School playground bulling within NCT groups

[purpleturtle72]

Hello

I joined my local NCT group with my partner when I was pregnant and attended pre-natal classes with the aim, especially being new to the SE London area, to meet other parents and share experiences. The sessions were quite useful but with a now troubling emphasis on "making friends for life", supported by lots anecdotal evidence from the course leader. Fresh from the sessions the newly formed group began to bond and all seemed supportive with jolly emails bouncing back and forth. Yet 6 months on, "school playground" petty jealousies and competitiveness, mosltly vented towards myself, have worn me down. I feel totally pushed out by the group: I know they have met up and not invited me and when I attended the 'official' meetings, one in particular interrupted me every time I spoke, the others, bar one, ignored what i said and on more than one occasion members of the group turned their backs on me as they wittered on amongst themselves. I tried my best to win them over, and not lacking social skills, I listened attentively, I didn't 'go on' about my child, and I contributed by sending emails, mostly suggesting things to do or offering useful links on the web, most passed without reply. Not one to give up, I regularly attended meet-ups until my son was nearly four months old, but now I admit defeat. I have tried to join another local NCT group. A NCT neighbour suggested, I went along with a friend I'd met through Mumsnet to a meet-up of an amalgan of two SE London groups. We both wanted to meet up with them again, however, thanks to the efforts of one of them, who was outright rude to me on the night, thinking it was HER group, we were never added to the email list, and my texts to my neighbour now go without reply! All I ever wanted was to have friends for my child it but appears alot of NCT women, mostly intelligent high achievers with City jobs, are driven by snobbery and status, and they have already decided my son, as they have me, isn't worthy. I feel that NCT should include in their sessions the importance of excepting and supporting each other, whatever their social or ethnic background or other personal circumstances. NCT feels to me like an elite members club, overwhelmingly white and middle class in a very multi-cultural part of London. In light of my negative NCT experiences, I have now joined a local mums' groups and it's re-freshing to meet such down-to-earth and balanced people for a change and to be accepted for who I am. To close, here is a question for the NCT charity, why offer concessions to lower income families knowing they will be isolated by such a class conscious and elitist lot, only to eventually drop out?

I think it was at least £10 ( possibly more) a session, for about six sessions. ( And that was ten + years ago )
But as DH and I were both working ( DINKies ! ) at the time, and the sessions were aimed at both of us ( as well as me being a very excited first time Mum-to-be ! ), they seemed well worth it at the time

Hospital classes, which I/we also did, were nearly as good in terms of preparation for birth, and actually even better in terms of meeting a friendly group of women to meet up with after our babies arrived !

maybe it was a clash of personalities.

for me i would hate to be part of a group where people think money and material items mean you are better.

Maybe you expected too much of this group. I went NCT classes and found them incredibly useful and well worth the money As preparation for a natural birth. I did not expect any more than that- I certainly didn't go into it expecting life long friends ( your course leaders comments on that would have set alarm bells ringing for me). I vaguely remember having a couple of meet ups after for coffee, but nothing more than that. I agree with those saying that it's artificial to assume you will make lifelong friends simply through having children who happen to be born at the same time.

Who were your friends before you had children? Why cant they continue to be your closest friends? Look to people you really like and enjoy being with to spend time with. Having a baby is not a signal that you need to start spending your life at baby groups and coffee mornings.

Are you me?! I also encountered this type of behaviour in an NCT group in SE London! I generally got on with my group well but there was one woman who decided that she was 'queen bee' and seemed to pick on me. I was the youngest and I think 'poorest' of the group - I lived in the least affluent area (this group was the nearest to me at the time) and didn't have a car etc. This woman always insisted on meeting in an area that was easy for them to get to but really far away from me - it took me over and hour and two buses to get there and always ignored my suggestions of meeting somewhere halfway or that was even a tiny bit easier for me to get to. The others just went along with what she wanted because she was very domineering.

Her son was the oldest, so he was always bigger and better than my baby who was the youngest. My baby struggled with weight gain and she made several catty comments about my breast milk obviously being inferior to hers as her son was a big weight. I went back to work first (couldn't afford to have a full year off) and she was very dismissive about it all - even when I had real problems being back at work and was basically put in a position where I was forced to leave (long story - but I have another job now). She cut me straight out of all meet-ups. Fair enough I couldn't make the weekday ones but I could have gone to the weekend ones.

