Shouted at someone else’s child, WIBU?

[wooooooop]

NC as might be outing.

I take my 10mo DS to a small church hall playgroup, it’s mostly free play time with a singing session at the end. It’s been a lovely group thus far, DS has a great time there and I get to interact with other adults! There is a little boy there of about 3 or 4, he’s never supervised by his Mum who is always sitting at the other end of the hall chatting, or on her phone. DS and I usually steer clear of him as he seems quite a boisterous child, and he often snatches toys from the other children.

DS and I were playing with baby toys today, and I didn’t notice the other boy approaching from behind us until he kicked my poor little DS in the back as he reached for a toy I instinctively shouted at him (I didn’t say anything horrible to him, I was just so shocked at what he’d done that I shouted at him to go away), he clearly went to tell his Mum that I’d told him off as she came storming over demanding to know why I’d shouted at her child while I was trying to comfort my own sobbing baby. I was more angry with her than her DS so I told her that if she’d supervised her little bully, I wouldn’t have had to shout at him and my baby wouldn’t have been hurt. Instead of apologising for her son’s behaviour, she went to the group leader and asked for me to be banned from the group!

I’m so upset, I don’t know if I overreacted or not as this is my first child and therefore my first rodeo with playgroups!

I mean re the language 'victim blaming' 'bully' 'thug'.

Your mistake was shouting at the kid. Never shout at someone else’s little terror child.

Hiss at them quietly and then pretend you’ve never seen them.

Whatever the child had done, the issue was with the mother. Personally I think OP lost some of the moral high ground by labelling a 3yo a bully. I fully agree that the kid should have been supervised, and I sympathise with the OP for being annoyed in the moment with the child, but I also think that she didn’t help herself by stooping to the level of calling a 3 year old (who may be badly behaved, may have additional needs, may have just tripped and kicked by accident for all we know) names.

ETA: as you said yourself, your own kids were biting each other at around this age. Snatching toys carries on for a lot of kids well into primary school.

Some children absolutely are bullies from a young age, and make life very unpleasant for others around them. Given I have a decade of teaching 4-5 year olds I’ve witnessed plenty, usually with entitled, disrespectful parents who do nothing but make excuses/blames others/are in complete denial, so I speak from my own experience of literally hundreds of young children. Open your eyes.

I absolutely will shout at someone else’s child if I see them physically assault mine. Don’t like it? Teach them how to behave in public then.

You sound like me when my first was a baby.

4 children later and an incident like this was water of a duck’s back.

My 4th child is very resilient, getting a few bumps (or worse) from the older ones at times.

Of course tell the older child to be careful and distract them - but soon you will be the mother of the toddler, then the school child, then the teenager and your perspective will change.

Shocked at this thread. I’ve got 2 DC, one who has been 3 and one who is soon to be 3. At that age there is no way either would have intentionally kicked a baby. They might have accidentally knocked into one, in fact I remember DS1 sending a ~ 1 year old flying after losing control of a little tykes car he was in at a toddler group once. But the difference was I was right there supervising, so picked baby up and apologised to the mother.

I don’t think OP calling the 3 year old a ‘little bully’ is on, as the kid is clearly a product of bad parenting. But saying ‘just you wait until you have a 3 year old’ is bonkers as most supervised 3 year olds don’t go round intentionally kicking babies.

Except it was the OP’s child that was reaching for the toy

A child who hasn’t yet learned the social conventions of playing with other children should not be left unsupervised for long periods of time. To do so is a safeguarding risk. Speak to the people running the group and ask them if there is a safeguarding lead you can discuss this with and if they have made a record of the incident. I have emailed a school DSL before when a little girl in her uniform shoved my son off a slide when she was climbing up it, then ran off laughing when I told her off. Guardians nowhere to be seen. OTT maybe, but she shouldn’t have been unsupervised.

If everybody did this every time we would not have to deal with the constant issues around big children going in the under 3s area at soft play and terrorising the babies, or going in the toddler playground and climbing on the roof of the frame or whatever. I don’t mind kids being kids at all, and I bollock my own toddler if he snatches or barges other children, but I do mind the laziness of sitting being a phone zombie when your child doesn’t know how to play. We all want to take a load off at these places, but you wait until your child can play.

It’s really not you. I’ve read most of these comments and uttered ‘WTF?’ after a lot of them. I shouted at a few little shit who deliberately hit my DC when they were small. I was also more than happy to reiterate this to their equally shit parents who should have been parenting properly and supervising. Nobody ever needed to shout at my DC because they were parented properly and knew right from wrong. There’s definitely quite a few parents on MN who are too scared to discipline their kids and only think that accountability happens the minute they wake up on their 18th birthday! There’s nothing more cringey than hearing someone calmly saying ‘Now Johnny, we only use kind hands and feet’ after their kid has kicked shit out of another. My toes curl when I hear this sort of bollocks.

