to be shocked at a mother feeding her 7 and 4 year old DS's yoghurt with a spoon?

[Anna8888]

Franco-American mother I know a little - her DSs are at the same school as my daughter. They were having a picnic lunch in the park yesterday and she fed them each a yoghurt (in its entirety) with a spoon.

Life is too short to worry about yoghurt.
Don?t waste time judging other?s actions - go enjoy your own picnic and your own kids. I hope that the paranoia you may experience is brief when you realise that others around you might be as judgemental as your good self and are sitting around privately laughing at what they perceive to be all your weird faults and parenting choices. Don?t worry though, I have a feeling that you will be fine as I have not met that many people so caught up in judging others that they feel the need to comment about strangers in the way that you have. Even if they do go online and talk about you in this way, hopefully plenty of people will knock them back for you and help them understand exactly how unnecessary it is because, as I have already said - life is too short to worry about yoghurt

sorry Anna, that was a little harsh. It is lateish and I am tired and your post irritated me
I stand by what I just said but perhaps could have been a little less arsey about it

Sounded pretty good to me, BagelBird

I fed my 6 year old some dinner tonight. Shall I go hang now?

GPAC you infantilising harpy. You probably forcibly breastfed said 6 year old too.

But he says he really likes it???

Sometimes children just want to feel babyed again. i can remember asking my mum to feed me sometimes at the age of 6/7.

Well, I don't know diddly-squat about children over 4, so I probably wouldn't have batted an eye, tbh! Even if I'd noticed, I doubt it would really have registered, I'm actually not all that interested in other people's kids (apart from close friends' dc's), and if it doesn't affect me, I don't care! I'd probably have been more worried that my kids were going to do something terrible on which I would be judged (very convinced SAHM's make me nervous!)

oh
I thought this was about the mother pouncing upon the OP's DS's yoghurt and feeding it to her children

you're all mad as meataxes.That's why i love you

This is quite extraodinary. Is MN changing it's whole nature? IME much of MN's raison d'etre is the passing of judgment on other parents' parenting skills - from food, nappies, behaviour, schooling, haircuts, school run etiquette, school run clothing , working, not working, claiming benefits. The list is alarmingly long. But it's suddenly not acceptable judge a loon who thinks it's OK to spoon feed a 7yr old child? A child that is not SN as far as the evidence suggests. She can't hear us, it won't upset her, so why can't we say that she's a nutter? Because I think that is fairly nutterish behaviour.

Yes, as far as the evidence suggests, that's fine. The point some of us are making is that the evidence may not go very far. I have already detailed twice on this thread how I made a complete dogs dinner of evidence and formed very definite judgments of the parenting skills of a family whose dd then turned out to have Aspergers.

In fact, there were two separate occasions when I have calmly made up my mind that families I knew quite well were nutters and loons- and on both occasions I found out later that the children were on the autistic spectrum. They seemed so normal .

I know she can't hear us, but a lot of mumsnetters with children on the autistic spectrum can hear us- and know that they may end up in the same situation as my friends, judged on their parenting skills because their children are outwardly normal.

cory - anyone who imagines that the child(ren) in the OP might have SN is letting their imagination take the better of them.

I have plenty of evidence that they don't. The school they attend cannot cater to children with SN, to begin with. How about that?

so does the french system not do inclusion? or is this some super duper exclusive private school? don't know about france - but even posh academic private schools here tend to be able to cope with mild SN that don't affect behaviour/academic performance.

Maaaaan, I just love the Anna threads with my morning coffee! Thanks for starting my day off with some good giggling

Now, carry on, please...

This is a school that specifically helps children from countries other than France (or French children who have been abroad) adapt to the French system - so it has special, small classes for them. That is its specificity. The school attracts multiple nationalities/religions/cultures and helps them all live together - I like that.

It is a school that teaches bilingually, in both French and English. Bilingual schools here don't take children with even mild learning difficulties as it is too much for them to cope with.

It is also a school with complicated premises (five sites, lots of very old buildings) so unsuitable for any child with physical disabilities.

Not all schools can offer all things to all children.

My friends' dd attended a school that couldn't cater for SN children- it took them years to have her statemented and years before the school admitted that she did indeed have SN. Before that, she just got told off when she couldn't cope with something.

She appeared a perfectly normal little girl- apart from the areas that she couldn't cope with. It took 24 hours at our house (sleepover) before those areas emerged and I realised there was something odd about the child. In fact, very odd, when you happened to get to one of the problem areas. Aspergers children often do appear normal in almost all respects- apart from one or two odditites. Many of them are very high functioning (including some mumsnetters).

My dd also attended a school that couldn't cope with her invisible disability. She got told off too. It has taken us 4 years to get recognition of her medical needs. Before that, I was just this hung up Mum who let my dd use a wheelchair for no reason. Or carried her to school on my back when she collapsed for no reason. And I am sure the neighbourhood judged like mad!. Maybe we can find it on mumsnet if we look back a few years

My point is that if your child is different in some ways you adjust to it as a parent, even if you don't have a diagnosis or any support from anyone. My friends were doing the right thing in treating their daughter differently- she was different. But if you had asked the school they'd have said there was nothing wrong with her.

I ahd no coice but to carry dd when she could not walk. But if you had asked her headteacher about the situation...

The people you saw in the park may well be a couple of normal children accompanied by a loon. But that was precisely what you would have thought of me pre-diagnosis. And what I thought of my friends. And what the schools thought of us all.

This is a long-standing school with a lot of experience of its specificity. At the slightest sign of difficulty (of any type) parents are involved and the school can insist on (at the very minimum) a multilingual speech therapist's assessment of the child's suitability for the programme.

Anna8888 on Thu 03-Jul-08 09:05:45

"It is a school that teaches bilingually, in both French and English. Bilingual schools here don't take children with even mild learning difficulties as it is too much for them to cope with."

Why would being bilingual be beyond a child with Aspergers??? I do not get this at all! Aspergers is not a learning disability in that sense. You get highly successful academics with Aspergers.

The more you talk about SN, Anna, the less convinced I feel that you would really be qualified to judge if a child of your acqaintance was on the autistic spectrum.

Cory - this is the school's policy, not mine.

And having seen at first hand how children with Asperger's fail to thrive in multilingual educational settings in my own childhood, I understand the policy.

Anna, stop digging! Please, for your own sake.

I'm not digging at anything.

But am fascinated by how many sheep flock to MN

Sheep? Anna, I told you on the first page of this thread that you were barking. My opinion hasn't changed.

Well fair enough, you know the school and I don't. But if you had explained about the school's unusual exclusivity in your OP, that would have made your judgment more understandable. It has taken us 9 pages to get to your reason for excluding SN, namely the highly unusual policy of your school to exclude even the mildest forms of SN. We could hardly guess at that without being told; it's not a situation most of us would have come across in RL. Yet another one of those threads that start at the wrong end...

This thread is full of bleating . But also (thankfully) quite a few voices of reason.