to think this child is too old to be exposing himself?

[JenniBoo]

Bit of a back story... was delighted when a young family bought the house next door. After the previous elderly couple (who would complain about noise and balls going over the wall etc.,) I thought another young family would be a breath of fresh air and that their boys (8, 5 and 3) would play with my daughters (3yrs and 3 mths).

The first hint that they were not our sort of people became apparent almost immediately. They are both heavy smokers - they must smoke at least a pack a day - but instead of doing it in their house, they (and their friends) congregate on the porch- the smell wafts across into our garden and through the kitchen window. One day it was so bad, you could smell it in my baby's bedroom on the floor above! I asked them politely if they would mind smoking indoors or at the end of their garden - but they were completely unapologetic and said they couldn't do that because in the house if might affect THEIR children - and that at the end of the garden, they would get wet!

She seems to let her kids run wild - she is never in the garden with them, and the noise is something else. The other day I had to complain because they were throwing stones at each other - one flew across into our garden narrowly missing my baby, who was sleeping in the pram. I went across to complain but the mother couldn't have cared less. She lined them up and made them apologize, but she was all "boys will be boys" and you could tell she wasn't really sorry.

Today has been the final straw though. I came out to find both the younger boys exposing themselves to my older daughter. They had climbed onto their trampoline and were waving them at her. The older boy was there too, but was just laughing. I went round to the mother and told her. . The other mother told me I was "being stupid" and that "they are just little boys" and that I should "get over myself".

I don't think a 5 year old should be getting his willy out in public. Surely if he did that in the class at school he would be in huge trouble? Am I being unreasonable?

phantomnamechange very perceptive post. I think you are spot on tbh.

I really don't like living like this :(

I was expecting to read 10,11

5!!!! is still a small child.

Mouthful

You'll be waiting a long time given the tax from importing tobacco helps prop up the NHS.

Though having said that,the way this govn are going...

Octopus

You might as well discard anything you might have thought. Very odd thread indeed.

Might do a spreadsheet of all the people who agree with OP just so I know to dismiss their opinions in future

That's weird Alisvolatpropiis are you taking this a little too seriously?

Here. In honour of one of the most relentlessly stupid threads I have ever read.
And I never name change ...

We are very lucky we have a family next door and our dd and their dd are inseparable. But we certainly irritate each other it's all about tolerance realy and picking your battles. So IMO smoking not ideal, but not much you can do. Throwing stones absolutely not acceptable and the mother knows this, as both times she has apologized. Unfortunately I don't think you can leave dc2 sleeping in the pram atm and I would not be afraid to tell the mother this.

. I'm in two minds about the Willy wagglerling TBH. I really think you could have distracted your dd/ignored it.

That felt weird.

at Pagwagglewilly

My 2 yr old was throwing stones at my 4 year old again today - guess he is too far gone wtf !!!!!!!!

Now you can criticise the OP for many one or two things, but taking half a cake round is very nice, neighbourly behaviour. Might make them feel a bit odd if they thought you'd cooked a whole one just for them!

OP, you should've started a thread about the Little Tikes incident, then you'd have experienced a completely different AIBU result!

OP, that's a very brave acknowledgement and the closest you have come to admitting this is blown out of all proportion.

You don't like living like this - Are you getting some help? Maybe start again with the neighbours - forget the willy waving and say you hope you haven't got off to a bad start but the stone throwing thing really scared you and shook you up. Take them a whole cake (they have 3 boys, it'll soon vanish!) They may be your neighbours for years. You might even become friends over time. But you at least need to manage the everyday little annoyances a bit better or life will be miserable for you all.

OP on another thread I posted about the best and worst ages of parenting. I am a certified EXPERT because I have managed to get my DSs from infancy through to grown-up-ness. My youngest DS graduated last week!! From Oxbridge! Yes, thank you very much for your admiration. You're too kind...

I do seem to recall endless willy waggling, trampoline jumping, frog chasing, stick chucking, you name it. Their father (xH) even smoked. And yet, these little shits now seem to pass muster in PhDs and the Inns of Court. Wow.

You have 2 precious DD. Things are not always according to what YOU perceive. Either get hold of reality now, or it will get hold of you later.

No Jenni love, I was being facetious.

HTH

I do feel sorry for you OP, especially that this is causing you so much anxiety, however I have to say I am starting to feel really sorry for your neighbour too. Maybe you need to try putting yourself in her shoes?

