

i mentioned to my youngest I was thinking about getting a new kitchen table and she said “oh don’t, it’s covered in memories”

Your daughter won’t remember what she spilt. But she will remember how you made her feel about it

OMG how nice of you to embarrass your daughter like that. You are the adult and could have prevented this from happening in the first place. You knew this could happen but still let them play with the “stupid stress toys”.
You spoilt your daughter’s friend’s parents plans too and you expect them to send you an apology by text. Pay for the carpets to be cleaned yourself and next time, if there is a next time, don’t let your daughter and her friends play with liquid filled toys that can mess up your carpets.

God I don't think I could ever get this upset with a bunch of pre-teens about a carpet. Did none of the people who want to ban her from having her friends round ever fuck up as a kid? I wouldn't be that rude to other people's kids either. OP knew better than the kids how easily those things could break, she should have taken them away or sent kids into kitchen or garden. I suspect the bad mood is because she knows SHE fucked up.

It is about proportion though.

This is a completely ridiculous disproportionate reaction to a highly forseeable accident, where there's a hall with a fucking cream carpet (!) where the adult involved did not take responsibility. The kids are normal kids, nothing we've heard about them indicates they're in any way reprobates, and if you think a silly mistake like this that they tried to correct means they're unfit to be her child's friends I do not know what to say to you. What kind of weird uptight household did you grow up in?

Exactly the kind of place many of us learned to avoid growing up, I suspect, the friend with the psycho parent. Who used to find it a relief to come to ours where they weren't constantly treading on eggshells.

It isn't about hating your kids if they don't learn respect for the property of others and refuse to be warned they need to feel it is something they can't repeat. You're worried about her relationship with her friends FFS they helped mightily in this sorry story if she falls out with them you should be delighted.Embuing kids with the idea they can get away with anything doesn't help them,it will cause misery,all you will have done is make life easier for yourself by not punishing her.

Obviously I got the whole “we’ll be careful!” reassurance, and please don’t ask me why I didn’t confiscate the toys off them because I honestly don’t know!

This is really the crux of the problem. The way to prevent this from happening was glaringly obvious, and well within your power to enforce. You can't now blame everyone else because you didn't do it. Sorry

I'm sorry you're so stressed. Id try and give it a good scrub with bicarb and maybe stain remover to see what happened, presumably you couldn't make it much worse! Imo its just one of those things, I would try not to let myself get too upset over it.

It happened to me. It didn't even came to my mind that DD friend's mum should be responsible for the damage as I meant to be the responsible adult in the house! Your DD is just as much as to blamed as her friend for being careless imo.

12 year old kids are still kids. And SOME kids do cry because they're worriers and get genuinely upset when they fuck up. And worry about it for weeks later. It's not always "turning on the waterworks for attention".

She was at least trying to right a wrong. Which is what most adults would do, in fact. You sound exactly like the kind of parent I would always remember as a total cow for the rest of my life for how they treated a 12 year old who WAS actually trying to correct the wrong they'd made. It's not being "disciplined" to treat kids like that and it doesn't teach them responsibility. It's just unpleasant, bullying behaviour.

Incredible how much some people appear to hate their own kids.

Its likely in this case however, that the DDs friends won’t have any intention of coming back anyway so the OP can rest easy on that front. Her DD on the other hand may wish her mother had handled it differently. I really hope this does not cause friendship issues for her.

wait - what? Talk to me about bleach for colours ….. is that a real thing? How does it work? (Real question, no sarcasm)

Duplicate

I sympathise. When my daughter wasn’t much older, she had a sleepover downstairs and they were ‘cat walking’ through our conservatory into the dining room, yanking the curtains open. I told them to be careful, but I didn’t stop them…. They managed to pull the curtain rail out of the wall. I wasn’t happy, but it was my fault for not being stronger and stopping them. The kids were very sheepish and apologised. I didn’t ask or expect anyone’s parents to pay, I just learnt from it for the future.

Attempt to remove it yourself then professional clean and your DD pays for it.No friends around for at least 6months.

If you get this far OP, I’d be hitting up professional carpet cleaners, chat GPT, Nancy whatsername who can just about get any stain out of anything, and I’d try absolutely everything I could. You can’t possibly make it worse. Good luck.