To think this type of helicoptering is OTT at kids parties?

[minxofmancunia]

I'm prepared to be flamed about this, I know a lot of parents like to hyper supervise every single calorie and morsel that passes their childs lips otherwise....oh i don't know hell might freeze over or something but surely you can back off at a party??

One of the reasons I send dh with dd to parties rather than go myself is because I find the anxious, hectic, hyper controlling helicoptering of other parents too much to bear esp at the mealtime. So what of they just eat a handful of doritos 3 breadsticks and a piece of cake? It's ONE MEAL. It's a PARTY.

Dh went to a party at a play centre recently, one that's renowed for having healthy good food, carrot sticks proper baker chips, pitta bread, hummus etc. It was for a 5 year old. every parent bar him stood "OVER" their child monitoring and co-ercing every, single, mouthful and flapping if they didn't take adequate intake of grapes/veg etc. Above anything else i actually think it's embarrassing. get a grip people.

At my dds 5th party I'll be asking that they're left. No staying and special GENUINE dietry requirements aside I ain't monitoring them all at food time.

AIBU, I'm I a terrible mummy, benign neglectful harridan?

Oh and BTW I work in child health and am fully aware of opinions amongst my colleagues and myself who think that this kind of parenting can actually contribute to food issues in adolescence which i believe to be true.

my son's only 2 but i cant wait till i can deposit him at a party and not have to be there to entertain him (DGMW i love him to bits but a couple of hours break would be good). He is the crisps and cake kind of kid and even now at parties he'll hoover most of the cake up if i allow it, but you know what? Apart from 1 hyperactive toddler to deal with i figure it wont do him harm if he goes mad once in a while. i'm actually hoping he'll eat so much choco cake one day that he'll be sick and never want to touch it again lol

Competitive party bags is another bug bear. There is always one who has to do it bigger and better than anyone else. I actually look forward to seeing the sweets and plastic tat.

I didn't get a chance to helicopter over ds1 as he wouldn't sit at the table long enough - even at his own parties! I went to a local grammar school open day recently and witnessed a great deal of loud show offy parenting in the science labs. 10 year olds being made to look at displays so that parents could show off their O'level Biology. We skulked around the perimeter and scarpered.

This thread reminds me of a story I was told. A friend of a friend took her child to a party (3yo) and hovered, to make sure he only ate the veg sticks and healthy stuff, and didn't touch the crisps and cakes. She took her eyes of him for 3 nanoseconds to proudly declare that in 3 years he had never tasted chocolate, and in that time he managed to shove a whole chocolate cupcake in his mouth in one go. He couldn't eat it, but neither was he giving it up. She shrieked hysterically as she was worried he would choke on it and was trying to prise it out of his mouth as hard as he was trying to chew it and swallow before she could get it out. Honestly - why do some people put themselves through it?

DD's 4th birthday party is next week. I have a broken leg. Parents will be assigned tasks when they arrive - you're in charge of party games, you're in charge of keeping the Pimms jug filled, etc. Should be good!

Maybe I did go to kitchen, or perhaps No kitchen avail. or it was locked (can't quite recall!), assuming that query was directed at me. Was a filthy venue, anyway, I seem to recall the toilets were the only scrubbed-looking area.
I have a lot of cavities, am fussy about DC teeth precisely because my parents' weren't fussed about mine.
Partly wanted water because I had very mobile baby DC3 with me, too, and would have been awkward for him to not have Cola, too.

Was utterly pointless experience, DD didn't even enjoy the party side of it!

DD was DC2, Would probably sigh & shrug & let DC4 have the lemonade if it happened today (am mostly a slattern, really). But then I'd make any of them have something savory (even if only crisps) before access to the cakes & sweets... so many MNers talk about "Many Parties every weekend" -- doesn't it bother you if your child has several meals each week that are all sweets, biscuits, ice cream & cakes? Or is between one to three purely sugary junk meals a week in the "No Big Deal" category for most of you? I've had mine binge so much on sugar that they eat nothing else for rest of the day.

haha, ewa, my DS has done that.
He used to be a cake fiend. We would have some after dinner, now he won't go near them.
Well, unless they have plenty sugary icing then he eats that and leaves the sponge!
But then he also won't eat fresh fruit or many vegetables
Awkward blighter.

