Telling a child who isn't yours to put a coat on

[blardyfeck]

Ok so I've a history of anxiety & I dwell on things a lot.
I was picking up ds7 today & one of his friends ran towards our group of mums standing together. It was raining. The friend was wearing his polo shirt & carrying his bag & coat.
I said hi to him & then said "gosh you should really put your coat on, it's raining" and started to help him by taking his bag to hold for him. His dad (who I know fairly well) then arrived & I said "hi I was just getting him to put his coat on" and his dad said "he doesn't have to put his coat on if he doesn't want to". Then they walked off.
I now feel sick with worry that I've pissed off the dad by doing something that I would be totally ok with if another parent did with my ds.
Am I a twat for trying to get another persons child to put on a coat in the rain?
Am I a twat for worrying that I've pissed off the dad who will then tell the mum who'll also be pissed off with me?
Am I over-thinking this? (probably)

Footiefan2019 I haven't called you anything.
I was a Douglas Adams fan in my mid teens, I just like the phrase. I suppose I don't need to point out the hypocrisy of your comment given you recognised the reference - or did you Google?

Calm down, you two. Getting a bit heated there.

If there was no indication from the child he didn't want his coat on then yanbu. Only if you were making the child do something he didn't want would the dad have a point.

My 13 year old daughter yesterday told a small child to be careful because he was playing with broken glass in a smashed window and apparently his mum gave my daughter evils. I told my daughter the mum was probably being defensive as she felt guilty she hadn't noticed what he was doing and stopped him.

I can know about a book without having to google. Typical, you think I’m obviously too dim to get your amazing taste in literature. Haha.

None of this is helping the OP and given we only have her written down account of the thing no one can tell exactly how either of them did or didnt mean anything and all of this reading into a level of passive aggression that may or may not have been there isnt going to help her anxiety.

Footiefan I really dont get why you think not wearing a coat is so bad though or going to cause issues. DS is perfectly able to decide when he needs a coat his threshold for weather is just different from the average persons.

thelongdarkteatimeofthesoul Yes

I really don't get why everyone is calling the dad a twat?!

I don’t care whether a kid wears a coat or not, it’s the banging on about bodily autonomy or other such bullshit (PANTS rule etc yes, totally get it, but OP suggested wearing a coat, not that the child does something horrific) and the posters saying they’d be annoyed at a parent for basically giving a shit about their child. It just reeks of the ‘no one can tell my child what to do’ attitude that’s rampant nowadays.

Has no one been in soft play and gently suggested to a child that’s not yours to stop throwing the balls, or to let another child have a turn on the slide, only for their parent to swoop in and tell them ‘it’s ok darling don’t listen to the lady!’ And give you evils? Or are you all the parents doing the swooping in ?

Not me, I've never taken it upon myself to be the soft play police, I think I missed the memo that says once you have a child you have to mother everyone else's child and get involved in that kind of thing, not my circus .....

Footiefan2019
I don't really understand how that equates to someone saying to a 7 year old that they should put their coat on, and the dad saying, actually he doesn't really have to if he doesn't want to....throwing balls and taking turns are things that affect other people, wearing coats, not so much.

If the friend was about to walk home alone, no harm in suggesting he puts his coat on. But given that you knew that this child would be being picked up by a parent, it really wasn't your business to parent him yourself.

So yep, I wouldn't be massively put out but I be a bit if another parent had intervened to that extent.

I think you misses the point about bodily autonomy, footiefan. No one is saying it's wrong to put a coat on your child. But nor is it wrong to basically leave them to it when it comes to that kind of decision, whereas you have said quite forcefully that it is. And people who do leave their kids to make their own decisions about coats have generally come across people who passive aggressively make the same point as you quite often. The op, to be fair, doesn't sound like she is one of these people.

I once taught a severely autistic boy who would barely ever wear a coat at playtimes. And he really didn't seem to feel the cold at all. Forcing him to wear a coat would made him extremely anxious and panicky, to the point that he would self harm. He had great parents who took the view that if discomfort at the cold was ever a problem for him, he would wear it - and on rare occasions he actually did that, and put his coat on by himself.
So that was what I did. Left it to him and didn''t force the issue. But jeeze did it cause me some problems with other members of staff. Even though it was in his behaviour plan, it freaked them out, and given a chance they would ignore the plan. I once discovered that whan I was away, someone took advantage of my absence to force a coat on him - which led to a forty minute melt down and bruising to his head where he self injured.

Anyway - an extreme example to illustrate that if a kid's uncomfortable, he'll put on his coat. At seven they don't need to be told to by anyone other than a parent. It's not a safety issue or an emergency.