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Holidays

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What do you do when your children's holiday friendships threaten to take over?

3 replies

Cornflakemum · 07/04/2009 15:48

Just interested really, as I can see this being more of a problem in the future, and wondered how folk handle it?

We were skiing last week, and stayed in a chalet with another family who had kids EXACTLY the same age as ours, and all the kids almost instantly got on brilliantly, and were 'new best friends' for the week.

Obviously that is great on one level. However their 'new' friendships began to take over the holiday. The kids wanted to ski together, eat together, spend loads of time in each other's rooms (4-bed family rooms, so a bit of a pain sometimes), and even sit next to each other on the coach and plane home!!

In this particular case it wasn't really an issue, as we liked the parents too, and we all rocked along OK. However on the last day I felt a bit wistful that we hadn't actually spent any time together - just the 4 of us - as our own family.

When kids get wrapped up in new friendships it does rather seem to take over, and we would have had to positively say, "no - you can't ski with X&Y" which would have been hard to do, given that we all left the chalet and arrived at the lifts at the same time.

I just wondered if this happens to others, and how to handle it (especially if we weren't keen on the parents next time!)

OP posts:
Alibabaandthe40bunnies · 07/04/2009 17:27

I would have put my foot down about the rooms - I can remember doing this as a child on holiday and there is no way I would have expected my parents to allow my new friends into their bedroom.

For the rest, not easy in a chalet especially with the mealtimes. Maybe next time just say one morning 'we're going to do X today just on our own and we'll see abc at dinnertime'?

Legacy · 09/04/2009 14:34

We had this last year, and it can be a pain... the kids and Mum were lovely, but the Dad was a total knob We ended up sneaking out before them/ being vague about our plans etc and let the kids play together at times when we could escape from the parents.

Sadly I think the Mum knew her DH was a knob too...

scienceteacher · 09/04/2009 16:34

I encourage friendships, but they are absolutely not allowed in one another's apartments/rooms.

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