About this mum in the coffee shop

[Sallygoroundthemoon]

I am currently in a coffee shop having a nice cup of tea and catching up on my emails. It is fairly buzzing with chat and so on but not the sort of place with thumping music if you see what I mean. All good and to be expected in a coffee shop. However, there is a mum the other side of the shop reading stories to her toddler at the top of her voice, complete with pauses and shouts to make the toddler jump, silly voices and so on.

Now I am all one for reading to little ones and am not adverse to silly voices but AIBU to think that a nice coffee shop is not the place to be doing this so loudly? I've now heard the same story several times and it is driving me up the wall, not to mention being on edge waiting for the dramatic shouts. It just reeks of 'look at me, I'm a parent don't you know and I don't give a shit about anyone else'.

You know what annoys me....

When you for a slice of bread buttered side down on the floor?
Eamon Holmes?
People who sneeze in a really dramatic fashion?

People who sneeze in a really dramatic fashion?

Afraid I do this. It really pisses the kids off! To be fair, I'm just as suprised as they are.

@bbismad

You know what annoys me.... women judging and running down other women for parenting their kids in whatever way they feel fit.

@youthecat

bb, we have descended into being lovely, respectful and reasonable to each other now. I'm afraid you've missed the boat.

PMSL!!!

@squoosh

What annoys you?

When you for a slice of bread buttered side down on the floor?
Eamon Holmes?
People who sneeze in a really dramatic fashion?

I know right! Sneezing in a dramatic fashion is just so attention seeking and rude.

URGH! Bastards.

You know what else annoys me...... when a wasp nestles inside my bowl of strawberries that I just put out for my lunch.

I think being disparaging about parents who try to enhance their children's knowledge is actually a very worrying trend in society. Dismissing these attempts as 'fucking boring' is having a false sense of pride in being anti intellectual and suggests to the child that the seeking of knowledge is a bad thing. These comments suggest it's not about the volume at all but a preference for competitive ignorance. It's easy to mock someone for being 'fucking boring'.

^^**It's not difficult. hmm Anyone who can't get that clearly has a bit of inconsiderate or performance parent in them.

That is a very arrogant assumption, that because some of us don't agree with you, it means that we do performance parenting. What complete rot! I certainly don't, I'm far too self-conscious to show off my parenting.

But I also have never seen it. As I said before, I'm too busy doing my own thing with my DDs to worry about what other parents are doing with theirs, and whether they're trying to impress anyone.

I think you all have too much time on your hands.

One person's loud and over the top is another (less focused on judging others perhaps and not on constant hunt for grievance) person's gentle humming noise in the background. It's a fine line...

A lot of Performance Parents fighting their corner.

Bravo! Bravo!

In some cases you might be thinking it's all about you when it isn't. My DH has a voice that carries and he loves his specialist subject, engineering, he looks after bridges. His big hobby is trains. We've taken our DDs to York Railway Museum. He can wax lyrical about trains and I have heard him give lots of information about the history of railways to them.

He is not doing this to show off his parenting, he just likes to share his hobby with the DDs. (If anything he finds public parenting stressful, especially when they misbehave.)

According to you, because he has a voice that can carry he must be a performance patenter. No he isn't at all. I don't doubt that there are others like that.

If this is a binary argument I think I'd rather be in the 'perfornance parenting' corner than the Architecture is 'fucking boring' corner!

I'd rather see / hear a mother amusing / interacting and showing love to her child then having the said child running around screaming or sat glued to a media device while she is sat on her phone ignoring the child. Maybe we should just ban children from leaving the house so as not to have loving mothers annoying people !

'Performance parenting' my arse it's just called parenting 😡

"Exasperation, not anger."

Why are you so exasperated? The way other people parent their children has absolutely nothing to do with you. And if you are that easily bothered (loud voices in cafe, museum, London Eye) I personally think that is quite intolerant and precious. You are being 'reverse entitled' where you feel you are entitled to others behaving according to your very own standards with little imagination as to why they might behave in a range of ways at any given time.

Don't get me wrong i can be grumpy and judgmental about people but I know that it's up to me to deal with my bad mood. I certainly won't blame complete strangers for spoiling my day out. If I did I feel i'd be the one with spoilt behaviour.

Live and let live.
You have to expect things not going according to your subjective expectation when you enter public spaces. As long as they don't hurt you or jump a queue it really doesn't affect you.

And yes of course there are competitive parents, but unless they act in a way that disadvantages my children in a significant away I honestly don't care. Because what would I get out of being so angry? What change would I be able to effect? Nothing and none.

I like a bit of variety and it takes all sorts in life. Live and let live and don't be such a grump.

"most of the strangers surrounding me don't even speak English properly and can't understand what I'm saying to her."

Well, Mary, you are living in a foreign country, and I think it's normal they don't speak English "properly".

