Sorry for the long post. I brought my 14mo to the playground today, this is the first time she's been as a walking toddler and she was loving her life. There was this kid, if I had to guess, around 3 years old. My baby loves socialising so she was socialising with other kids there. This particular kid eyed her up, walked straight over to her and pushed her over. I was pissed but she didn't cry and the parent "corrected" the kid, so I held my tongue and chalked it up to kids being dumb.
But same kid about 10 minutes later, came up to my girl again and tried to grab her head and stick his thumbs in her eyes!! My babys dad was right next to her and grabbed the kids hand and stopped him, and the parent came over and got her kid. How would a kid even think to do that?? Is this just normal behavior?? It didn't seem like the parent tried to do much correcting at all, just a simple "don't do that." If that was my baby I'd remove her from the park and say no more playtime if you're going to be mean to other kids.
I'm a FTM with not much experience with kids, but seeing my baby be treated like that broke my heart, she looked so confused. She was fine after 10 seconds and went back to playing not a problem, but I'm really upset over this.
Is it okay etiquette to tell other kids in the playground to go away? Or to grab their hands if they're trying to harm my child? What's the proper way to deal with this? All of the other kids were lovely, but this one kid just seemed very very mean. He just singled my baby out, he didn't touch any of the other kids.
Feeling really sad that my baby will inevitably encounter bad people in her life, but I didn't expect it to happen at 14mos. How do I teach her to deal with this in the future?