To tell these performance parents ...

[pieceofpurplesky]

To shut the fuck up?
In A&E with DS waiting for X-ray results with two very vocal performing parents.
'Look Livvy the book has a chicken. What does a chicken say Livvy'
'Oh Livvy you are so clever'
'Livvy look at the nice nurse. What does a nurse do Livvy?'.
'Stop walking away Livvy, I am reading a story. You need to listen Livvy it's a good story'
And on and on and on

All poor Livvy wants to do is bash a toy car on a table and play with a teapot.

I once had a woman following me round the supermarket singing The Whhels on the Bus continuously over and over again to the child sitting in her trolley.....she was an aisle behind me but I could hear her.

@Rainatnight where have I beat mothers? There were two parents a Mum and Dad. Both were acting in this way.
Jesus as a single Mum with MH issues I really wouldn't beat up in mothers

I read once in a book about child development that this sort of over talking to the child (or particularly for them) in the sort of “and how do we count to three Tarquinius, yes, un deux trois, that’s right...” and not actually letting the child get a word in is quite harmful for their developing speech rather than helpful as it gives them no freedom to actually talk themselves

I found myself wondering if I was a PP the other day as DS - autistic with a recent obsession with the periodic table - kept on and on about it and I did end up talking about elements etc, but I’m ridiculously self conscious and talk really quietly.

Loving the stories about the PPs getting their comeuppance with swearing children etc :o

Bows to argeles for having a postgrad certificate. By the way I have one too - read to my own child who is intelligent but never had to perform.

I absolutely agree, @Rainatnight there's a lot of mocking of parents on Mumsnet and I find it sad. It's so hard taking young children out, whatever you do you get judged. If you don't entertain your child and they throw a tantrum that's just as bad. Singing nursery rhymes in a supermarket would almost certainly be an attempt to avoid a tantrum. As she was the aisle behind you, @Jaygee61 she was hardly performance parenting was she??

But then again, I would find it irritating after years of nursery rhymes.

I hate it when parents can’t talk to kids at their level, everything they say has to seem educational. Elouise let’s count to 20 then count backwards -Elouise is 2 and probably would prefer to be chatting about peppa pig. Jeremy it’s pancake day, it’s proper name is shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday the start of lent. Lent is..... Jeremy is 18 months and the only thing that is of interest to him is scoffing lots of pancakes with ice cream. I feel sorry for kids who can’t seem to have a conversation with their parents unless they are being force fed facts.

Maybe the mother could stare at her phone and ignore her child, then you could post an aibu about how awful she is to ignore her.

Oh purplesky, I live quite remotely and yet I have seen pp. You've had a bit of a roasting here and i think thats a bit unnecessary really. If folk don't believe it then why would they bother to comment? They should just move on if it's so irrelevant to them.
One grandma who used to do the nursery run used to say one sentence to the child and the last 3 words to any parent who was watching. It just made me want to look away as it was clearly to gain attention. I appreciate 2 hours is quite a lot and you would be a bit sick of it by then. But above all I do feel sorry for these kids who are just smothered.

We have post graduate qualifications but we also have social skills and recognise that others probably do not wish to hear us boring on at our dcs in an otherwise quiet waiting room, train carriage or whatever.

Teaching your dcs some consideration for the others around them in any environment is also a pretty important life lesson imo.

Former I think the poor girl would have preferred that after two hours (as it was in the end). She just wanted to play. None of the other parents were on phones - a couple of kids (one being my 14 yo DS and me as I was doing work emails and online marking)

I was a bit about people claiming other parents did performance parenting until one day I had to put up with some.

All we wanted was a nice quiet meal in the pub after a day on the beach and it was great until another family came in with 'performance dad' who treated us all to an extremely loud monologue of random educational titbits. Actually felt sorry for his wife and kids who looked bored shitless.

I don't drive and commute to work by bus. I can confirm there are definitely one set of parents who talk to their children and keep them entertained, and another set of parents who ensure the entire bus is listening to them tell their little darlings to count to ten in Mandarin and recount their glorious adventures on their skiing holiday or safari adventure, looking round every so often to ensure their fabulous parenting skills are being acknowledged.

I have a child with extreme language delay and I have to talk loudly and continuously to him whilst out and about. What I am doing is not performance parenting, that is entirely different.

I am talking clearly and looking at my child, about the actual things we see around us, consolidating simple concepts like up/down, hot/cold. It is about that level. So behind where you would expect children of his age to be.