Backinthebox ROFL

Dear God. I'm pg with 1st, and now I have something else to get annoyed about after the birth! As if the preponderance of pink s**t was not enough! Have things changed that much in the last generation, or are MNers a bit posher than we were?

I distinctly remember kids parties for my little bro in the 90s. Proper party food, most parents dumped the kids, and the few who stayed were my mum's friends and they drank wine in the kitchen! There was someone keeping an eye on things and organising the games, but grownups had their own party in the kitchen!

I'm going to be a social outcast. I can see it all... I'll have to invite MNer's kids to the parties instead!

musicposy, my son, who ate the frazzles IS 2.5 Is that o.k. ?

Crikey none of this happened at the parties DD went to! Nor do I remember parents staying for parties for 5 and above - not unless I had specially asked them to stay to help. Up to 4 - yes that did happen. Five seemed to be the cut off point though.

Like one or two others on this thread, when we had parties for DD when she and her friends were small I used to go for the party box idea. For her 4th I got those cardbourd limos from Party Pieces that you can arrange food in and they took me bl**dy ages to put together. Thank goodness i hadn't left it until the day of the party!

Re the food - yes, totally ott and annoying. Possibly the parents are trying to prove they are very healthy/careful/superior parents?

Re the parents staying at parties thing - personally I wouldn't leave my DC at the home of someone I don't know, and wouldn't expect another parent to do it either (my oldest is recently 7). I either stay myself (but don't hover about - just natter to other parents, or offer to help with the food or whatever), or if a friend's DC is going then I would ask them to take (and stay) with DC, or vice cersa. Its very common here - parents generally stay. Generaly there are some nibbles and a cuppa for parents, and the parents enjoy the chance to chat.

I wouldn't, however, bring my other DC along with me (have seen parents do this at others' partiues and think it can make it very difficult for the host parents, especially re party bags), unless it was an infant.

There is another side to all this though - kids get 'treats' so often now that party food may form a good chunk of their diet most weekends.

My darling neice is very overweight and if left to her own devices will eat junk till it comes out of her ears. My sister doesn't 'hover' but she does try to set limits on what my neice eats. If she's attending two parties, a family birthday, a school treat and a cafe visist with her dad all in one week then what kind of parent would my sis be if she didn't take some responsibility?

I agree re all the competitiveness, show off parenting etc but it seems like a no win situation in a way. I have no doubt that many people look at my neice, look at my sister and think 'that mum shouldn't have let her daughter get so fat'.

"10 year olds being made to look at displays so that parents could show off their O'level Biology"

oh gawd I HATE that. yes we know you're clever and educated and that you're a Good Parent who's trying to educate their child. We know ...

but we don't give a flying %$£&

loud discipline too. there was a parent doing loud text book parenting that I saw the other day - reprimands, counting to three, penalties. yes dear, you're great but WE DON'T NEED TO KNOW

I'm from the 70s when there was no such thing as healthy eating. We were the only people I knew who weren't allowed white bread and processed food. There was no stopping me at parties and anywhere my mum wasn't around.

I'm from the 70s as well. My mum was also one of the first generation to discover wholefoods, before anyone had worked out how to make it taste nice.

Another child of the 70's here. Nouvelle cusine in our house was a tin of chicken in white sauce from M & S (had to be theirs) warmed up and served on crossiants from Andrew G Kidd (Scottish equivilent of Greggs in the 70's).

my mum homebaked most foods as my parents didn't have a lot of cash. I was so jealous of a family down the road that ate hot dogs and drank pop all the time.

There's so much helicopter parenting here that I get regular flashbacks to 'Nam.

Recent examples include being invited to a picnic; turning up with DP, our two kids, as well as a chum and his son. There were a few other couples there with their children, age ranges, say 18 mo to 5 years.
So, we were told to turn up at 3.00pm, but when we all started unpacking our food, the hostess (if you can host a picnic...) got all wobbly, as apparently we weren't to START eating until 5.00pm, as this is the time her DCs eat....every day, without fail.

