Your thoughts on other people calling a baby 'my baby'

[Climbingahoneytree]

E.g. 'my baby', 'our little boy', etc when they are not one of the parents. Particularly if the mother has had to go through a bit of a stressful pregnancy.

I've been called "my baby" at 30 years old somewhere up north whilst working in A and E

OP only you know how you feel and why but I can only say please tread carefully and sensitively if the people in question are otherwise nice. Many people use terms of endearments and they will see it as only that (as I do when I use them) and not know how strongly you feel about them not unless they're told.

Slightly off topic but my DDIL to be had been quite ill, next time I saw her parents I said how worried I'd been about our X. The roasting I got from her Mum, she is her daughter etc, was a fun New Years Day after that!

I hope people don't take offence at this. I'm a childminder and call all the kids I look after "my girl", "my boy", "my baby", I just use it as an affectionate term because I care about them all so much, they are like my family. I don't have a problem with any family saying this to my kids either, infact my parents do it all the time now that I think about it.
I think you might be being a bit precious because I'm guessing it's PIL or mil saying it?

I hate it personally, no rational reason and it's very petty but it really annoys me !

I got pissed off about this! I had a lot of baggage when DD was born as her sister was stillborn and to be honest, I felt I couldn’t express my grief because certain members would try to either compete with me in terms of their grief or would expect me to be strong for them.

Plus certain family members had a tendency to be overbearing when DD was born. So for me I was very sensitive about others seeing her as ‘theirs’ when I felt I wasn’t being given my place as her mum!!

It definitely depends on context. And yes I was very sensitive to it but I stand by it.

God are you the woman with twins again?

I volunteer with Home Start and when I visit my family I always ask 'how are my lovely children today?' I know they are not actually 'my' children and their mother knows too. It's just a term of endearment.

@Mumberjack so sorry you went through that. Totally agree with what you said about context.

Obviously situations like Mumberjacks are different but generally the baby is their something and it's a shortening of that. It isn't a claim on parenthood.

How's my baby (granddaughter) ?
How's my baby (nephew) ?
How's my baby (God daughter)
How's my (favourite) baby?

However I know some people use "my son" to children they're not the parent of. That would annoy me. "Our kid", "come on my son!" fine, if you come from / live in the areas where that's common.

MIL says 'my baby' and it annoys me (I thought irrationally until this thread!). I immediately think "no he's MINE not yours". I'm prob being very unreasonable! 😂

I haven't heard anyone call them that recently and when they were little my feelings depended on who said it. As previous posters have said, it's all about context.

My in-laws, I didn't have much issue as everyone is our/my [name] at times and were pretty involved though they lived far away and medical issues made that harder as time went on. It was actually kinda nice. I would feel similarly towards close family friends doing it and would have no issues with a childminder or a similar person who saw them regularly doing it unless there were other things going on.

My family, it pissed me off and it did feel like they were trying to claim ownership and act like they were more involved than they really were - which is not at all as they've never met or even spoken with my kids and my mother was very vocal about how I shouldn't have kids even after I had them. I used to grit my teeth as I was trying to keep extending the olive branch and keep family peace, but my sister was foolish enough to do it the day after I gave birth to my youngest and I let my hormones make the choices that that and her poorly disguised attempt at getting gossip was not going to fly. While it pissed off her and our mother, it brought me a lot of relief. No regrets, that was never going to be the happy healthy family relationships I was trying to make happen.