Roll on over a year now and we had a recent meet up (I organised). She was exactly the same - everything perfect in her life etc, talking about how amazing everyone thinks her son is etc and I just smiled, nodded and went to talk to someone else. I can't be bothered to talk to someone who thinks they are better for me with no good reason. But I do like the other women enough to put up with her.

Just cut them out of your life, you will be much better off for it.

In my (old) area, there were no antenatal classes available whatsoever on the NHS so I went to NCT classes because I knew nothing about babies. I found the people in the class fine but I moved out of the area so don't see them any more. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - just accept that they are a nasty bunch and cut them off.

Looks like prices are per hour now and you have to pay for the re-union meet-up now too, which was a bit more informal in my day !

• Just a bring a dish at one of the Mums homes - and a lovely opportunity to meet all the babies and have a catch up ! Slightly cheeky that they're charging for that too now IMHO !

And as most sessions are 2 hours long in the evenings it's heading towards £20 a session now, but that doesn't really surprise me !
Still well worth it for your first, if you're not broke !

I think it's just life, to be honest. I attended a terrific NCT group and got on well with all the other mothers there. We continued to meet up after birth but I was too busy to meet up every time and I noticed, via Facebook, that they were meeting up regularly without letting me know. Even now they meet up even though our DC are 3.5 yo, without me. I don't take it personally, I'm busy with my full life and have made new friends through my DD's nursery (and she has loads of new nursery friends too). This September our DC start school and there will be more opportunities to meet new parents. I shrug all these "playground politics" off.

First mumsnet post turtlepurple?

Slagging off the NCT for being 'elitist'?

As for cost - the courses are fucking expensive: £200+ in central London for a full couples course (6 to 8 sessions). But they're non-profit making: the charity funds national helplines, the training of breastfeeding counsellors, as well as research into parenting and birth issues.

Also to fund its lobbying work to improve maternity services for everyone. These services are funded in part by the revenue from antenatal courses.

Re cost: if you're on a means tested benefit, in which case you can get them at a fraction of the cost. I think those people on income support (or whatever has taken over from income support) get them at 10% of the full fee.

NCT do have a very middle-class clientèle in some areas, particularly central London. Less so in other areas. But nice people can be found in any social group, as can nasty people.

(wondering if turtlepurple works for one of new profit-making, franchised antenatal class companies, set up in the last year or so, who see the NCT as their main competitor)

By the way, to declare an interest - I sit on the committee for my local NCT as a volunteer. I think it's got a great history of campaigning work. Would add - there are some people I can't stand in our branch, but then that's also true of the mums I spend time with from my children's school, which is the least middle-class group you could hope to meet....... As I said, nasty people come in all social complexions....

We called them the NCT mafia. Three of us who were like-minded formed a splinter group and abandoned the rest to their fate! But I was lucky in that at least I did find 2 dear friends, we still meet for coffee and gossip even tho all the children are secondary stage now.
Shocked to see just how expensive the courses etc are now - they were steep then, but seem worse now, would not bother if I was starting the family journey today.

Why do people feel that by paying up to £200 for NCT classes they will find bosom buddies there? We felt this was a silly idea, you are just as likely to make friends at the free NHS class, playgroups etc. I feel they are selling false friendships and you will do better making friends naturally. The sound like a bunch of playground princesses so do you really want your child beng friends with theirs? I hope you find some nice friends elsewhere.

I agree with hexagonal.

This is not unique to NCT (which as I was abroad didn't have).

I did however join at parent/toddler group and as many of the mums knew each other I felt like an outsider. (DS just 2 when I joined as just returned to UK and wanted/ needed to meet local people). Some mums tried to make me feel welcome but the alpha mum treated me like dirt from day 1 and continued it when our DS' started school together. It happened from the moment I said hello so know I hadn't said or done anything to upset her. She even went as far as to 'lecture' me on potty training when DS announced he needed a wee and we ran went to the toilet. Apparently I shouldn't 'push' these things.
She had 2 older children and obviously felt that because DS was my first and hers her 3rd she had some kind of superiorness to me?

It stopped last year when I used the well known MN phase 'did you mean to be so rude' when she blatently snubbed me.

YANBU, but you are better off without these toxic people in your life and ultimatly will be a happier parent not being involved in playground games and DC competitiveness.

