to be annoyed at friend for dissing my parenting

[DonttellDH]

with no alternative advice?

My dd gets excited when she sees our friends, these friends and others. she is a whirlwind, is quite noisy, exciteable, hard to calm, but happy and lovely with it, a typical 3.5year old with an audience, she does not always listen to what we ask especially when there are babies around for her to coo over that she knows, or indeed her new 8wk old brother.

When i spoke to her last, she said to me 'i am surprised you let her ignore you the way she does, you ask her to sit down at the table so many times, my mother would have lost her rag after the first couple of times, you need to discipline her more' and that it irritated her that we 'did nothing' (ie, although we asked her, we kept asking and returning her to her chair when she got down, and did not 'lose our rag' Apparantly her mother had a tone. I said that we like to choose our battles carefully, as once we start we have to continue in a certain way, and don't like for life to be constant battle, try to reward good behaviour and ignore bad, where we can. Also said, that children need time to learn behavour, its not instant, and whe she is 7, i am sure she will sit well behaved at the meal table. I also said that tone is subtle and needs to a) be learnt and b) be subtle enough that they hear it without it being aggressive or shouty, and others outside of the family might not even here it, when it finally becomes recognised.

Then, I was talking about my friend saying her DP has lost confidence in how he will parent their 5 month old, talking to my DH and he said it might be due to a conversation he had with her. It turns out, she also mentioned this issue with our parenting to him as well.

She said it in such a patronising 'come on its easy' kind of way and it has upset me that she clearly spends time judging our parenting and how crap we are at it. DH told her 'wait til your LO is 3.5, then we will discuss this again' and told me to not worry about other peoples opinions on our parenting (we are mostly united in our parenting, DH and I, and we discuss it a lot, how we will manage xyz behaviour). I just do not feel happy that our parenting is being discussed (not surprised, people are people), and that she felt it ok to comment, without offering any kind of support or guidance as to how she feels we should do it, other than 'lose our rag, but with a tone not shouting'.

I know IABU to be upset, i should just grow thicker skin, but it relly hurt, she is meant to be a friend.

TBH I don't think I would want their friendship. They sound like a pair of twats.

Duchesse your so right imo with no 1 on your list
I am suprised tho there hasnt been a teacher on here yet to flame you prehaps your just lucky

I love Duchesse's list, but would like to add an extra one: childless people who have watched one or two parenting programmes.

Bizarrely though, people in their 70s and 80s seem to remember again what it was really like ime.

Ohh I really like the printing it on a mug idea!!

duchese i might well just print that list off you know. Really I might.

thecrackfox do you know, tbh, there have been other things, you know dripdripdrip effect, in our 'friendship' that make me wonder if i do want to be friends with them. I don't think i will stop it completely, just back off somewhat, not that easy to just ditch her! I had been trying to support her through the hardest first born bit of being a new mum esp as her DP was away working, she camped at ours a lot. She was around ours for a WHOLE day, when our boy was 3 days old! We put a stop to that quickly! Her DP is a bit of a jerk atm too for lots of reasons. He is DHs best friend from school, they have known each other for like 22years and are pretty much brothers (boarding school), they have that relationship, annoy each other, irritate each other but ultimately love each other. I, on the other hand do not have that relationship.

Luckily, I did not hear him call her a thug, DH told me. He said it was said 'in jest'. I would have tore a strip off him.

paisleyleaf and you know what? You are so right about people winding her up and then not understanding that she does not calm down easily. Especially before bedtime. This friend, her DP will happily chase her up and down the corridors of our house tickling and hanging her upside down, then wonders why she won't sit down to eat, or get ready for bed without a fight!

Oh and I know how our friends 'talk', so we had some good friends over last night for dinner, came over at 5:30pm so they could see our DD and DS before bedtime (not that DS has a routine, he is 8wks!). DD ate her tea with relative calmness, had cuddles with everyone, then had stories in the front room with DS and my friends for 45 mins, then she went to bed without a struggle, straight down, not up again, on time. DS went to sleep during story time and slept through our entire meal, and was still asleep when they left at 11pm! We had also prepared food in advance, and the house was lovely and tidy, so the evening was smooth and relaxed. They can take that back to the gossipy judges and tell them what a calm chilled out night they had with a new parents of 2 who cannot control their todder!

I have thin skin too. Often think I'm doing it all wrong and then step back and realise I'm not, I am fairly well thought out.
I will listen to advice, but it's up to me to not let it hurt me and I don't have to take it (I have to repeat this often!) I have a 3 year old and you sound like you are doing great (I seem to lapse into horrible shouty mummy far too often).

DonttellDH

I had a friend like that. I mean her DP and my DH were really good friends so we became friends. Ordinarily she was not someone I would have chosen. She drove me mad. She was only a year and a half older but thought she knew soooo much more. It was before I had DS but she had 2 DCs whilst we were friends. She always used to go on about how she would be my birthing partner (I had never mentioned this to her) and how I caould borrow all her baby stuff even though I wasn't pregnant and told her I couldn't wait to go shopping for baby stuff. She was very overbearing.

Her and her DP split and it turned out she was having an affair with her cousins husband (him and her cousin were also in our circle of friends and we were all Godparents to the 2 DCs). Me and DH (he liked her less than I did) 'sided' with her exDP and we didn't speak to her again. OK maybe we shouldn't have done that, but tbh it was all the excuse I needed to get rid.

