"You didn't really expect food to be ready at 4pm did you?"

[123bumblebee]

Said to me by my mother recently when, after driving 2.5 hours with a toddler and planning our meals around this, dinner didn't appear until 6.30pm. We were staying in a hotel so imminently had to leave to get our 18 month old settled for the evening- we're not precious parents who are rigid about bedtimes, it's just she loses her shit with tiredness past 7pm and it's not fair on her. She won't sleep out and about in a pram, never has.

It got me thinking. I've had another recent family fallout where I hosted my brother for lunch at midday and he turned up 2.5 hours later claiming the time he said he was arrive was 11.30 "ish" so therefore we were obviously supposed to know that he was going to be so late.

Am I naive to expect people to serve meals or turn up for meals at the time stated? My mother laughed at me being so naive to expect a 4pm meal to be served....around 4pm. Obviously I understand things crop up and it sometimes takes longer than expected but this was a BBQ and the host didn't even light the BBQ until gone 5pm.

If so, how the frick am I supposed to plan my life if this is an unspoken rule that I have never been informed of?

YANBU
This annoys me too. I don't care what time it is, but just stick to it so I can plan around it! I think people without young kids can forget that they can't be as flexible as adults.

I have young kids and this kind of rigidity would do my head in.

Your brother turning up 2 hours+ late for lunch was incredibly rude of him.

The BBQ situation is probably quite common - people don't know/have forgotten what it's like trying to parent a young child who likes their routine. I find that when dealing with events like this it's best just to be open about when you'll need to arrive/leave, bring your own food for LO, and then stick to what you said about leaving times etc.

It is frustrating when people don't stick to plans but the reality is that your toddler's routine is much more important to you, your DP and your LO than it is to anyone else (because other won't have to deal with the consequences of late bedtimes etc!) Do what you need to do for your kid, even if it means being your own food etc.

@MargotBamborough - to be fair, the OP said she was there a couple of hours before, so she was invited for 2pm told food at 4pm. I’d assume 5ish at the latest food if I’d been told that as an adult and would have a big brunch then skip lunch to accommodate eating dinner early. (A 2pm invite for 4pm food is sort of super late lunch territory in my head, not dinner, I’d expect to go home around 8ish and eat again then)

@spitefulandbadgrammar

I know what the 4pm “tea” consists of thank you. I’ve worked in several nurseries. All have a “light tea” at 4pm. The meal consists of half a sandwich, crackers and cheese or veg sticks and dip etc Therefore it is not a “meal”. It is intended as a snack to keep hunger pains away until dinner is served when parents arrive home from work and they eat together.

The earlier “snack” you mention is generally a fruit snack or yogurt.

Your D.C. may have been content with half a sandwich at 4pm and a yogurt for supper. Most have “dinner” with their family.

Maybe if OP carried a sandwich and some veg sticks in her bag (I refer to these items as a snack. You refer to them as tea), her dc may have been content with that and may not have needed to stay awake for the bbq, which seemed to be the main cause of distress to the child and parent. We’ll never know because OP expected everyone at the gathering to pander to her toddler, instead of being prepared.

For the posters stating OP’s mother should have made egg on toast for the child. It seems OP’s mother wasn’t hosting. There would have been nothing preventing OP asking the host if OP could make some toast for her child though. Surely it’s the parents job to ensure their child is fed and comfortable?

Oh and OP, you need to be clear when you’ll need to leave and feed your dc separately. I had years of feeding dc1 a sandwich because MIL Sunday lunch wouldn’t be on the table before 2pm, and then her being annoyed he didn’t eat anything/was falling asleep.

Then SIL had dc, she put her dc in the buggy and left at 1:30 having not eaten because it was her nap time. She did this once. Next Sunday lunch was on the table at 12noon. Que MIL commenting how my dc1 had found his appetite and ate a full meal…

is yours the first grandchild? You are going to have to train your family to either fit round your child or accept your child won’t be eating with them for the next few years. Agree asking for a place you can settle your dc if dinner won’t be served until after their bedtime. Overtired kids kept up to spend time with family always sounds like a nice idea until you are the only trying to eat and keep a lid on your child about to throw a tantrum because they are tired and need sleep.

@Cammac - my dcs nursery gave a cooked meal at 4:30ish. We always offered dcs food at home later but generally they didn’t eat much then. Most other nurseries around here do a meal, not a snack. Plus childminders will feed a meal around 4:30. I don’t know anyone who does more than toast level snack for childminder fed dcs unless they are getting to year 5/6 and need more food.

@LimeCheesecake

Whatever. It depends what you’re paying for nursery care doesn’t it? 🙄

The point is OP is the one who knows her DC’s routine. She can carry a full cooked meal in her bag if she wanted. What a “meal” consists of isn’t the point here.

Is it too far beyond the realm of basic parenting to be prepared to look after your own child??

@LimeCheesecake It may or may not be possible to "train" the child's grandparents to respect their meal and nap routine but it is unreasonable to expect anyone else to do so.

You need to decide whether you're the kind of family which never deviates from the children's schedule and doesn't socialise much until the children are older, or whether you go with the flow a bit more and accept the occasional meltdown or danger nap in the car at 6pm as the price you pay for having more of a social life.