To make matters worse, our friend had brought one of his homemade lemon and poppy seed cakes to share around.....

"Ohhh nooooo.....now they REALLY won't eat their dinners......"

For fuxxake. Thankfully, everyone just looked blank and carried on eating.....

The other example is ME being followed round on behalf of a girl.....I offered to get a plate of food together for her at DS' party. "....no..no....actually, I'LL choose the food......I have to make sure it's not too full of sugar, or she WILL have a meltdown....". I have never seen her DD freak out over anything; in fact she's always come across as a very calm and compassionate human being.

I think the worst thing there, apart from the cake, was a bowl of Kettle Chips.

Oh, and a couple of months ago, pouring out some squash for the children at a friend's DD's party......

"You don't get squash at home, do you, X? No, we have water or milk, don't we?". Now, if she didn't give her son the squash because there was some sort of prob which led to her avoiding the stuff, fair enough, but she let him have it while letting us all know about her great parenting. This woman has tried to do competitive hyperemesis with me in the past

Oh god.....another one......

In the park recently with some friends and their DSs....ran to the shop to get some drinks and a few Flumps. Offered them round.....all kids and mums accepted except for one mum who replied in the most contemptuous tone:

"I don't think he'd eat it" Pause "Thanks".

He's four, this thing is 10 grams (or thereabouts) of shit and sugar....of course he'd eat it.

Just fuck off...

As you were.

YANBU, but I'm not sure you will be able to make parents leave! Could you make little sandwich boxes instead?

Oh yeah, and we have raging familial hypercholesterolaemia, and we were, like the posters above, the first people we knew to eat muesli and use olive oil as a food rather than for earache!

We are sensible about food, I think...but at a party.......as long as DC aren't tipping plates of biscuits into their trousers for later......leave 'em to it.

I think this meme of certain parents (middle class ones) ostentatiously performing good parenting is a red herring. It's about class really. One thing Britons (having lived overseas for a chunk of my life this really smacked me in the face) are excellent at, is perceiving extremely minor differences in class and the accompanying attitudes and mistrusting/trusting others.

In the febrile world of parenting this is even more true. One parent perceives another to be a certain social class, either feels superior to them, or inferior to that person, and then it descends into a mental slagging off that that mother or father is 'showing off' or 'performing for the cameras'.

Maybe a tiny proportion is showing off. A pretty arid existence, and a fruitless task, I'd have thought. Why bother?

More likely they simply have a lower tolerance for certain things. Maybe their kid has been eating junk for days. Maybe that kid (or more likely, the parent thinks that kid) will behave a certain way if it drinks Capri Suns or eats Quavers. Maybe they are just a bit more uptight about food than you are.

For what it's worth, I like to leave my child to get on with things and don't like to get in her face when eating. But not everyone is like me. I don't weigh myself up against those who do and come to the conclusion that I'm perfect because I'm less uptight than the next parent.

And to be honest, what others get up to washes over me. Sometimes I raise a smile when I see certain things going on. But get annoyed? Start heated threads about it? No, I can't see the point.

Sometimes this place is like Daily Mail Island. You can't be too thin, you're not allowed to be too rich or successful, or be obsessed about education. You can't read about parenting, you must possess a much vaunted 'common sense' (which, by the way, doesn't exist: Common sense is simply what you do that you think is right). You can't be too lax, or too strict.

Basically you've got to fit so far in the middle your eyes pop out. Anything else and you're a try-hard show off ponce, or else chavscum.

Sometimes I try to make sure mine gets enought to eat at parties as he invariably whines for food all the bloody way home.

And ds once went to the party of a boy who's mum is a dietitia and Ive never seen so many sweets in one place before (ok exaggeration it wasnt like wonkaville but there were a lot).

Great post there Otcha....it's also about controlling everything.
What I notice most is that most of these people are simply not very happy, they're always anxious, which does my head in.