It's week three of the summer holidays and she is at home alone all day with three young boys who are probably starting to get bored and restless in the house and are now starting to display silly behaviour, winding each other up and encouraging each other to do things they likely know are naughty. She has just moved house (you don't say how long ago exactly but I'm guessing it's within the last few weeks?) and is probably still trying to get the house in order, plus moving is expensive and so it's possible her family probably don't have a lot of spare cash at the moment to spend taking the boys on days out to help fill the time and stop them from getting so bored. It's a new area so the children probably haven't had a chance yet to make friends with other neighbourhood children and thus take some of the pressure to entertain off their mother.

I'm not trying to excuse the behaviour of your neighbours little boys or the fact that their mother perhaps hasn't dealt with their silly behaviour as effectively as she could have, but moving house is meant to be one of the most stressful things you can do and no doubt it is worse when it is the summer holidays and she has three small boys to keep entertained on top of everything else. Your poor neighbour is probably exhausted! I doubt that your neighbours want to upset you, or the man on the other side of them, and it sounds like she could really use some support.

Please be gentle with your neighbours on Friday, no doubt they feel bad about this (especially if their sons have now upset their other neighbour) and want to make amends. Do be careful not to say anything that would cause them to feel defensive or like you are criticising their parenting - I think you need to consider that you have probably been introduced to this family when they are not at their best (eg: in the midst of moving, school holidays, whole family probably out of routine and over-tired) and that maybe once the family have settled in and the older two are back at school things will improve.

I hope that things do improve for you and for your neighbours, that you are both able to accept that things have not been handled brilliantly by either side and that you are able to start again and maybe even become friends, especially as it sounds like you have good relationships with your other neighbours and could help this family to feel part of the neighbourhood.

Christ I unhide the thread and she's still going? And has written these poor lads off by the look of it.
I hope you didn't do that with the children in your care when you worked in childcare.

a few points:

. I don't think you like boys very much. You keep changing details to demonise these kids even more than you already have in your own mind.
. I think you are letting your own anxiety issues cloud your reasoning. Your LO is still tiny, are you still seeing your HV? (Genuine question x)
. You are turning into your old neighbours. Consider how you felt when they complained about what you felt were unreasonable issues. Really think about it. Now put yourself in your neighbours place.
. This isn't about willies or stone throwing really is it? It's more about how disappointed you were when you discovered that your new neighbours weren't like you. I understand the relief when PITA neighbours move out, a lot of us will, and the feeling when new people move in is a mix of excitement and a slight fear that it's more of the same. You are upset because they aren't what you would term a 'nice' family.

You are being very unreasonable, not because of your reaction to the willy waving, you've had enough decent advice on helping your DD handle that one, or the stone throwing (they coincidentally did it again just before you came back to the thread? Really?) but because you are determined to write this family off as bad people to justify your own feelings. Nothing anyone says on this thread will change your mind because you don't want to!! You were never asking AIBU, You were inviting people to help you judge this family.

Oh op I really hope you never try and work with children after your recent posts, you're sounding so unreasonable and nasty about children. I really do have some sympathy for your dds tbh,I hope you can see how damaging your attitudes about othere opeople may be to their development....

OP

Plenty of children at this age do the same naughty thing more than once. Will you write your own DD off if she, say, draws on the table more than once or breaks more than one of her toys in a temper?

So they've thrown stones again. Sounds like they've been told off again and the parents are paying for the damage.

Like it or not, you are going to have to live next door to them and they probably won't ever be your kind of people. What's the best way to handle Friday (and things going forward) to get the best you can out of things? If you raise every difference between you with them, I suspect it won't go as well as if you pick your battles.

Lay off the OP a bit folks, she was just about coming round to the idea that this was all down to her
a) disappointment that the new family were not, as she had hoped, similar to her and they could become good friends

and
b) the fact that her anxieties make her overreact - she has already said she does not like living like this, IMO that's a brave thing to say when she has had so much ridicule on here already, so a little sympathy and some positive suggestions might help

OP, it sounds like you've had your hopes up about what "sort" of people your new neighbours were going to be, and you are understandably disappointed that you're not going to have much in common with them, and may, just possibly, have let some of that disappointment influence, and leak through into, your dealings with them.

The smoking thing is annoying - I wouldn't like it, but I would be aware that I have no right to dictate to them where in their own garden they choose to smoke. How soon did you raise it with them? If it was very early on after they moved in, they were probably a bit defensive. It might have been better to leave it a while, and then gently mention it during some other conversation - you might have got better results than making it into "an issue."

This exchange has probably coloured their view of you and made them less receptive to other complaints. The things that have happened seem to be isolated incidents - a single stone coming over the fence, and one willy-waggling incident. If they were doing these things constantly, you might need to take a slightly more robust approach about it, but one-offs can be dealt with accordingly. The stone shouldn't have been thrown - that one probably warranted flagging up with the mum as soon as it happened. I think the willy waggling could have been dealt with much more lightly - possibly by simply shouting over to the boys "oy, lads, put them away, she's only three and she's getting upset", and mentioning it to the mum, light-heartedly, the next time you saw her.