If I were performance parenting I would be talking about things above his ability level, like telling a two year old that rice was a carbohydrate (I saw this) and glancing around to see if other people appreciated my brilliant parenting.

It is really clear what the difference is and I have never felt that I was performance parenting because I know I am not a show off If your child has special needs jabbering at them all the time about complex concepts wouldn't necessarily be helpful.

ROFL at performance parenting producing post graduate level children.

DS1 is in his first year at Uni. Do I need to get him home and do a bit of PP with him just to be sure?

Yep -lots of postgrad qualifications here also ( bow 👏👏), but I have enough social skills to realise everybody wants to enjoy their day out and hold conversations at normal volume with their own children or companion ~ not to be deafened and forced to listen to someone else’s performance. It really is inconsiderate and unnecessary.

Hmm, I have a post grad qualification too argeles, don’t tend to boast about it though, or awkwardly shoehorn it into conversations about something entirely different.

However, I also have social skills and empathy for others. As a result of these skills I possess in addition to my academic prowess I do not loudly impose my ‘parenting’ on others around me with a boasty face and an arrogant lack of consideration for anything but showing everyone how my little darling is better than all the other inferior children and aren’t I marvellous! Mainly because it is excruciating for everyone else involved, including the child.

Being a second generation performance parent is nothing to be proud of IMO. Being intelligent has nothing to do with your parents being show offs.

& as a caveat I would like to add that was not in any way directed to anyone dealing with a child who is not NT, or who is just quietly teaching their kid to count - that is totally understandable & very easy to differentiate from performance parenting, clearly that is just parenting and should be respected.

It’s basically the self-involved show offs with no consideration for others that are the issue for me.

OP, I didn't mean this incident specifically. I was talking about criticisms of performance parenting generally, which tend to usually be about mums.

We all have different types of people who irritate us. Maybe I just don't notice what other parents are doing because I feel we're all doing our best, and I'd rather they overdo it than just let their children run amok.

Now businessmen making loud telephone calls on their mobile phones, whether in a train or in a restaurant, do annoy me.

Oh yes Lizzie48 The performance boasters!

'Oh yes Philip I got the deal signed for 1.2 mill. Yes signed and sealed and on my desk. Oh are you at the Regatta this weekend? Oh it's your polo weekend well I'll see you Monday as I will be on my boat this weekend . Ciao.'

Gawd. People used to be able to just engage in a lighthearted thread around here!

Ffs.

It also seems as though there’s an influx of posters who can’t actually understand the difference between parenting and PP. And some with post-grads, no less!

Of course, it’s entirely possible that it’s hitting a bit too close to home...

Oh, and there’s a whole world of reasonable behavior between sticking your kid on an iPad for two hours and “now Cressida, let’s count to 100 in Latin before your organic kale smoothie”.

Happy Cressida does all that ~ it’s the volume I don’t get. Why does the parent have to shout and include a disinterested audience?

You’re perhaps being a bit mean if you’re there with a teenager. It’s bloody stressful being in a&e with a little one. Now if Livvy doesn’t have anything really wrong with her that’s probably like what it was like being in outpatients with a toddler for me. I.e not the acute stress of something being super wrong but being a fairly hideous experience all the same due to late-running clinics, grumpy patients and a v grumpy toddler. I have to admit I might have gone in for something akin to ‘performance parenting’ as I was so desperate to avoid a screaming fit from my scared, grumpy toddler and was trying to subconsciously prove to others in the waiting room I was trying to entertain her.

In normal situations, I get as irritated as the rest of you by parents loudly announcing little Jonty’s superb love and mastery of fine art but in a hospital setting you could probably cut other parents a bit of slack.

I give up, I clearly don’t get this parenting thing. I’d have thought that trying to entertain your child in a hospital waiting room with a book rather than letting them bash toys on a table was a good thing.
I am absolutely a performance parent by the examples on here and frankly I don’t care. I talk a lot to my 16 month old, I read him endless books and when we are out and about I frequently describe what we are seeing, often at a level well above his understanding because I don’t think it does any harm for him to hear these words. The chat keeps my attention on him and his on me and the detail stops me going stark staring mad at the endless chat. I can completely see me in the supermarket saying ‘so this is the rice, is it brown or white rice? It’s white, rice is grown in countries a long way away because it has to be nice and warm and the fields are full of water, do you want to hold it for Mummy? No, Ok, then we’ll put it in the trolley, what’s this? Pasta...’ etc etc I hate to disappoint people but it’s not for anyone’s benefit but mine and his.