Competitive mother

[abitofpeace]

My ds has a friend who is what I’d call a bit of a bragger. He’s tells my ds better than my him at swimming, football, reading, maths, etc. Ds really likes this boy but has started to think of himself as not being good at things any more. The boy’s mother is very competitive and this week sent me photos of his school work (she’s a keyworker) and the teacher praise written on it. This was out of the blue and I didn’t really need to know! In the past she has also tried to find out about ds reading levels, etc.

My ds likes this boy (they are both 7) and regularly FaceTimes him, it’s its usually just silly chat and mucking about. Tonight though the boy’s mother was in the background (I could hear her voice) and the boy started quizzing my ds on Maths. He was holding up a workbook to the camera and asking ds questions! This went on for some time. Ds had no interest in it and kept saying let’s talk about something else but the boy was persistent. Ds eventually hung up but seemed upset at being put on the spot.

AIBU to think this is really weird behaviour?

We can go too far in our attempt to be the antithesis of a competitive mother though. I usually go to parents) evening on my own after my husband (who's never taken recreational drugs) made an ill-judged drug related joke to our deputy head. It was for the best he stayed at home after that.

But he happened to come to one parents evening and pointed out that, in my desire to be self-deprecating and not be that competitive parent, when the teachers said X is doing very well in this or that, I'd have to make a negative comment. Such as joking "are you sure you've got the right child?" or "really? Because his spelling/creative writing/whatever isn't great". I didn't really realise I was doing it as I was embarrassed hearing nice things about my children's work.

One final incident that amused me. In our school sports day, there was an obstacle type race for the nursery age kids (aged 3). At one stage, they had to get into one of those Little Tikes cars with the roof and pedal a few metres in them. One of the Uber competitive mums turned to me and said (crossly) "Why didn't the teachers tell us they were doing that so I could have practised with X at home". Most of the kids didn't even know which direction the finish line was, they were just gambolling around happily.

One of my earliest memories is being at my friend Suzanne's house for tea after school. Primary school so we must only have been six or seven. I walked into the kitchen to find Suzanne's mum with my school bag open, looking at my exercise book and comparing it to Suzanne's!

Our school had to get rid of parent reading helpers years ago because they were overheard loudly ranking the class one day while waiting in the playground.

I didn't do this on purpose but we had about 15 groups on sports day, mixed teams doing an event and moving to next.
My other child had done this year's before.
The team leaders always provided sweets for their teams.
I had just been shopping.
I did what had happened every year and just spent £3 on penny sweets for 6 children, bagged them up , I also had a pick and mix bag of sweets, that the toddlers of friends were raiding.
The nasty bragging mother produced a bag of haribo and handed out a 10p bag for each child. Her shock as my child handed each team member a lovely full bag.
She then looked at the other teams too see every other team was handing out lots of goodies.
My child just grabbed the last of my pick and mix bag and hand out extras to the children with one bag...