It sounds like, in a fairly short period of time you've gone trooping round to complain about several things, and they're probably feeling defensive and wondering if you are planning on complaining about every single thing that the kids do.

Being irritated about something does not have to result in a complaint. When you live in close proximity to other people, you need to keep things in perspective. Some things need challenging, some things can be shrugged off, and other things can be dealt with on an ad hoc basis.

You do sound a little bit precious about your "nice girls", and I think you need to be very sure that doesn't come across to your neighbours. Have a think about what you want to achieve from this chat with them - ie what issues are real deal-breakers, and what concessions you can make. A bit of give and take will probably go a long way to making things much more pleasant all round.

And I do think you need to get the willy waggling into perspective. I have a just 4 year-old, who spent a week with another little boy at pre-school, gleefully dropping their pants and performing willy-waggling dances at every opportunity. Of course all the other children (boys and girls) fell about the place laughing, which just reinforced the idea that the two of them were the funniest things ever. We had murders stopping the willy dancing.

Boys have willies. Willies are funny when you are three. Many owners of funny willies will want to wave them about in the hope of others finding them equally amusing. Don't build it up too much, OP. One day you may find your DD bouncing on a trampoline waving her naked buttocks in the wind and shouting "bum bum bum" or similar.

Phantom thats why I think she needs to talk to her HV. I unhid the thread because I have been thinking about her this afternoon.
jenni I apologise for my outright sarcasm, believe it or not it's actually worse in real life...
Speaking of which how much support do you have irl? People to talk at all?

jenni my sister in law has always had disputes with her neighbours in every house and with pretty much every neighbour in the last thirty years that I have known her.Some have been really petty complaints particularly when her ds was small and she couldn't bear to think his world might be contaminated by people not her type.
The latest targets of her unhappiness is.....believe it or not.....a convent (this is after she banished the vicar for not being supportive enough of her previous vendetta) and yet she still cannot comprehend that it is she that has a problem.
She has had a miserable existence not going on holiday in case the neighbour's children threw a ball in her garden, logging cars and noises and anything else she felt wasn't right.
You are beginning to see that your anxiety is at the root of all this so do go and get help because being unhappy in your own home and garden must be very hard.

Oh and she too bakes cakes for the ones she approves of until they don't support her complaints vigorously enough anyway. Mind you she is an awful cook so they are probably relieved when it stops tbh

Thanks everyone - that's really kind that people are concerned. I do have anxiety issues - I do see a pyschologist to help me with that. It was to do with serious stuff that happened before. I don't really think my mental health probs are connected to my concerns here :(

Anyway - it is all resolved! I have you fabulous posters to thank for this.

Was quite upset last night and had a teary call with DH and gave him the link to this thread. He read the whole thing before his b'fast meeting this morning and says he has been thinking about it all day.

He said I should be grateful to you all for being so HONEST and frank with me. I have lots of friends, but none of them would say things like this to me, as I can be a bit sharp with people. He says it is clear that we have different expectations to most parents about how chidren should behave - which you could tell from how many mums here thought I was BU. BUT he says even though I might be a bit anal (blush) that was just how I was, and I wasn't going to change. He also said he hadn't appreciated how much it was all stressing me out.

So he thinks the obvious answer is to move - somewhere we have a bit more space and fewer neighbours in close proximity so that we can have a bit more control over our immediate environment. My home is very much my haven - and whilst I can cope well with people you only see fleetingly - like a rude mum at tots group - having my home smell constantly of smoke or worrying that a stone will come over the garden at any point is driving me nuts. I appreciate that other people can handle this stuff and not be bothered - I just know that I can't.

I have always wanted to move out of the city, closer to my mum and sister - DH always thought the city would be a better place to raise the girls - but we can afford a more spacious house where I come from originally... and now DH has agreed that we can look there. I have already found 3 places that look good and that are in our price range (more or less - DH might need a bit of persuading on the most expensive one!). So from feeling gloomy, I feel really relieved and so bloody EXCITED!! I never could have persuaded DH to do this without you lot. Thank you all so much.

Friday no longer seems a bit deal now. You are right - the other mother must be feeling crap - imagine moving and instantly falling out with your neighbours on both sides. I think I will make a tray of nibbles and take some Pimms. If I say I'm sorry that I got a bit stressed with her and that all this is obvioulsy a storm in a tea cup, perhaps that will smooth things over?

Thank you all so much for your excellent advice