Did This Happen to You?

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn42q39qg4ko
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Later on we did Tumbletots, but omg not the parent toddler groups.

My antenatal group was judgemental and clicky - excluding me. I met my friends for life at Surestart and at the village hall mum & baby group. The “babies” are 17-18 now.

I didn’t bother joining because I knew I wouldn’t fit in.

I get the feeling that far too many women join groups like this thinking they are going to get on with everyone and make loads of friends. I know, I felt like that myself, and I was wrong. Why did I think that? The only thing you have in common with these people is that you all have young kids. That is literally the only thing that connects you.

I left a toddler singing group thing after being chastised for letting 2 yo dd walk around a bit behind me when she should’ve been sitting. And the mother and baby group I went to once after being looked at like I had two heads when trying to strike up conversation with a couple of mums. Very weird vibe. I did make a couple of good friends at their playgroup once they’d made little friends themselves.

I loved the one I joined with Ds 2 , but the lady running it was very inclusive and it was cheap and cheerful with nice people. A few others were cliquey and people would start arguments over nothing much. One was very toxic, so I only lasted one meeting.
I suppose it’s best to try a few out.

I went to baby massage and it was lovely, everyone was pleasant.

I went to heartbeeps or whatever it's called and it was awful. It was like a cult!

I used to find toddler groups run by the church much nicer than other ones. Yes you did have to sing songs that had a religious theme, but the volunteers from the church that ran it were always very kind and welcoming.

I don't think new mums are any worse for judgy/bad behaviour than any other demographic. Just ignore the idiots and chat to the nicer mums surely?

I go to two playgroups and all the people in them are lovely. I definitely wouldn't be best friends with all of them, but they are fine to chat to, and a couple have become good friends. They are just a normal bunch of women who happen to have birthed children.

I met one of my best friends at a baby group 23 years ago 😃 we were very different in our parenting styles but it didn't really bother either of us! Our boys are still very different and didn't grow up to be besties as we had hoped but we remain very close friends.
I honestly didn't experience any of the toxic mum group stuff at all. I made several friends, most of whom I've drifted apart from over the years but not for any reason other than circumstances!
That said my youngest is 16 so it's been a while since I was part of the young mums gang 😂

Look, having a baby doesn’t make you part of a Happy Borg. Sometimes you join something and people just don’t like you. Sometimes you don’t like them, either. My NCT group just didn’t gel. Hardly surprisingly, as all we had in common was having babies at around the same time and living in roughly the same bit of London. It was pretty clear by the end of the course that we didn’t particularly like one another, but by the first ‘all the babies are here’ meeting, it was obviously never going to work.

And tbh, a couple of people, including me, had very hairy births and were feeling dreadful. I had no milk supply, an infected CS scar, and a very fractious, high-needs baby, and I probably wasn’t at my sweetest. One of the other couples weren’t a couple. They’d accidentally conceived during a fling and decided to co-parent. Another couple were very stressed architects whose business was struggling. Everyone had their shit. It was no one’s fault it was no fun.

I left an online group "mums in" <town> after reading a post criticising a mother for letting her toddler be a short distance behind her in a fairly safe pedestrianised area. Those that agreed that picking the child up and hiding in a shop with her to teach the mother a lesson was the right thing to do were far more worrying than any other danger.

Yep it’s not just mum groups, this dynamic always seems to prevail in groups of women. As I get older I give a very wide berth to any woman I hear talking badly about another woman. My thinking being that if she’s saying that behind her back then she’ll say it behind my back. Not interested. There’s no point confronting these people, it’s just who they are. I find gradually withdrawing from such people to be the best course of action. I prefer to spend time one to one with people who I know are genuine and talk about things other than criticising other women. Who my children make friends with is up to them, I don’t also need to be friends with their friends mums.

Not at all, I went to lots of different groups and never experienced that at all, I made a group of very close friends at NCT ante-natal and lots and lots of acquaintances that I will still stop and chat to if I bump into them 20+ years later. Obviously I didn’t click with everyone but there was no bad behaviour that I was aware of. We didn’t really know anyone here when we had DC1 because we moved here for work but neither of us worked in the actual town (10 miles either direction) and joining all these groups has been one of the best things I ever did,

Don't blame you OP. Baby group.was.never my thing. All those mums comparing agas and expensive sachet foods. 🙄

That first summer ds went in a sling and we walked the ridgeway. Breast feeding while watching shallows & combine harvesters😊

By the time ds was 2y2m he was at the childminder and I'd returned to work.

I was quite lucky with DS1 in that I met a lovely group. One ended up being a close friend and still is. It was a very random group, there were many I had nothing in common with but they were nice people. I dont remember any judgmental types. Sometimes a person who has little in common with you has a child going through exactly the same issues and they can be a godsend at the right moment for you. So I always kept an open mind.

There was another group I joined a few years later with toddlers DD and DS2 and there were only 4 of us but one woman was a pain in the ass and I couldn't deal with her in my sleep deprived state, I was getting stressed just thinking about the place so I stopped going.

If you don't like one group join another, it's a bit narrow minded to say I don't like mother and baby groups because of my one and only experience. You could apply that attitude to any workplace or hobby etc and you'd be a very limited person

I joined one when my child was about a year old. Was introduced by a friend however it turned out two of the 'main character' mothers were vile toxic bullies who just intended to run the group so they didnt have to mind their own kids and then run other women into the ground. One is now a psychotherapist and i hear so many stories of her telling people about her clients. Shes not fit to be human let alone for therapy and shes a dreadful mother. The other one is a psychiatric nurse yet the biggest narcissist I have come across. Control freaking attention seekers both of them. I totally would advise people to go nowhere near this kind of bitchy mom bullying cult culture and just raise your baby by yourselves.