To ask for the most inappropriate unsolicited advice you received from a random person about your child?

[Adviceagains]

I’m feeling sensitive today. Stood in a queue and dd asleep in her pram. Women behind me starts talking to her husband/partner saying that baby looks too hot, how ridiculous she is in a hat indoors in this weather… obviously I could hear. I didn’t say anything. She then taps me on the shoulder and shows me an NHS page on clothing/temperatures for babies and said I might need it. What the fuck? I am a new mum and already stressing over making the right decisions. Am I alone in this? I actually cried when I got in the car.

Some of these have reminded me of comments I got! But I definitely think young mums get more comments, I had 2 kids at 26 and 28 (but looked way younger) then 2 more at 32 and 34 and didn’t really get any comments with the older ones. Some of my favourites were…

the lady in the supermarket who insisted DD1 was a boy. She said ‘what’s his name?’ And I said ‘she’s called x’ and she said ‘but he’s wearing blue’. It was a blue dress! 😂

The old lady in a retail park on a mildly sunny day who walked past me pushing my DDs in the buggy and snapped ‘I hope they’ve got sun cream on’. We were going into shops and only outside to walk between shops and the car, so no?!

My favourite was a different old lady in the same retail park. I was queuing in New Look and my kids were messing about by the jewellery. Not ideal, but I couldn’t leave the queue without losing my place, and I was keeping an eye on them. She snapped ‘you need to be careful with those kids. A little boy was running around Topshop last week and he died!’ 😂

I was in a supermarket with DD in a sling when she was just a few weeks old. She was crying and unsettled (diagnosed with silent reflux shortly after), she’d been fed and changed so I was just getting my shopping done as quickly as possible. A man approached me and told me he had a newborn at home and knew what my baby needed, then offered to go and change her nappy for me! Oddly enough I did not hand her over and instead told him I had been a nanny for years and knew what I was doing. Still wish I’d pointed him out to security as it just seemed such a weird thing for someone to suggest.

I was a bit overweight during my pregnancy (size 14/16). A woman on the bus told me I should lose weight because I’d probably get pre-eclampsia and my baby would die

Considering I had my first when I was 16 but I looked even younger because I'm only 5"0 I didn't actually get that much negative unsolicited advice but there's was always someone trying to tell me I was freezing my child because he didn't want to wear a hat scarf and coat on a day in April that wasn't even particularly cold and don't get me started on the socks when he was a baby and constantly taking them off

I was pushing my baby along. About 10 months at the time. It was the middle of summer and she had a sun hat on, shade down on her pram and a parasol.

A complete stranger stopped me and said I was ridiculous for having a baby that young outside in the sun. We're in Northern England so not exactly tropical but she was well protected anyway.

I just nodded and carried on walking.

I argued with an old lady once that my little boy was in fact a boy. Around 8 months at the time and she said what’s her name. I replied he’s a boy. She told me he was far too pretty to be a boy and was I sure on his sex?

That's so funny! I had almost the same!

My DS was about 2 & had blonde wavy hair, not very long but not short. He was wearing an orangey-pink hoodie. At Mass an older lady smiled at him, and asked his name. When I said it, she misheard it for 'Rosie' and said 'oh lovely, pretty little girl'. I corrected her & she just stared at me. 'No. Not a boy - not with those curls & that top. No way is that child a boy'. So definitive, she just walked off!

(Said DS is now 14 & when he sees photos of himself from then, he agrees & is horrified about my sartorial choices & his cherubic curls!)

I normally smiled & ignored unwanted opinions.

But one time I still remember really upset me. I was rushing around trying to finish a grocery shop with DS3, a baby at the time, before getting back for preschool & school collection for older 2.

DS started crying & getting fed up. I knew from experience stopping wouldn't work, I had to persist & get through it so I was soothing him while flinging last bits in the trolley.

Older woman sympathises with DS, 'oh poor baby, you just want your Mammy' then turns to me patronisingly & says, 'at this age they just want to be held, it's very cruel to leave them cry'. I snapped that he was my 3rd baby & I knew what I was doing but I was really upset for some reason.

Not advice but... my perfectly-behaved six-year-old was with me at university. Another mature student (a woman probably in her fifties) told everyone that my child would 'grow up to be a delinquent!' because I'd divorced her (violent, adulterous) father.

My dd has now grown up. She has never been a delinquent.

Thought of another. It really upset me & I have used it as a learning for myself looking at any other mother / family.

I'm a single parent & when the DC were about 3, 5, 7 & we were in a busy coffee shop & I was trying to get their drinks & not get in anyone else's way. This was also a rare treat for us as money was v tight, this was a pricey coffee shop.

Two DC started fighting & I gave out, then there was arguments about the drinks & treats so I ended up speaking really sternly to them about behaving, ruining treat etc. I noticed a (again!) older woman looking over.

