AIBU to find FTM chat incredibly dull?!

[Elleee]

I attended my first baby group with my DD who is now 8 months old. I also have DD aged 4.

I started talking to a few of the other mums there - I made lots of friends the first time round at baby groups and was keen to meet some other mums with babies the same age as DD.

I couldn’t believe how boring the entire room of conversation was! One mum was saying how she’d been carrying around calpol for the past few days and taking her DS’s temperature hourly to check that he wasn’t overheating and didn’t need calpol to bring his temperature down (not entirely sure that’s how calpol works anyway!). Another mum going into detail about how her DD’s bowel habits had changed during the heatwave. Another parent informing everyone that she’d read that wooden toys are so much better than plastic and that she had banned plastic toys from their house (just you wait until your DD gets to age 2 😂). Another saying how she’d been setting alarms to check on DS during the night to check he hadn’t overheated. Other topics of conversation included how BLW is so much superior to purées and how their babies were GREAT eaters (babies were all 6m-14m…).

I actually remember discussing these sort of things back when oldest DD was a baby and I’m mortified at how boring I must have sounded! Is this standard stuff once you’re past your first baby?!

Whenever people enter a new phase in life it's natural for them to talk about the minutiae with others in the same boat. That can seem boring once you've moved on.

I really tried to move the conversation from this dull shit even with my first.

I think you are being a bit U but you know that

Try to find a group with a wider age range so parents of children who are a bit older will be there, they more often are 2nd+ timers or just have a bit more experience e.g. it not being their first ever summer in charge of a vulnerable tiny creature who can't talk yet.

I loved the NCT bumps and babies group but as soon as your baby was mobile (crawling, bum shuffling or Rolling With Intent) you were booted out and we all went to the sure start stay & play instead. I'm sure those are gone now but I'm hearing good things about the family hubs which are opening up in some places. Or failing that, church playgroups were often a bit wider spread in terms of age group, even if you have to plant a smile on while you sing about Jesus at the end. (Some don't do this part as they prefer to be inclusive, TBF I think either approach is valid.)

Oh I think this is a good one too. If you don't mind being put in the position, casually mentioning your older child and some experience you had which was similar to the one someone is worried about and it all turned out fine can be really reassuring and help quell a lot of the general anxiety. I loved chatting to the more experienced mums when I had my first baby and I loved being the more experienced mum too.

Completely agree but I'm sure I was like that!
My DCs are adopted and I got so bored of people telling me what happened during their DCs birth. Thought I'd got away from that but a colleague told us all about her birth plans (me and one other female colleague who at least has a fairly small child, mine are secondary school age!) and now tells us how BF is going.

When your first child drops its dummy or a toy on the floor you wash it with soap and sterilise it. With the second child you run the toy under the hot tap, and with the third you give it to the dog to lick clean.

I didn't find information seeking conversations boring. I couldn't bear the competitive Mums though who seemed to be constantly boasting about their child prodigy.

Having said that, I wouldn't go to these groups with a second. There were numerous things I signed up to as a ftm which I didn't really find beneficial.

I didn't bother weighing DC - they were exclusively breastfed and naturally small and I didn't need to go through what a friend went through with the health visitor trying to pressure her unnecessarily to combi feed her baby (her baby was fine. This wasn't a situation where there were difficulties breastfeeding or anything).

I confess to falling victim to the wooden-toy-only obsession. It didn't last long 😂

I did a mixture of purees and blw. I joined a terrifying Facebook group which kicked you out if you mentioned puree and acted as if you were poisoning your baby. Ridiculous. I did stick rigidly to waiting for 6mo to wean, which with hindsight was also silly. Not all babies walk or talk or sit at the same age, why would all babies magically be ready to wean at exactly 6mo?!

It’s totally normal, people become diet bores, gym bores, baby bores, politics bores… I think with babies it’s often that when you have your first you are usually really focused on not fucking it up so it consumes a lot of your mental space. It makes a lot of sense from a anthropological perspective that we should be so heavily engaged with our little ones, if we weren’t theres a chance they wouldn’t survive infancy.

Was on your side till the 'just you wait' 🙄 feels like the JYW brigade only use it to suck the optimism out of people. I cringe every time I hear someone say it to a new parent.

