Weirdest things you've seen other parents do as they bring up or care for their DC?

[FortunesFave]

Here are mine.

I was in a public toilet in the cubicle and heard a woman come in with a small boy.

They went into a cubicle together and I heard her ask him repeatedly "Do you want to dirt!?"

She meant poo!

"Do you want to dirt???

Omg.

Second is SIL. When her DS was little...around 2 or so, she'd put chips for him INTO A BOWL OF COLD WATER so they'd cool faster.

Dump the cooked chips into a bowl of water. Leave them there for a bit and then drop the soggy pile onto a plate for the poor child.

WHY? What are yours?

its fully natural for humans to walk around naked no matter how cold it is

And then they naturally die of hypothermia.

That just isn’t true. Most if not all healthy babies potty train by 4-14 mths across Asia.

At 4 months, that is simply holding a child over a potty. It is entirely adult dependent, so the health or lack of health of a baby is irrelevant. It is catching what the child produces in a potty rather than a nappy. It used to be done in the U.K. too but there is no real end game to it until a child is at least mobile.

In our house the rule is-here’s your dinner. It’s up to you whether or how much you eat but there’s nothing else.
Mil thinks I’m a meanie for that.
She is also terrified of a tiny drop in temperature and tries to force DC to wear too much clothing which most kids hate.

@SoItWas

As a kid, my mum used to say loadies instead of poo. It makes me dry heave thinking about the word now .

Loadies!

She is also terrified of a tiny drop in temperature and tries to force DC to wear too much clothing which most kids hate

My sil is like that...many years ago she brought her grandchild round to our house. The house was warm and heating on...poor thing had about three jumpers on... because he had a cough

@YeOldeNameChange

In our house the rule is-here’s your dinner. It’s up to you whether or how much you eat but there’s nothing else. Mil thinks I’m a meanie for that. She is also terrified of a tiny drop in temperature and tries to force DC to wear too much clothing which most kids hate.

Same here. There is bob all chance of me doing 2 separate things.

I also know a woman who buys her kids clothing in the exact age they are...so if they're 5, they get aged 5 clothes. Thing is, her kids are beanpoles. Nothing ever fits! It all looks tight and too short...why can't she see this? So weird.

I’d never even heard of snot sucking until this thread! If any of my friends or family did it they kept it a secret. How did my children survive? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Couple with PFB.

DC cannot be disturbed once he is asleep. If DC goes to sleep in his car seat they stay in the car until DC wakes up, however long it takes. Sometimes it's hours. I've taken cups of tea out to them before now, but I drew the line at serving lunch.

They are also following a parenting method where there is no discipline of any sort, not even saying "no", and no routine whatsoever, so PFB sets his own hours and they fit in around him. Some days he doesn't get dressed because, apparently, "he doesn't want to". PFB is not yet 18 months.

@chocolatemademefat

I’d never even heard of snot sucking until this thread! If any of my friends or family did it they kept it a secret. How did my children survive? 🤷🏼‍♀️

I suspect it's like winding and not strictly necessary but feels like your doing something useful.

Snot sucking is definitely cultural. We did it for DD in America because the paediatrician said it was the done thing; while here in the UK we didnt do it with DS. It is oddly satisfying tho - like popping a pimple!

@LabStan

I'm in hospital with DS, been in 2 weeks now. I'm amazed by the amount of DP's feeding their children....I'm talking kids 10 years old. They may be ill or injured but they can still feed themselves!

If your kid is ill enough to be in hospital and wants to be fed, why wouldn't you? Surely no parent is going to start telling them to grow up and be a big boy in hospital

@chocolatemademefat

I’d never even heard of snot sucking until this thread! If any of my friends or family did it they kept it a secret. How did my children survive? 🤷🏼‍♀️

It's just like blowing your nose - if you never blew your nose you'd just be uncomfortable, you'd still survive.

I sucked snot out of my baby's nose a couple
of times (over 20 years ago). I hadn't realised it was common in other cultures (I am white English), I had never known of anyone doing it and didn't know you could buy things to do it with (may not have available in those days, of course).

My baby's nose was stuffed up, she needed it cleared and couldn't blow it herself. it seemed the obvious thing to do. It was very effective.

On 'dirt' for poo, I have never known anyone use it as a noun, but we often talk about a dirty nappy and when I was young it was quite common to say that young children had 'dirtied themselves'.

My grandmother could not say poo or poop. She used to call it a pops, eg: Are you going for a pops? A penis was a tail.

