To despair sometimes!

[Gincompetent]

I can't get my head around MN sometimes.

So AIBU to think that are 4 year olds are still very young and immature, or are they expected to conform to grown up social norms?

Just saw a thread about a 4yr old who knocked his tooth and missed football and poster was upset by her DHs reaction (OP you were NBU btw!) and the unanimous opinion was he was BU with a chorus of 'he's only 4' (and some saying their 4yos were still like babies)

Yet, I posted a while ago about my 4yo DS asking a friend at nursery to show him her pants and (apart from a few kind posters who helped me keep my sanity) so many posters fired in making me feel like he was some sort of deviant!

Of course, I said from the very beginning that I had spoken to him about it, wasn't just letting it go etc and that this had happened a couple of times after boys at soft play had asked him the same thing (so he was copying them) but posters were strongly of the opinion that - despite knowing he wasn't even at school yet and was only 4 - he had to by suitable punished and I had to treat this with the utmost seriousness.

I never once suggested I wasn't dealing with it, yet some posters went nuclear about how the girl would have felt m, and how I had to consider the impact on her, and how my son (my adorable 4yo baby) could be a future predator!

It shocked me to be honest. I came on to ask for advice on how to handle it since he had done this twice before, but felt it turned into an attack on an innocent 4yo.

For what it's worth, he never done it again, but this recent thread just struck a chord as the opinions on how young a 4yo is seems at polar opposites to the consensus view on my thread.

But surely it's not MN it's individual posters having different opinions. Unless the same poster has contradicted themselves.

It’s a HUGE site these days (mores the pity) so there isn’t an ‘MN view’ - it just depends who is around when you post and often what time/day you post.

Sadly, there are a lot of strange posters around these days and it’s sometimes hard to get advice without their ridiculous nonsense.

4 year olds are definitely NOT ‘babies’ or ‘toddlers’ but they are very young children.

As for your DS’s ‘show me your pants’ - it sounds like a dreadful fuss was made over something very normal. Kids do this all the time, boys and girls’. And it’s not just their pants! They’re curious. It’s not deviant and it’s just laughable that some idiot(s?) said he’d turn into a predator. FFS. I wouldn’t even tell him off - that’s more likely to cause issues.

I didn’t see the thread about the wee one losing a tooth, but no matter how old you are, if you lose a tooth you might not feel like running around playing football. Plus poor kid has probably just started school and is probably exhausted and over emotional anyway. Either way, he 4, the Premier League is a while away!

some mners really lose the plot over the stupidest of things, they are they ones more likely to mess their dc up.

Yeah I guess so.

Sometime it just seems like a unanimous view (aside from one or 2 outliers) then you see a very different, contradictory consensus on another post.

Some posters on my previous thread were horrible about it. I won't deny it, I cried

MN seems to be full of people who enjoy upsetting people with ridiculous views helpful to no-one. Luckily there are still a lot of decent people who are on the site for the right reasons. It takes time but try to weed out the arses!

There's a mob mentality here. I remember your thread. One arsehole, usually a prolific / well known poster, offers their view and minions jump on. There is also a very disturbing trend on mumsnet recently to imply that all males are sexual predators in the making. It's ridiculous.

Sometimes I think you could post identical threads on different days at different times and you'd get totally answers.

If course you teach him we don't show our pants but he's 4 and copying examples. Then they go to school and get undressed for pe and everyone flashes their pants anyway

And I also think there's a lot of mob mentality going on sometimes.

Then a poster talking sense appears and the whole tone of the thread can change. But until that poster appears, it's like an attack en masse!

I didn't see your thread op, but agree with pps that sometimes people like to join in and gang up against the op. Who knows why?

I think 4 is very young and think the dad in the football thread is being very U.

With the showing pants thing, I think people may be harsher on the 4yo as he was potentially upsetting another 4yo, whereas in the football thread it’s a grown man and a child. So the grown man should definitely be behaving better than the 4yo and not expecting him to behave like an adult.

Also, I think nobody wants things like a child saying show me your pants brushed under the carpet. And you haven’t; you said you spoke to him that it wasn’t the right thing to ask even though he was just being a young child and perfectly innocent.