As she and her husband were leaving she quickly said to me 'I'm not sure if you realise how upsetting it is to hear you talk to your DC like that'. And scurried off. I actually went after her & said 'excuse me' & she repeated it adding, 'they are very good children really'. The H looked mortified.

I just cried & cried in the shop & later. The kids felt awful.

I was really struggling at the time & did my best for my DC, I felt so judged ironically not for letting my kids run wild but for disciplining them.

In hindsight & now I've older DC, I get it more. To her they looked like cute small children & I was nagging at them. I now see hassled young mums & feel a bit sorry too for an over-tired tantrumming toddler & think 'oh she should just give him a cuddle'. But I remember being that mum & knowing how hard it can be & the cute kid I saw might have driven her demented since 7 am.

And I also remember that thoughtless comments can really hurt.

"You'd best make sure you put plenty of sunblock on her, you don't want her getting any blacker" about my then six month old mixed race daughter.

Oh my God! 'Baby cows grow but they are not very intelligent'. 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

That's horrendous.

It's hard to believe anyone can be so racist & hurtful 😟

Some woman i had never seen before came up to me when we were camping to recommend a parenting book that "changed her life". She appeared to have 1 child. I have 5. She looked shocked that i didn't want the details.

I was talking to my then 7 year old walking down the road (post Brexit referendum) about how you could belong to 2 countries at once, you could be British and French at the same time like us. And a woman walking behind us stopped me and said “that’s not right, you shouldn’t tell her that, you can’t belong to 2 countries, you have to choose”.

She got a pretty brisk “mind your own business”.

Honestly, earwigging and batshit views and interrupting. So rude!!

When my daughter was around five and we were in a B&M type of store.
My daughter picked up a play make up set and while she was stood holding it at the tills, an old lady passed and told me ' you shouldn't allow her to have that, it'll turn her into a trollop when she's older '
I was so taken aback that I actually laughed.
Fortunately my daughter now in her thirties chose medicine over trollophood.

I was told to give mine a bottle/dummy and nobody really believed me that he wouldn't take either. Eventually he could have a sippycup/solid food and then I was asked again why I was still breastfeeding, and had to explain that milk was still beneficial for my baby, just like how other babies get given bottles of follow on milk. I stopped at 14 months and dealt with lots of rude questions/comments. Mostly from older women.

"You should ignore him - you're spoiling him by cuddling him, no wonder you can't control him"

-a family member to me about my 2 year old, who was crying at midnight because he had just been woken up from his sleep in the car after a 4 hour drive. Apparantly this wasn't normal child behaviour and by comforting him I was creating a rod for my own back.

That's really sad...wonder what happened in the old lady's life

Urgh! Mother of a type 1 diabetic. Plenty of people with useless opinions about him being fed sugar when hypo. Apparently if I stopped giving him haribo he would recover. No, he'd die, love.

I remember being in Boots with DD when she was newborn. It was a sub zero day outside, warm in the chemist but obviously we were only going to be in for a few minutes.

DD was wrapped up warm in her buggy.

I was waiting at the till and turned around to check on DD and found, to my surprise, a couple of elderly women had taken it upon themselves to remove items of her clothing.

As they did so they were talking to themselves in Portuguese about how bad English parenting is. Unbeknown to them I understand Portuguese. I told them to go and fuck themselves in Portuguese.

Their faces were a picture. No doubt it confirmed their views of English parenting. But very satisfying.

Off topic, but I love these moments of yes actually I speak your language. I had one where a taxi driver was talking crap about me in Arabic. I only speak/understand a bit but I got the gist. At the end I thanked him and wished him a nice day in Arabic and the look on his face was priceless.

yes it was 20 years ago, but I still think about her and wonder

@takealettermsjones

Off topic, but I love these moments of yes actually I speak your language. I had one where a taxi driver was talking crap about me in Arabic. I only speak/understand a bit but I got the gist. At the end I thanked him and wished him a nice day in Arabic and the look on his face was priceless.

LOL.

Again off topic but I had another similar moment like that with Portuguese on a train when some extremely macho young Brazilian men were making unpleasant lewd comments about a young girl in the carriage. I told them she wouldn't touch them with theirs and they started swearing at me and calling me the Brazilian equivalent of an old trout etc.

Deeply gratifying.

Never a good idea to slag people off and assume they can't understand you. It's doubly insulting when they can.

@Arewehumanorarewecupboards

I empathise. Had a random stranger tell me once that I shouldn't let my autistic kid wear his ear defenders because he had to 'get used to noise'.

DD2 (aged 2yo) was having a tantrum in the shopping trolley because I hadn't let her go to the toilet unaccompanied. As in left her to walk down the long corridor, go into the ladies and just waited by the supermarket entry for her.
Random woman walks past: "Why don't you give her a couple of bars of chocolate, then she'll stop?"

Dd2 had a very long memory for anything like that. If I'd given her a chocolate bar not to have a tantrum in the supermarket it would have guaranteed a tantrum every visit until probably she was doing her own shop having left home.