This potty training this is a bit of a myth. My MIL insists she trained both BIL and his brother by 18 months (in Asia). Except they had regular accidents till they were 4. I have asked plenty of other people and this bears out. Yes they are out of nappies earlier but they are not accident free till roughly the same time as kids trained later. I trained both at 2.5 in a week with no accidents. MIL was amazed and then admitted that this was much much simpler than her laborious method.

BUT. Now she regularly calls up the daughters and DILs of friends in India and says ‘my DIL says this is how you should potty train. Her way is so much superior to your early training.’ And lectures them. It is MORTIFYING. These random Indian people I don’t know must hate me.

Oh yeah squeamishness about nudity, pooh, sex and genitals is something I find annoying and such people are normally terrified of germs as well.

My SIL is from a large family and they all do as their mother did. Her youngest and my oldest are a few weeks apart in age. At my PFB’s first birthday party, he was having his lunch (pasta with homemade sauce and additional veg on the side). She was horrified! All of the many (many) babies in her family start on baby rice at four months but stick to very watery puréed foods until after their first birthday. They have bottles going to bed until at least six and soothers in many cases until 10. I breastfed and co-slept, so we were poles apart really.

@LuchiMangsho

This potty training this is a bit of a myth. My MIL insists she trained both BIL and his brother by 18 months (in Asia). Except they had regular accidents till they were 4. I have asked plenty of other people and this bears out. Yes they are out of nappies earlier but they are not accident free till roughly the same time as kids trained later. I trained both at 2.5 in a week with no accidents. MIL was amazed and then admitted that this was much much simpler than her laborious method.

BUT. Now she regularly calls up the daughters and DILs of friends in India and says ‘my DIL says this is how you should potty train. Her way is so much superior to your early training.’ And lectures them. It is MORTIFYING. These random Indian people I don’t know must hate me.

The accidents would have meant they wouldn’t have been able to go to bal shara or the temples / mosques and resulted in a lot of shame. In DH’s family and caste in India all kids have to be fully trained and cleaning themselves by 3 - no accidents at all and that is the norm across the entire region. You can’t even get into preschool if you’re not fully independant in the bathroom.

Lol this thread won’t go well ‘stop shaming soggy chip mums life is hard enough as it is’

Apart from usual PFB stuff to be fair I haven’t seen anything that has made me thing weird - but a few of these have made me laugh!

@YeOldeNameChange Same in my house and my ex-step MIL and current step-MIL think I'm an absolute witch. I'm supposed to chase DS (2) around the house with a spoon trying to force feed him specially prepared, bland kids meals.

Ex-Step-MIL once chided me for giving DS raspberries.

(It's FIL that keeps getting remarried, not me)

[quote allfurcoatnoknickers]@YeOldeNameChange Same in my house and my ex-step MIL and current step-MIL think I'm an absolute witch. I'm supposed to chase DS (2) around the house with a spoon trying to force feed him specially prepared, bland kids meals.

Ex-Step-MIL once chided me for giving DS raspberries.

(It's FIL that keeps getting remarried, not me) [/quote]
I feel like they’re not happy unless they’re micro-managing a child or panicking that it’s “so cold” outside and God forbid a child coughs they are then “ill” and it must be reported on constantly
My DD hates coats and I go for layering when it’s freezing as she’s very active but my ILs don’t “get” layering it’s - depths of winter let’s put a girl in a frou frou dress with a michelin man coat so child can’t move (ie much safer)

How snotty are all these babies!
My twins are only 20 months, but luckily I've never had any need to think about removing snot - they've never had a bunged-up nose.
If I ever have to, I definitely will not be sucking it out with my mouth!

@HoppingPavlova

I really hate it when people use 'cute' words for things because that's how the child pronounced that word at 18 months, and continue to use those words.

Mine are adults and we still do this. When they got old enough to know/speak the proper word we kept a few as ‘in-jokes’. Some are painfully obvious (snausage), others I doubt anyone would even know what we are referring to as they seem to bear no resemblance to the actual word.

not envy

This is so excruciating. My mil still uses the 'cute' (not cute) wrong words that my husband and his brother used to say. My kids never used them; we don't do 'baby talk'. They just found it weird that she would use these tortuous, twee mispronounced words.

@YourFinestPantaloons

Does it actually make a difference what age they're potty trained? Six months or 3, as long as they're going to the loo independently by school age surely it doesn't matter that much. Like reading - we all reach the exact same level eventually

There's inevitably a higher environmental cost of more disposable nappies going into landfill and more use of water/energy in washing reusables the longer toilet training is delayed.