I think there is a valid point being made here about the NCT emphasising how the classes are a way of making a friendship group - obviously they can't control how that pans out, but maybe they should include some discussion of that in the classes. I also joined an NCT class in SE London and had a similar experience as the OP.
We were new to London and knew very few people so for me the social aspect was definitely a selling point. The classes were ok other than the teacher being so resolutely anti-epidural, and we met up a few times afterwards. However, I started being excluded in nasty childish ways and the other mums were pretty snobbish (lots of talk about certain prams being 'chavtastic') so I withdrew...I did find it hard to talk to other mums in general at other mum-toddler groups - I found them in general unfriendly and cold - this was in battersea/clapham and I went to I'd say about five different groups. It got better once we moved to a different area!

My NCT group was my lifeline. Also in London. No family. Without my NCT group I would have been very lonely indeed. It was a very varied group (only two white british women, of which I was one). Great support, genuinely caring. One girl did fade away, she had a family network which meant she did not meet up quite so frequently and, inevitably, when she did, she was a little out of the loop (although we all made a huge effort to include her when she did).

I am always surprised when people recount similar experiences such as yours and they do not look inwards more closely.

I don't know whether I have my rose tinted specs on here, but I find it very odd to think the entire group of women were being nasty and excluding you for no other reason than they were all just nasty people. I suspect there was a reson, and that reason sadly had something to do with you.

I do not want to hurt you, I really do not. But I think it is worth carefully exploring how you approached these women. Did you go in thinking 'oh they are city high fliers who are going to be stuck up and ignore me' and behaved accordingly?

My nct group has really stuck together and has gained some extras along the way. I think we have gained people because we recognise how valuable having accepting people going through the same thing as us is, so we are welcoming when friends of the group join us. Also with a lot of us back at work weekly meeting ups need new blood. I really could have done without the classes and I think there is a gap in the market for an organisation that just puts people into little groups when they are having babies without the expensive classes.

Shagmundfreud, you are kidding me.. someone who has found NCT groups unfriendly (hardly a new phenomenon) is automatically out to discredit the whole organisation?

I think a lot of it is down to demographics, to be honest with you. If you live in an area with people who are, more or less, "like you" (and by like you, I mean in broad general terms of lifestyle factors in common rather than ethnically/socially/otherwise), you are likely to find good friends within whatever groups there are around you.

I feel one of my issues with meeting people last time was that I live in a relatively poor estate (mostly council) beside an uberwealthy area (houses c. 2.5million and above). I am friendly and chatty with everyone I meet at various groups in our area, but truthfully, we don't have a lot in common. The mums at the local Stay and Play bond over benefits and I always felt like a total fraud when they would talk to me about how I could get x or y (assuming I was in the same situation they were as we lived in the same place), the mums in the "yummy mummy" groups (Baby Sensory, Gymboree) were all about their nannies and travelling abroad and the church groups were full of childminders.

Sometimes the "unfriendliness" is because people at child-bearing age often have very little in common and conversation just doesn't flow. New mothers, especially first-timers, are often very sensitive about minor differences in opinion and view the actions of other women as a judgement of their own behaviour when really everyone is being slightly egocentric and just wanting to bang on about their own decisions and almost justify them as they are shit scared and not at all sure. It's not always the best time to meet people who are different to you.

At university, I had friends who were like something out of Made in Chelsea alongside people who had come from comps like mine, from a widely diverse range of backgrounds, and we all had great times as we had a similar outlook for that period of tim. But fast-forward 15 years and the ones who went to Eton etc are barristers/museum curators/politicians and those more like me are teachers/social workers/middle income public sector workers and though that friendship history is there, generally speaking, people who remain with factors in common are more likely to maintain friendships than many of those whose paths diverged. It's just life.

bbface but as you say, you had a very varied group. I think you're being very naive if you think a group of people with similar status will not exclude someone they see as not fitting in. It's not inevitable, but it often happens.

The OP says she's having a much better experience with a different local group which implies that the problem is not her at all.

I have heard similar horror stories from another South London NCT group. A friend of mine was shunned by 2 ladies for living on the wrong side of Tulse Hill Road (and honestly that was it, she is super lovely and everyone else liked her).

I think some of the comments towards the OP are overly harsh. I do disagree that the NCT are in some way responsible for the OP encountering a group that she didn't gel with and seem to have behaved unpleasantly towards her. The NCT does seem to vary massively from group to group, some people have met lovely like minded friends, others don't. Best to cut losses quickly and move on to another group. There is little more soul destroying than trying to fit in to a group that isn't prepared to give you a fair crack of the whip.

really, the bottom line is that the only thing you have in common with these people is that you had a baby at roughly the same time. If you get on with some of them then you are lucky.

my NCT group was generally great and I still know many of them years on. My NHS group was ok but a larger number of them were very aspirational and shallow; I used to have a sinking in the pit of my stomach feeling before each meet up. Frankly, it was a relief when I decided I was flogging a bit of a dead horse and stopped going!