I remember being at a soft play with my 2-3 year old when a boy twice her size started just pummelling her for no reason. She was just starting to go for little loops on her own under supervision. We noticed immediately, but couldn’t get to her immediately. It was horrible. Sometimes those places are like Lord of the Flies (this was at Butlin’s in Skegness). The parents of the attacking boy have no idea to this day that it even happened. You don’t always react perfectly in the heat of the moment because these are times when you have adrenaline, because your child seems to be in danger.

I also remember shouting when a little neighbourhood bully played knock door run on our house for about the fourth time in a row, after having spent the morning harassing my own children on the neighbourhood green. I answered the door (again), saw her running away, and called out, “If you do that again, I’ll go and tell your mum.”

In retrospect, this would never have worked anyway. Mum came to me, complaining because I had upset her child. As a teacher, I should have understood that all behaviour is communication. Crazy lady practically stated a fight over my reaction to her kid’s antisocial behaviour.

It’s true. All behaviour IS communication, and some of the time, misbehaving kids are communicating that their parents are lazy self-excusing aresholes who can’t be bothered to instil any kind of manners or civility into their poor children and instead deflect and project their own parenting failures onto the failure of everyone around them to cope with their precious little unmonitored brute. It’s easier and quicker to deal aggressively with any naysayers than it is to actually supervise your child full time. You just need a thick skin and no self-awareness.

You’re talking about the dynamics between your children here, yes?
not your children and children that belong to other people?

I agree with this!

It’s the one when you seem like a loser! Maybe dont call other children bullies. You are calling him a bully, but really that’s what you are!

Explain how a) she was pretty awful and b) what the better way to deal with it was? c'mon it's not that difficult to understand?

I think a lot of people are reading your first part OP and not reading that the other mother was the one to escalate with you. Hint - her child wouldn't have been called a bully if she hadn't stomped over and had a go at OP for shouting at her child.

This happens, unfortunately.

We had it at playgroups, nursery, soft play, at the park - wherever there are kids gathering there is often a little shit with a lax parent.

Well done for telling him off and well done for standing up to the Mum.

The neglectful ones are often the most gobby too, I've found.

Not unreasonable to tell him off (though 'go away' isn't exactly the most constructive way to go about this). However calling him a bully to his mum does lose you the moral high ground IMO.

Also, supervision of young kids/babies has 3 strands, as you have now likely found out. 1) ensuring your child doesn't do anything to harm themselves, 2) making sure your child doesn't harm another, 3) making sure that no other child is able to harm yours. And yes, that absolutely means being aware to the extent you need eyes in the back of your head. That's just parenting really. So if you know there's a kid with a reputation for being grabby, or a biter, or whose parents are unlikely to be around, having an awareness when they are near your child, so you can intervene, becomes second nature. Supervision is much more than just watching your child.

I’d have shouted “fuck off you little shit” so you were nicer than me. You did nothing wrong and that parent needs to be banned not you.

All of this is absolutely spot on.

Perfectly reasonable, OP, I'd have shouted too

WTF have I just read?
The kid WAS behaving like a bully! The OP is in no way at fault here. Her baby has been deliberately kicked by an older child who is old enough to know better and who wasn’t being adequately supervised! This was pretty much the definition of a bully when I was at school.
I can’t believe you then called the OP a ‘loser’. Are you 12? 🤷‍♀️😂

A similar thing happened to my first at butlins (common theme maybe!) Some little boy about 3-4 wandered over and stamped on his back and head unprovoked as he lay on his front playing.
I went over and called him a little psychopath to the parents who didn’t give 1 shit. Probably the reason the kid was so rotten in the first place.

Some kids are just awful, it’s not normal behaviour to randomly kick someone no matter how you try and dress it up. None of mine have ever attacked a child for no reason, I'm suprised people think this is okay.

Wtf is this twaddle about "labelling pre schoolers" being wrong?

3 year olds have their own personality, they are completely capable of being naughty, nasty and cruel to other children. That by definition makes them a bully. All this bullshit about them being allowed to act like a bully but you can't actually call them a bully until they're 8 or whatever is ridiculous! If a kid is bullying others, they are a bully and other children should be protected from them. Not told to shut up because they can't be bullied by a 3 year old 🙄

😂

Give over !!! And practice what you preach ,now you’re being a total bully!