To be so bothered about other people

[laughterlover]

We live in a beautiful place with beautiful scenery, low crime rates and good schools. We have a lovely house that we have spent ten yrs renovating ourselves. We are very rural and enjoy the country life.

However.... we find people are either local, very local and have a huge sense of 'ownership' and are quite unfriendly and often narrow minded . Or they are incomers and often are quite 'difficult' people who have moved here to 'get away from it all'.

I have some lovely friends here but they are few and faf between. I can't help but feel quite sad that there is quite a shortage of just ordinary folk.

Not just something i find personally btw but well known fact about area we live in.

AIBU to think we can live here whilst the children are schoolage and be unaffected. It plays heavily on my mind that my dc only have the children of said people as friends. None of my friends here have children.

Observant maybe but what was there to observe?! This was just a conversation between myself and dh!!

Problem with having kids over from school is the small numbers. There are VERY few children at school. I have considered moving them to a bigger school but the difficulty is THEY feel they are happy where they are, so I feel I am making a problem when they feel there isn't one. Dc (6) has no 6 year old friends as there aren't any other 6 year olds here!! Whilst they aren't worried about this I am!

I grew up in a place like that. Where someone wasn't a true local unless at least five generations of some part of their family had lived there. We just made friends with similar 'newcomers' whose had only been there twenty years or so. We also used to get those who came to 'escape it all' but usually went rushing back to the city at first opportunity (eg death of generous elderly aunt, not the job prospects they envisioned etc).

So many people on this thread are saying they recognise the OPs issues. Could it be that rather than being a problem in a particular area, it's a wider issue?

As far as I can see, the only children in the UK who get to play out with one another in a sort of community situation are the children who live on council estates like the one I grew up on and where my Mum still lives.

If you move into "middle class" areas in suburbia, people just don't participate in that "street life" thing at all....we go out and play with our DC sometimes, ride their bikes etc...play a bit of hopscotch...and all we see are those who might wash the car....or very, very rarely like when it snows...a Dad might come out to make a snowman and wave at us.

the kids over the road are smallish so they don't come out alone....it's the same in other streets though and even older kids aren't allowed out.

Its a bit more than that TrueStory. They dont have much to do, generally retired [prob same where op is, hence very few children around], people are related to each other [in our parish, there are 11 families with the same surname!], they dont generally travel more than about 6 miles in any one direction, they know well anyone who visits, including the postman, etc etc. In our case, the 11 families are nice. It would be a bit of a nightmare if they weren't.

laughterlover. What will be the situation when they hit 11?

Laughter re the small school....my DD was also at a tiny one and it WAS a pain and also it hampered her development socially...she did ntot want to move either but I made her...and it was the right choice. She left at the end of year 2 and began juniors in the state school in the next village and she's just bloomed. SO much better. Lots of kids from various outlying villages and she's got more friends now. She says that she "thought she was happy" in her old school but now realises she was wrong!

NYANBU!!

Small rural communities make me considerably bothered about other people!

Because the population so small we invariably weave ourselves into the lives of others that we otherwise wouldn't.

I grew up in a state of constant anxiety, got treated for anxiety disorders from the age on 17 (should have been much earlier) Moved away permanently and boom! Cured!

Having said that I would not swop my rural childhood for anything. Playing out, den building cycling, blackberry picking, boating on lakes etc

Since moving to a town with a population the same as the entire region where i grew up, i understand how normal people relate to each other rather than being under a blanket of curtain twitchy, paranoid, standoffish, etc.....I'm sure the reason for this is that everyone got tired of each others company about 3 generations back. It's a relief to be away and be around normal people.

I feel sad though that i am not giving my own DC a similar childhood.

They will be fine. Just make the best of the good things and go on lots of trips to cities.

Very interesting thread, it's so weird feeling like you don't fit in a place if you know you have fitted in somewhere before.

We moved out of london into a village, picked it for the house no other reason, I can say I will never fit in here, people are friendly but weird, narrow minded and not like us at all.

I really took fitting in for granted, infact I had felt a bit trapped by it, you know the mummy clans all looking the same wearing the tribe shoes etc etc but now I'm out of it I realise how comfortable I was.

My DCs are teens and don't go to school in the village so I will never make the school connections here and the pub is full of builders watching sky sports!

I feel like a snob, but I'm not. We won't stay here long. Next time I will take more care in choosing an area.

OP being part of the school will help as even if you don't like the parents the children can be lovely, mine used to bring all types home for tea and it was always fun, they hardly ever went to others houses except for a few good friends but I was always bringing others home, parents usually at least smile at you if you let their children come and play at your house.

For me, part of the drawback of a small conmmunity, is that whenever anyone gets a do going, there are just not enough people. Think WI, school, village fete etc. Hats off to the people who try their best, but sheer numbers just mean that everything has a half empty feel about it.

But agree with catinabox. Great for children on the whole. Except if the school has more boys than girls or vice versa, which can often happen. And if you are on the wrong side of that, it is tough going.

OP sorry didn't realise the school was so small, that is tricky.

Yes I will be an incomer scuttling away.... A small town next time I think!!

There isn't the same opportunity for moving school here. Catchment areas all work differently here. So if i move them to the school in the next village the kids there will ALL be from that village. Also as we are so rural I already know around 75% of the kids at the next village school. There are around 50 pupils there, bigger than our little school by far but still so small I'm not sure it'd be that much better!

It is reassuring that it's not exclusive to this place tho!! In our little school at least 50% of the kids are related in some way.

I think perhaps when dc are out of secondary school we may move. We have close links to a big city as all my family still live there so we visit often.

catinabox what you say is so true about weaving ourselves into lives of others where we normally wouldn't. Even some of my friends here, they are lovely but nothing like me. We are chalk and cheese.

Its very interesting - I feel the same. I live in a fairly large village but there are a lot of families who have lived here for generations and the local school was oversubscribed so she's ended up at school in the town nearby. That works out really well at one level as I also work in the town and can drop her off/ organise friends to play etc but it means we don't really know many people at all in the village.

In London, I had quite a large group of friends and it was easy to meet new people - now I just feel as though we're odd and noone wants to talk to us.

I think we're stuck here for primary school ages as we can't afford to move at the moment, but we're going to try to move for secondary.

OP your first para could have been written by me...the rest of it not really. You can find in really rural areas that you need to relax a bit and take it as it comes. We have met some true and fabulous eccentrics in our county and adore it all the more because of this. But we are pretty laid back ourselves.

Wondering if you are near me...can you give us a hint as to where you are in the UK?

skaen i think when you work/go to school outside the area you live it is easy to get a bit forgotten about by the people in the village. Could your dd go to Brownies or something similar in village to get to know some locals better?

littlemog we are in Scotland. Keep driving until there is nothing there apart from the view, then you'll come to our house

littlemog eccentrics I love. Unusual alternative people I love too. But that only describes a rare few here. It's the catsbumfaces, the narrow minded can't see anything but negative people that wear me down.
Our school fete has been organised by the parents for years. Woe betide anyone who dare suggest a 'new' idea or buy a different drink/biscuit/present for the Janny. It is all so tight and ridgid. Actually brings out a side of me I didn't know existed, it almost brings me a kind of naughty pleasure going to the meetings and asking questions like 'could we have pancakes this year rather than scones?' I mean it is all so ridiculous I can't help sitting there like the village idiot with a big stupid grin on my face

I need to get out more.... but there is no where to go