I think some people pay the extortionate NCT fees as they feel it will allow them to meet "like minded people" which in the NCT group I encountered (through a friend) meant "people who are NOT poor." If you do happen to be relatively poor and have the gall to turn up at an NCT group you can really made to feel like you've "cheated" to get in and that you're not in the right place. I mean the others have paid to get away from you, and now you're here, sullying their perfect child's atmosphere?? Not acceptable.

Also I think for some people their apparent snobbery is actually caused by social anxiety and just general naivete. One of the girls in my friend's NCT group was white but her son was black as her husband was African. The stir caused in the group was really quite ridiculous - she had to endure endless comments about her son's "lovely skin" and "gorgeous hair" when it was so obvious that they were horribly uncomfortable around her and just didn't know what to say because she was "unusual." It struck me that a lot of the "rich" women in the group had led very very sheltered lives - they'd been sent to private schools where they never encountered anyone from a different economic background or ethnic group and had stuck to "their own" at university and in jobs later. And they were planning on doing the same thing to their kids - turning them into nasty people who had fixed ideas of the world and who excluded others on the basis of skin colour and income.

Incidentally the whole thing was very amusing for me as I joined the group through a friend after our babies were born and so was an outsider. I have an Irish accent so they couldn't place me from how I spoke and they knew nothing about me so they were forced to be polite to me until they found out how to pigeon hole me. The atmosphere turned quite frosty when I said where I lived (not a great part of town) but I was very quickly allowed back into the inner circle when it was discovered I had a degree and my husband had a respectable job. Some of them actually repeatedly tried to figure out why I was living where I was living, as that was clearly causing them an issue - they couldn't believe they might like and socialise with someone from the rough part of town. I was even asked a few times when I was moving, even though I never mentioned moving. Odd creatures.

buttonspoon the woman you came across sounds exactly like the woman that I encountered at my post-natal group experience. She also had a big baby, far bigger than my DD, and would make cutting comments like "Oh, don't you feed your child?" and "When we know what we're doing, our babies thrive, don't they?" directed to her baby, when I mentioned that my DD had dropped off her centile. Everyone else at the meeting seemed in absolute awe of her and would all say "wow" and "that's amazing" when she detailed her DD's latest achievement.

I stopped meeting with the group in the end; I was only 22 at the time and the mums were all late twenties, early thirties, so I guess I felt a bit like the odd one out anyway, but I didn't want to spend time with someone who constantly tried to make me feel rubbish. After I stopped going to meet ups I bumped over several years into other group members in town and at other things and all of them said to me that they found this woman too much and too competitive and that they wish they had done what I did and stepped away from the group as they were now all tied up in the "keeping up with the joneses" circle with her, for things like birthday parties, and comparing holidays, and who can make the best cakes for the coffee morning, that sort of thing.

I think that you can get it with any group. Maybe I was lucky but I found NCT groups fine.
You are not going to make friends for life through it (or maybe only one or 2) because as soon as your DCs is old enough they will choose their own friends and not mummy ones.
I would just write it off and look for friends elsewhere.

I think too that NCT groups and the like do often only suit those that are professionally competitive and are just happy to talk over each other about themselves to compete all the time. "Oh my DH has got a new job" "Yes darling mine has got one now too, how funny that my DH is always a step ahead of yours on the career ladder" "yes, but we've got a villa in Tuscany" etc etc

It is probably to do with living in London and 'high achievers' putting their all into parenting. Judging by another thread they see themselves as 'alpha' parents and are seeking other 'alpha' parents. I think you are well out of it-'competitive mummies' at their worst!!

I agree with others that there is something quite arbitrary about friends based around kids of same age and even of same area.

The alpha mum/stealth boasting thing is wearing in whatever form. There was someone in our group who made snidey comments about someone living in a "palace" (other woman wasn't a baggy type but offered to host as others did so bit harsh).
Am just doing second lot of courses for dd2 and although I like the course (Its a good chance to ask questions), I am not expecting friendship . If it happens great but somehow I dont feel quite need for it with second dc and also understand that not bonding not necessarily a reflection on me.