I think what’s worse is when those same parents meet their child free friends and have the same conversations…. The number of times I’ve been on the receiving end of a monologue about a baby’s bowel movements or eating habits 😂 I get it but it’s very hard to pretend to be interested in this stuff if you’re not going through it yourself. It’s a bit like people who go on and on about work - keep that conversation to your colleagues who’ll actually be able to relate to what you’re saying.

I think that when you’re an exhausted new FT parent, the last thing you should be worrying about is whether your conversation is sufficiently elevated or entertaining — though I do remember a highly entertaining, and rather dark, conversation in Naomi Stadlen’s Mothers Talking group (which I attended when DS was very new) about different hallucinations people had had from sleeplessness eg I thought the shadows on the floor were talking to me.

I think where YWBU was even going, those groups are for first time mums for that reason. It's a bit mean to go along and say how dull it is (I know you didn't say it in person), what's next, going to a primary school classroom and saying the lesson is easy. Or talking to some teens are saying they giggled too much and talked too much about music.

I remember accidentally sitting next to a mother and toddler group in a gallery cafe when I was pregnant and couldn’t believe how boring they all were. Like ‘how can every single person in a group be so mind numbingly boring?’ type of boring. They all also seemed to have to the same uniform of striped tops with hair in ponies and just looked like larger versions of their toddlers. I remember mentally crossing off that group as a thing to sign up for once I’d had my baby.

I'll bet you were boring too.

This is why these groups are dominated by FTM and you rarely see mums with more than one child at them. It’s equally as much the tunnel vision over the PFBs as it is the fact that often you have a toddler or two also crashing around near the babies which rather worries the FTMs.

My friend and I tried our village baby group (where we met with our first babies) and when we had our second ones and found we were far less welcome with two boisterous 2 year olds in tow, and the other mums just seemed so boring (as you found). After that we used to go to national trust gardens, play parks and the beach, and we actually met two more mums with similar aged newborn & eldest combos that we fell in with who had been similarly underwhelmed by their local baby groups.

I honestly thought this was going to be a thread about trans men… 😂

I would never say it to a new parent! Just secretly think it😂

New mums will naturally want to discuss things they aren't sure about. You've done it before, you are an old hand so of course you find it dull.

I only managed 2 baby group visits before I realised it wasn't for me. I remember listening to a serious conversation about how to clean an Aga. 😁

Huzzah!!!

Yeah definitely can't help thinking it sometimes 🤣😅 just not out loud!!

Isn’t it just the same as any new group. Small talk that eventually leads on to deeper friendships. Separate out a likely candidate or two and get together and they could be a friend for life.
I have a few mum friends from nearly 30 years ago and I promise we have moved on from talking about babies.

Yes!!

I didn’t attend baby groups with DC1 because it was lockdown. I then did attend one with DC2 and found it boring and difficult to bond with other mums, and also felt my approach to parenting by then was more relaxed. Eg i heard one of them saying they would never put their baby in a travel cot.

Err no you are not wrong. 😂

But it WAS important at the time, chatting about your babies, bonding, making friends..I would love to have had some mum friends when I had my first DS, I had moved to a new town and didnt have any friends. There didnt seem to be any mum & baby groups and it felt very lonely

I’ll be honest and say I have never been able to make friends with other mums from groups like this or from school etc for this reason. I don’t think it even ends once they’re past baby/toddler stage from my experience. DH said I’m being unfair and it’s because that’s the main thing you have in common so of course they want to chat about that. I really find it very tedious, it isn’t interesting to me…

My youngest is almost 6 and the chatter is still completely inane. Often about class teachers, things going on within the classroom, have you heard they’re implementing x and y from next year in the school, school trips coming up, the hassle of non uniform days etc. So very dull. I think it’s more pronounced in mums who place their DC at the centre of their universe.

Boring/ interesting is pretty subjective tho. Its not like "discussing the arts, literature, philosophy" or whatever else someone might put on a dating profile is inherently interesting - if the person doing the discussing is a crashing bore. On the other hand, I've been in pain from laughing at a story about a leaky nappy, in the context of a discussion about the merits of different nappy brands.

If nappies and Calpol are the subjects people are interested in, you'll be the bore if you insist on talking about the latest Sally Rooney novel that no one else has had time to read. And any subject can be interesting in the right hands.