Would be interested on people's views on this.
We were at a summer party/BBQ thing yesterday with our two kids (6 and 3) - lots of people both with and without kids.
It wasn't a house we'd been to before, and they are work acquaintance type friends, rather than life long buddies IYSWIM...
Well, my approach in these sort of situations is to accept responsibility for my children, show them where things are when we get there, and make sure I keep an eye on them to make sure they are playing nicely, not damaging anything etc.
During the afternoon my two were generally well behaved and playing together with some other kids, and I was chatting to other parents etc.
At one point they were playing garden Jenga, and I became aware of a little boy (about 2) trying to join in with us. Thing was, of course, he wasn't joining in, as he was too young, but just kept pushing the bricks over (at one point on top of my 4 year old, which hurt as they were heavy wooden ones).
To start with I just said, 'no darling, let's leave the tower up', but after he knocked it over for the third or fourth time we were all getting annoyed and so I asked him 'where's your mummy then'. He looked around as if to say 'I don't know', so I tried to distract him from the Jenga by begining to kick a football to him.
I then got called away to take my 3 year old to the loo.
When I came back into the garden I noticed that this same little child was now sitting alone in the middle of the patio with a large cup of orange and the huge salad bowl full of crisps (previously on the table). He seemed to be coughing a lot, and when I looked closer I saw that he'd poured himself an entire cup of neat orange squash . There were no parents in evidence, so I took the squash, went to the kitchen and made it up properly, got him a plate and put a few crisps on it.
Anyway, after this, I simply couldn't shake this child off, and there was simply NO SIGN of his parents at all. And to be honest, I got f**ked off with ending up having to look after him - stopping him from ruining the games; taking the gobstopper-sized boules little ball thing out of his mouth (!) etc etc.
Finally when I found him 'painting' on the table with a squeezy bottle of tomato ketchup (which I gently removed... grrr) I went in search of the hostess and asked whose child he was. Oh, it's X's she said, pointing to a couple who were sitting on the far side of the garden eating, laughing and drinking...
Sorry to rant, but it just really pi**es me off when people rely on other people to 'parent' their under-3s. He could just as easily have poured himself a glass of Pimms!
I know I wasn't the only parent who thought it was a bit 'off' there was also a mum with a little girl who was upset because the jenga bricks had fallen on her...
Why do people feel this is OK? I wouldn't mind if he was the child of someone we knew, but nobody there seemed to know him.
Grrrr......................