School playground bulling within NCT groups

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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 like mine now, but think new mums can be pretty annoying and obsessive. reason we all get on OK hnow is we all work FT, ergo in same boat. I not too many yummy (boak) sahm mummy types

HELLO there ladies

does anyone know how to email people individually on this??

PT

I'm sorry to hear your negative experience. My dd1 has just turned two & my NCT group (6 of 8) still meet up every Tuesday. It's lovely to see the kids playing together & are all so comfortable round the other mums. We are neither power bitches or lentil weavers! Just a group of middle income (teachers, civil servants, etc) mums who joke regularly that we are the best friends we ever bought! We had o e nasty experience with a slightly odd group member who tried to stir things up, but she was left in no doubt that bullying was not allowed so she got fed up & left.

We were however extremely lucky, 5 of us were born within 5 months of each other & have a lot in common. I guess this is a rare but lovely coincidence.

However me & one of the other mums did a post natal course with them and had a very similar 'coven' lime experience to you. Luckily we had each other!

Good luck for the future.

I met one lovely friend from my nct ante natal class. The rest of the group were actually really lovely - but moved away, went back to work etc.

I moved - I was introduced to another what had been nct ante natal group. They were mad, obsessive, weird, jealous - dreadful.

Luck of the draw imv.

I am going to be doing NCT classes in SE London and am already worried my class might be overwhelmingly glamorous and high-flying career types, which is the polar opposite to me (fairly plain looking and hated my career, am much more excited about being a mum than I ever was about spreadsheets).

I was told by one friend that the support from the class was essential in the early months - the time you've just been through - for comparing notes and just having someone else who's going through the same thing as you. After that you'll be likely to meet other mums at clubs/local groups and detach from the NCT mums you didn't have so much in common with in the first place.

My NCT class is not that close to where I live - or at least close as the crow flies but not easy to get to on public transport - so if the other mums in the group come from a wide area I'm hoping to find people living nearer me, one way or the other.

I never joined the NCT as such but did go to a baby massge course when DD was a few months old. I lived in the normal part of town and the course was in the uber swanky part. That should have been the clue really. I have a vague recollection of sitting in one womans house who was going on about having street dinner parties and her plans to dig up the cellar and turn it into a playroom. It all felt so contrived and I definatley didnt fit in. There was one lovely lady but we didnt stay in touch as it was quite far away. Unfortunatley women can be like this sometimes. I have had similar horrid experiences with a group of women assocaited with friends of DH. However, women can also be amazing to each other.

I'm really not sure why women want to belong these groups so that their DC make ' friends '. They make friends anyway once they start preschool , school etc etc .
I do think it's a very modern middle class phenomena.
I jacked my antenatal group , they were a bunch of bitchy women who thought they were the first group of women ever to have a baby !
I still see them out and about at pre - school, in the park etc but I just vaguely smile and try to avoid them .
The endless emails about ' what age can I give Johnny a raspberry ' used to drive me to tears.

Perhaps you missed the NCT session on "How to be a post-natal bitch" ?

Because 8 weeks of talking about pain relief and the progression of labour is going to have a massive influence on whether the attendees are able to polite and sociable.

Yep - definitely all the NCTs fault.

I went to NCT ante-natal classes, but found I had very little in common with the members and drifted away from their clique very quickly. Then invited to local NCT post natal meetings with a completely different and really lovely bunch of local mothers, with whom
I got on really well, and whom I still see many years later. Then I got loosely involved with some volunteering - a third group of women who I got on fine with but didn't make good friends with.

So I guess I'm with all the people who say it all depends on the luck of the draw.

My health visitor encouraged me to go out & join a group. Several weeks of meeting up with women who had no interest in each other & who repeatedly asked 'so how old is your son?' just so that they had something to be alarmed or smug about was enough.

I don't think that DS2 suffered from the opportunity to make friends, & I used our spare time to teach him Latin, which is good as it's making a come-back.

spermy yes I found it all very ridiculously competitive .
It's all very twee to me .

