Every other Friday night, when she isn’t with her dad, I take DD (aged 9) to a soft play centre. I vary it each time.
She has SN and a couple of medical issues.
She loves Soft Play. I always choose ones aimed at slightly older children, there’s 4 nearby that say they go up to aged 12 or under 4.5ft.
DD looks and sounds younger than her age more like a 6–7-year-old but she’s happy.
She usually has a couple of goes on the slide then just sits in either the ball pit or under those big square blocks. She happily chats to any child who passes her or who stops for a chat, and she never gets in anyone’s way. She doesn’t throw anything, or shout or meltdown she just sits. She says she sits and makes up a game in her head with the balls being a shark pit or she’s floating in the sea waiting to be rescued, she pretends she’s sat on a raft and the other children are on other boats or rafts also waiting to be rescued.
Tonight she was doing just that, sitting in the ball pit, chatting to anyone who passed her, one girl stopped and chatted to her for a good 5-10 minutes.
After that, the girls dad came up to me conversation went like this:
Him “Is that your girl in the ball pit just sitting?”
Me “It is, did she throw something or say something mean, I’ll have a word if she did”
Him “No she’s just sat there chatting to my girl when my girl should be playing”
Me “She’s happy enough, if she’s not upsetting anyone please just leave her be, she’s quite happy. If you don’t want your daughter to chat to her and would rather she play that’s fine”
Him “It’s bloody strange, it’s a soft play, they’re supposed to play, sitting is not playing they can do that at home with a tablet. It’s wrong”
I’m sat thinking that she is playing in her own way. She’s happy, I can see her, she’s not disrupting anyone. I check in with her every 10 minutes or so and check she doesn’t want me to ask some of the other children to play with her, and she always says they chat to her and she’s fine.
I’ve paid the same price as everyone else there for my DD to be there, so surely if she’s happy and not upsetting anyone it’s fine?
For context DD loves these trips, looks forward to it all week and says it’s her way to relax after a hard week.
So AIBU? Or does my DD play wrong?
Lighthearted by the way, I don’t care what someone thinks about the way my DD plays.