I came on to say that I think I might have been guilty of performance parenting in the past.I was slightly mad with lack of sleep and had two kids close together and I got it into my head that I was always being judged or some such rubbish-so would occasionally probably do some conspicuous loud and involved reading of books in the garden centre cafe or some loud logging of meaningful things I had done with the dd's at the weekend when we were on the train with a captive audience (of no doubt annoyed commuters) kind of thing.

Think I was just very insecure and must have wanted some sort of validation from somewhere.Christ knows why...
I fully comprehend now that I was acting like a knob.

I can always tell when people are doing it around me now and I do a little internal eye roll, whilst feeling quite sorry for them in a funny sort of way.

I totally agree with Salut - it's the anger that's disproportionate here. The level of "consideration" that is expected on Mumsnet is unreasonable. And I don't say that as someone who does a lot of the things that are not tolerated. People listening to "loud music" through headphones on a train so you can hear a tinny beat. How loud can it be, really, compared to the background noise of a train? You're not at a meditation session. If people could learn to be a bit more tolerant then you wouldn't need to be hyper-vigilant that some minor infraction would generate all this ire, and I think leaving the house would be less of a stressful undertaking all round.

I understand that nigels - you do often have a bit of an audience as a parent - especially if your kid is speaking to you in a quiet place and you only have to open the active threads on here to see how people can be silently judging. If you take that kind of thing to heart you can easily feel self-conscious whenever you're talking in public.

nigelsbigface
Performance parent out the other side.
It's nice someone gets the point of the thread and doesn't start whining 'I can't believe people hate parents who interact with their children'.

Maisy it's interesting that even when you have people like Nigels who freely admit they may have been guilty of pp in the past and what an idiot they were, there will still be others who say pp doesn't happen!!

I once sat on a train opposite a little girl, her mother and her grandma, all counting slowly and loudly with the little girl

OONNNNNNEEEEEE.....
TWOOOOOOOoOOO......
THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE....
FOOOUUUUURRRR....
FIIIIIIIIIIIIVEEE...
SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIXXXXX...
SEVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN...
EEEEEEEIIIIIIIGHHHHHT....
NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEE.....
TEEEEEEEENNNNN!!!!!!
YAAAAAAAY!!!!!
clapclapclapclapclapclapclap

OOONNNEEEEE.....
TTWWWWOOOOOOO...

For 2 fucking hours.

@daffodil10, Ok, point taken. I do think it sad, though, that these parents end up acting this way, partly because of the 'judgey' attitude of those around them. We know that exists because of posters who comment on parents not interacting with their children and palming them off with iPads.

It sounds like she was absolutely shattered, though, and it must have been obvious to those around her that she would be, as she obviously had a baby and toddler in tow. Now I know it's not the other diners' problem, you will say, but you could try cutting in mum in that situation a little bit of slack and not just slag her off on mumsnet.

I get the self-consciousness, I used to just nag my preschooler, feed my toddler, and somehow find time to eat my own meal and get the hell out of there.

daffodil10 It's interesting to me that even when you have people who say why they might have been performance parenting there are still people who seem irrationally angry about the phenomenon. There are 2 ways of reading everything.

@ohmywhatamisaying, that would be far too much, I agree, whether it's pp or just plain lack of consideration.

Ohmywhatamisaying I'll say it before the tribe comes along apparently this is ok and you are being intolerant for suggesting a parent can't count, read etc etc with their child in a public place. The fact it was over 2 hours is your own fault for being on the train so long !!

"For 2 fucking hours."

They sound patient. If it had been 'performance parenting', however, they would have counted in French, Spanish and Mandarin and then spelled out the numbers and done a bit of adding and taking away and time tables, whilst asking if they associate certain colours with certain numbers.

However even if they had done that I doubt it would have been to show off their amazing parenting because honestly who cares about what strangers think about them and their parenting? Does anyone?

I would have thought that people who intact with their kids in this engaging (and possibly louder than you would like) way usually care more about how their children feel not how people they will never see again might perceive them and their parenting.

I honestly am so surprised at how much self-centred projection is going on based on this and similar threads. Posters have said that parents only talk to their child about architecture, art or smelly cheese in order to make onlookers feel inferior about their parenting.

Not everyone has a quiet way of talking. My MIL is from a pretty posh family background but she is loud. She is always dressed impeccably, is a former head teacher and absolutely lovely, not an unkind bone in he body. But she talks LOUDLY to her gc and people stare at her us.

There are some selfish fuckers out there, parents or not, oblivious, taking space etc. but what's the use in being so cross about it? Either say something at the time or shrug it off, it's not healthy to seethe. I am sure all of us act selfishly and are insecure at least some of the time.

I just don't get this thread.

Off to take my dc to the museum now where I shall engage them and not care about judgy stares

and architecture is amazingly interesting not fucking boring

Exactly, Daffodil.

I'm still exasperated , rather than angry. I don't tend to judge parents when out and about because I don't notice them at all. If you're doing something at a normalish volume I'm not going to bat an eyelid.

If someone is being so loud and over the top then I will notice and it's not a case of 'live and let live' because the noise has disturbed me. 'Live and let live' works both ways - it's called showing some consideration for other people around you.