I have a friend who became a stepmother to two dcs aged 5 and 8 a few years ago, she has zero experience of children below this age. Didn't stop her beloowing 'we say PLEASE and THANK YOU don't WE!!' at my only just starting to talk 14 month old dd, and then questioning me on when I was going to start teaching her manners. She got this look from both me and my dd and funnily enough hasn't been round much since

bellowing

dear op you have an 8 week old baby and could be forgiven for taking huge umbrage at even the most minor criticism. I think I was on a another planet for most of those early months and years but there wasn't much I could do aout it. and so thing slike this really got to me too.

as my kids get older I'm realising how hard it is for other people (however well intentioned) to take some one else's kid messing about. but usually what they say reflects their uncomfortableness with the situation. rarely is it a targeted attack on you.

so don't lose a friend over this (or sleep, you really can't afford to). hard I know but venting is usually the only way to go.

that and coming up with a good one-liner to cut them off sharpish. found getting them involved works too (Could you just pretend to be a monkey for her please? etc): it's usually the feeling of powerlessness that sends them over the edge

I was the best parent in the world - when I didn't have children

now I actually have children it's amazing how much I forgot.

I think the approach to your friend is to laugh gently and say 'Please remember this conversation in a few years time and talk to me then' - if she has really pissed you off say it patronisingly

Don'ttellDH

Your DD sounds exactly like mine; everything you say about her rings a bell; the excitability, the verbal diarrhea, the playing-to-a-crowd, needs to be told upteen times, INCESSANT..... The food thing particularly; a couple of friends have mentioned this but not in a particularly disapproving way ('Gosh, no wonder she's so tiny, she doesn't eat anything!')

Luckily, none of our friends or family have been anything other than complimentary about our parenting (which is very similar to yours, by the sounds of things) and when your friend's LO is a toddler/pre-schooler, she will eat her words!

Perhaps it is as simple as administering 'the look' for some children but for the vast majority of children there is a great deal of (repetitive) input before they can be considered 'trained'!

Stick to what you're doing and gloss over her comments. CHange the subject quickly when she starts!

I can sort of see why your friend holds these opinions, in that to her, with only a little baby, your dd will seem very grown up and she might expect too much of her. What she is doing seems typical of her age but would not be acceptable in an older child.

But it wasn't a good idea to say it to you. In my experience parenting style is the one topic most likely to cause problems between friends. Even with children the same age - I used to meet up with my antenatal class ladies with all of our babies. It was great until those babies became willful toddlers, then the differences in our approaches really began to show up! I'm sure we all had to bite our lips a lot, I know I did.

Interesting that it could be a feeling of powerlessness that makes her hold this view, but i am not convinced it is anything other than her being judgey pants! She does know our dd relatively well, although not as well as others.

We have a couple of close friends stayed over last night with their 7 year old boy, who is a lovely boy, and who we learnt a lot about toddlers through, we all lived together when he was 2 or so, for a year. We sort of mentioned it to one of them this morning, not in a slagging off way, but more, as the kids were charging around playing, how x&y were in for a shock. I mentioned that the other friend had thought DD was a bit of a handful, bit unruly, and he was so shocked! He said our DD had the most lovely temperament of all the children he knew! He said they obviously did not remember when their boy was that age (they are also friends with these people), and that DD was calm compared to many children (although i guess the friends that stayed over last night know DD v well, they are godparents, DD has sleepovers with them etc). They absolutely adore her and were very surprised that other friends had this opinion, and said they were so in for a shock as they have not given birth to a robot!

I feel so much better about it all, after you lovely ladies have given me some support and our lovely friends have said how wonderful our DD is (and not blowing smoke up our backsides, there are very honest with us).

Well personally I blame aliens. CHildren of my generation were always so good and calm and well-behaved according to their parents. My theory is that aliens have implanted chips in the brains of all children born since about ..oooh....1987 to make them uncontrollable. Tis not our fault.

Or it's because we used to get beaten with big sticks.

Something like that.

LOL Orm

Personlly i wouldn't put up with a 3.5 yr old ignoring what i said and continually leaving the table.She will presumably be starting school in September and will be expected to do as she's told then.
But that's how you have chosen to parent and that's up to you and your friend should have kept it buttoned.

She is starting school In Jan 2011. That is one whole year away, a long long time in the life of a 3.5 year old.

Also, it is as you say my choice, and my DHs choice of parenting not to get heavy handed in front of friends or in a restuarant, which is, to be honest, the times she is most likely to not listen straight away, when she is distracted by someone pulling faces at her, or a baby who she wants to coo over. Even if it is not the right way, or a way that my friend feels is appropriate to discipline a child, i felt upset that she chose to voluntarily tell me she thought i needed to discipline her more, and also felt it appropriate to volunteer this information separately to my DH (in front of her btw), and without any alternative way of doing it.

Incidently, we had brunch today with our close friends, and there were 4 adults and 2 children around our kitchen table, and DD did not get up to lean across the table (our biggest problem with her), or try to get down, or have to be told more than a handful of times to eat her food. We were also not left to get on with it while they watched and judged in mild horror If someone saw her not eating, or playing around, they said 'pavlov's DD, can you eat some scrambled egg please?' and we do the same with their child.