My NCT group was largely made up of nice people. I am very much in touch with one of them, 2 years on, and the others occasionally and at birthday parties. They are nothing like the stereotypes that always come up in these threads. A couple of them would not be people I would naturally be drawn to in other circumstances and I never felt as connected to them but all we really talked about was babies and it actually was great to have that in the early weeks and months. Long before the competitiveness kicks in! At that stage we were all just so shell shocked by our equally awful deliveries that we were comforted by the opportunity to go over it all the time and purge ourselves of those conversations you want to have but don't
want to bore your other friends with.

Sure, as time went on, you started to realise who you could live without and things did drift once people went back to work but honestly it was my life-line and I really looked forward to our weekly lunches.

I think I was lucky in a way that of our group of 8, only 5 kept in touch after the course. I think it made it more intimate when we got together rather than a big gang which would naturally form cliques within it. I do think that in a bigger group I would have felt a bit lost.

I still recommend joining to every pregnant woman I know.

NCT was bad enough n the sleepy midlands town I lived in, I can just imagine all the London uberparenting yummy mummy NCT groups (shudders)

To anyone considering joining an NCT antenatal class I would say just enjoy your'e baby instead, and make individual friends along your'e journey as a new mum at toddler groups or things YOU want to do with your'e time.

Life is far far too short to be sitting around drinking coffee in a competitive bitchy atmosphere.
Like many of the threads here my experience started of well but slowly turned sour over time as I made it clear that I was really after individual real friendships. Takeovers were staged, divisions were made, and the whole thing was just far too hierarchical for me.

I found the group thing snobbish, stressful and pressured and there were days that I just wanted to breastfeed in peace and not have to worry about who was ignoring who, or marching down a road discussing weaning machines.
I would definitely not join ever again and 7 months on am now happy I have left the group and can get on with enjoying being a mum with real friendships.
It can be quite exhausting keeping up with everyone in the group and its energy better spent with you're baby in a more supportive atmosphere.

I also found the social focuss to be too much on information swapping and it was all rather impersonal.

I agree with the thread here that says the NCT is essentially like befriending a whole bunch of work colleagues. Its not a great premise for friendship and things can get pretty nasty and hairy with a bunch of post natal women who have all had their separate joys and losses.

This is not meant to cause anyone offence who has found positivity with the NCT just my experience that I wanted to share.

I had a really positive experience of my NCT group but then they were nothing like you describe. More inclusive and warm but we don't live in London. I do think local baby are the way forward for you. As a mum I have made various close friends through lots of different events over the years.

YANBU. I joined NCT whilst pregnant with my first child. My goodness , you couldn't have paid me to rejoin any of their antenatal classes or groups 2nd time around. I met a load of seemingly nice very middle class women who were on maternity leave whilst their DP's commuted into London for their well to do jobs.

I had v little in common with them and at the time DH and had even less in common with their partners who would all meet up for a drink but exclude DH as he doesn't drink (will still sit in a pub though- still never invited him)

Soon as the babies were born and the coffee mornings started it just became a bitch-fest. I was always the outsider, what with being an "ethnic" and having a difficult to pronounce first name and surname, bottle feeding non-baby-wearing and as I didn't drive I couldn't always get to the meetups but they would all be uber polite towards me and I got the group emails even though I wasn't really included in any of the banter. I knew they were being polite so didn't expect much in the way of any lasting friendships.

However one of the women felt horribly left out, they wouldn't always add her to group emails or invite her on coffee mornings. They effectively froze her out as she wasn't quite as posh as them. She would try so hard, always inviting them round to hers and then laying on a spread over and beyond what was neccessary, baking fresh cakes for coffee mornings and stressing over getting the right kind of food and drink. She broke down in tears in front of me one day and confessed she was suffering from PND and that this was contributing to make her feel like shit pretty much all the time.

I stopped meeting up with them soon after, this other lady did too. I still regularly see them around the town, they fucking blank me as if they don't know me, even though they aren't quick enough to hide the recognition in thier eyes. Its all so fucking superficial.