You accept that they lie and they are not going to consider your needs, and then you make it so that your needs are met. Boundaries. Self worth.

They're not "lying". They just don't realise that the sky will fall in if the schedule slips a bit.

I don't think this is an ASD thing. I'm NT but I moan about this constantly, with both my family and my DPs family in different ways, they just don't seem to appreciate that it causes problems for parents of young kids when things don't happen at least loosely when discussed/before it's too late. They've had young kids themselves obviously but just seem to have forgotten what it's like. It's a PITA.

But then you need to take control over the situation.

If your kid needs to eat and sleep at a certain time, you bring a high chair, you bring food for your child, you bring a travel cot. If you need to be home at a certain time for your kid's bedtime routine, you say, "Lovely, thanks for the invitation, looking forward to it. Just to let you know we'll need to leave at 5:30 at the latest."

If lunch isn't ready when you expect it to be, you say, "I'm just going to feed little Jemima now so she can go down for her nap while we eat."

Leave at the time you said you needed to leave.

You can't blame people for not instinctively knowing that you/your child needed things to happen at a certain time if you didn't say so.

And they can't blame you for feeding your child, putting your child down for their nap, or leaving at the time you said you would do these things.

@MargotBamborough It's usually that we are planning on eating together and they just keep pushing it back to a later and later time because to them it isn't a problem. With my family it's usually that they aren't ready in time for lunch, with my DPs it's usually that they want us to hang around for dinner later than is convenient, and then we live an hour away so there's the inevitable danger nap in the car. Yes we could leave early and suit ourselves. but that would be cancelling the whole point of meeting. They do know the sorts of time we like to do things as we've spoken about it so many times. They just don't seem to think.

I'm not saying they're doing anything massively wrong, it's just one of those things in life that you put up with but that is quite annoying.

This. We fell out with friends who were so inflexible that that any social event became really awkward. Everything had to centre around their children's routines, whereas our DS could eat and sleep whenever and wherever within reason. I am of European heritage, though, where children fit in with their parents' lifestyles rather than the other way round.

In your case I think I would bring everything you need for your child's lunch and just say, "If lunch is on the table at the time DC needs to eat, they can eat with us, otherwise we'll just sort DC out at their usual time and the adults can eat whenever lunch is ready," and I would refuse dinner invitations altogether.

@Cammac So first it’s nurseries serve a snack at 4pm, now you concede it’s actually tea, and that as I said, snack is actually earlier – and smaller than the tea (one might go so far as to say snack-sized!). “Puzzling.” How do you know most kids “have” dinner with their families after their “nursery” meal, have you “done” a survey? Most nurseries do their main meal at lunch “and” a lighter meal at teatime. Some kids will eat more later, some “won’t”. Tea is often a sandwich with side elements “such” as vegetable sticks, therefore it is a meal. (Makes as much “sense” as your arbitrary declaration of what a meal isn’t.) Thank “you” too! Hope I got the passagg inverted commas right!

I'm curious about this. If your toddler has their evening meal at 4pm are they really expected to manage without food until the next morning, i.e. about 15 hours?

Saying that you will do something and then not doing it makes you a liar. Just because it's normal doesn't mean it's right. And I don't believe they really believe what they say because if they had the intention of making food for when they said it would be, they would have to start earlier.

@MargotBamborough She’ll have some Greek yoghurt or something at home but she’s not hungry for more. Used to have a cup of milk in the bath but doesn’t want that any more. Sleeps through till 7am then gets up and wants to play rather than demanding breakfast. It’s less about the time without food, I think, as the overall quantity of calories over 24 hours and over the week – lots of studies show that if you increase a child’s calories at breakfast they’ll self-regulate to eat less throughout the day; the “stuff them full before bed so they’ll sleep” is a myth. Adults don’t neck their dinner right before bed, we need and want time to digest and unwind; same for kids.

Right, but adults go to bed a lot later than kids do so they don't have so long to wait until breakfast.

My two year old has a large lunch at about 12, then a snack at 4pm which is usually bread, jam and fruit compote, or sometimes cake if a child has a birthday, then he comes home and eats something like pasta or rice with vegetables and some fruit between 6pm and 6:30, which is usually about an hour and a half before he falls asleep. By 7am he is hungry and demanding his breakfast.

I really wouldn't want to move that whole schedule forward by two hours, or even one hour.

@MargotBamborough I think we can conclude “children are different”. At two mine was in bed at 6.30! I actually think that 4pm is a red herring: it could have been any time, the point is she was told food at Xpm but there was no food at Xpm. Doesn’t matter that your kid has pasta at 6 and mine has yoghurt at half five: OP was still not served food when she could have reasonably expected it.

Yes but this is the point, isn't it?

There are lots of people who wouldn't expect food at 4pm, regardless of what had been said beforehand. So what OP thinks is reasonable is not what a lot of other people think is reasonable.

If I invited people over at 2pm I'd expect them to have just had lunch and not be hungry at 4pm.

My inlaws invite us to a BBQ and we turn up at the given time they’ve already started or finished eating. 🤣