I know not all NCT groups are like that but my experience put me off them for life. Oh just as an aside, even though my group seemed to be full of rather well off women, they used to scout the local children's centre (on the wrong side of town for them) for interesting classes such as baby massage, sing and sign and baby yoga etc and then spend the entire course trying to interact as little as possible with the locals who they perceived to be beneath them and bitch about them all in the coffee sessions afterwards - shudders!. Never again.

Well I obviously got lucky then as my NCT group are a lovely bunch and without them my maternity leave would have been a nightmare as I would have been stuck at home or going to dreaded baby groups.

As it is I made 5 new friends all who live within a mile, and 15 months on we meet up about once a week for lunch or coffees (trying to fit around our various working days is tricky though!) and every month for wine in the evenings

My experience of the nct group I'm in is that they have been lovely and supportive, wonderful people. Ds is 5 mo now and I don't know how I would have coped without them. We moved to a new area and didn't know anyone, I also don't drive and dh works away a lot. They have gone out of their way to help. I can say I have made genuine friends for life there. We do not talk about our babies much, we talk about work and politics and interesting things.

I think group dynamics are hard and just one or two personalities can derail them. I think if a group doesn't work for you then it's best to move on. It's not possible to change them and certainly not exclusive to nct (I've had work place bullying like this).

I doubt including something in the classes would change anything as if these people are like that they probably don't care or don't realise - it's amazing how oblivious some people are to this.

My lot were and are when we meet up ten tears later, lovely.

No, not all of us would have natural been friends if we'd met another way, but we have formed a friendly supportive group.

Sadly several of us have moved around the country, so full meet ups are rare, but great fun when they happen.

We are now quite a crowd with DC2s and in some cases DC3 joining our number.

I met my cousin's NCT group about a year before I got pg, and they scared the living daylights out of me, so I didn't bother signing up - very hooray henry types, and so competitive and patronising that I just didn't want to get involved.

So after birth, I decided to go to a mother & baby yoga class run by someone in my pregnancy yoga class (which I had really enjoyed) and found exactly the same attitudes and cliques - they actually made me cry one day when I came in and said hallo to everyone, but I was just left at the end of the class alone with DS whilst they all chatted together drinking tea & eating biscuits on the other side of the mats. To be fair, the organiser had emailed me about a couple of daytime meet ups outside of class, but I worked 4 days a week so couldn't make it, so the others just didn't bother trying to include me at the classes.

So, no, I don't think it's a NCT problem, its just a general attitude problem with certain women. Their loss, OP. I'm glad you've found some new friends & a group that suits you.

You do know this thread is over a year old. Would be interesting to hear how the op is now though!

As said before bitchiness doesn't just happen in the Nct and the Nct isn't full f bitches, just as mumsnet isn't a nest of vipers!!!

I think it's just the group mentality, sadly. I went along to free antenatal classes instead of paying for the NCT, and I felt a bit frozen out by my group. I think they thought I was too posh. I'm not really, but I made the mistake of admitting that I had a maternity nurse for the early weeks. They then discovered that I had been to the local private school and Cambridge Uni, and after that I was pretty much frozen out. So it works both ways!

I'm struggling with the whole mum-friends thing too. Although the women in my NCT group are all lovely I don't feel we've clicked - though we continue to see each other, I know the others meet up individually/in small groups and it makes me feel a bit awkward. I do want to meet other mums in my area, but it gets very intimidating going to groups alone and feeling like it's the first day at school all over again! I've also had a couple of really bad experiences of being literally left to sit alone during 'friendly' baby/mum groups.

I keep thinking surely I can't be the only woman who's gone from working f/t surrounded by colleagues and still relies on the need for adult chat? I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something! The worst part is the guilt at feeling I'm letting dd down by not making friends with lots of mums with babies her age for her to grow up with. Part of me knows this is silly, but I can't help but feel like I should be doing more for her - can't be fun sitting in the house with a mum who is getting slight cabin fever!

I had a crap experience with the NCT, but it depends so much on who's in the group. Finding another group, which you've done, is the best solution.

I think the NCT, because of the cost and its perceived values, tends to attract competitive mums, though by no means all. Some people have a great experience.