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Playdate ettiquette

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  • Lucy5781
    Lucy5781 Posts: 745 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 500 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    Only just having a read today, call me crazy, but I'm actually rather suspicious of why she wants an excuse to be somewhere other than her own home for so much of the day.... Avoiding someone/something??

    Hope things improve with regards to it all and that your DS has a lovely Birthday.

    Lxx
    Credit Card & Overdraft Debts Jan 2012: £16,000+ :eek: [STRIKE] Credit Card & Overdraft Debts Sep 2013: £13,023 [/STRIKE]
    DRO Completed: 30/09/2014 :T
    30/09/19 - Details now dropped off debt register. :o

    My Diary - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=4202761
  • GracieP
    GracieP Posts: 1,263 Forumite
    Lucy5781 wrote: »
    Only just having a read today, call me crazy, but I'm actually rather suspicious of why she wants an excuse to be somewhere other than her own home for so much of the day.... Avoiding someone/something??
    I do suspect that she is unhappy in her home/marriage and that's one of the reasons why I don't feel like I can cut her off and it's why I don't mind not being invited to her home. But I went through a huge amount in getting DS and I to this place we are in. My husband developed an addiction to medication when I was pregnant and when his doctor stopped prescribing, he started drinking heavily and with hindsight I can see he was an alcoholic by the time DS was born. I don't want to go into all of that here but a lot of DS's first 2 years was utterly hellish and it was a major struggle to get my son to a home that is physically and emotionally secure for us.

    So I get that she might need a friend and am here for her in a lot of ways. But I don't feel like I can let my home be a place where she avoids what is making her unhappy. I feel bad that, that may be selfish and if she came to me and told me that she had a real need for somewhere to safe to stay that would be a different matter.
  • GracieP
    GracieP Posts: 1,263 Forumite
    So I just thought I'd update this. Lately she's taken to calling me, texting me and facebook messaging me minutes apart either to ask me questions that I don't know the answer to and she could easily google, like details of a bus timetable. Or else she is looking to borrow random things from me like my clothes (she's a lot bigger than me) or things that I don't have like beach towels and she then criticises me for using bath towels when we go swimming. It's all been a bit bizarre.

    Last week I was with some women who also know her when she started the calling, texting, messaging routine and it led to the women telling me about their experiences with her. In one case it was quite funny in retrospect. She went to one woman's house for a morning playdate. After a few hours the host's child needed his nap which the mum assumed would be the end of the visit. Instead she stayed for the 2+ hours that the child slept, having lunch made for her and her son. Then she stayed right through the afternoon not moving when the host started cooking dinner. The host eventually realised that her hints weren't cutting it and she pointed out that they would be having dinner now and she only had enough food for herself and her son, not guests. So she got up and called her son asking him if he felt like McDonalds and eventually they left and the host was just relieved they were gone and got on with her own cooking. Just as they were sitting down to eat there was a knock on the door the woman and her son were standing there with their McDonalds. The host was so stunned she just let her in and they sat down to eat their respective dinners at her table, staying for several more hours.

    Afterwards the woman who had hosted started avoiding her calls because she was being bombarded with requests for another playdate in her house. The weirdest part is that after a few days of evasion her husband started getting messages to ask if she was ok and nobody knows how she got his number. It completely freaked out the woman. When she told me this it freaked me out a bit too as during my building work, when I was refusing to have guests, she showed up one day outside my mum's house while my mum was gardening out front and had a conversation with her about gardening and building work. She didn't realise that my mum recognised her and knew about how she was being with me and I now firmly believe she was trying to pump my mum for information about whether I was lying or not about why she couldn't visit.

    This would all be weirdly funny and vaguely creepy if it wasn't for what happened with another woman's son. They were on a playdate in this other woman's house when she hit the other woman's son, who was two at the time. I feel really upset by this. I can only assume the other child hurt her son and she lashed out, but that doesn't make it ok. I don't smack DS but I don't judge other parents if that's how they parent but hitting someone else's child, a toddler, is so out of order. It makes me want to keep my son away from her and I know I'll never feel comfortable leaving the two of them in the same room if I'm not there. I was also told that at some point she was ordered to take parenting classes by a social worker after an incident at group with her own son. But I don't know if this was before or after she hit the other boy, hopefully after and she has learned better methods since. Tbh, I actually feel sorry for her as she's clearly lacking social skills and possibly struggling. More than that I feel sorry for her son as (at best) her behaviour means that he never gets invited back anywhere. At worst, she obviously has had trouble controlling her temper around children and if she hasn't learned better coping methods he will be bearing the brunt of feelings, though at least there has been professional intervention there and things are either better or being monitored.
  • HB58
    HB58 Posts: 1,787 Forumite
    Thanks for the update.

    I understand your feelings about the little boy but I think you have to accept that the woman is rather 'strange', to say the least, and you are unlikely to change that. You can, if you feel strongly enough, maintain the contact so that you can keep an eye on the son - but you are not a social worker and no-one would blame you if you decided to steer clear of her.
  • Hi Gracie

    This sounds awful. I agree with others that there are all sorts of people and that you probably met a bad apple.
    She won't change and you can only distance yourself from her now that you know what she's like.
  • BigAunty
    BigAunty Posts: 8,310 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    Wow, when I first read the early part of the thread, I wondered if your friend was a bit lonely, lazy at parenting, perhaps short of money (which is why she may have turned down some of the soft play dates, perhaps couldn't afford heating in her house) and very very wilful.

    Now it sounds like she has psychological or personality issues with the semi-stalking stuff, violence against other children and bids for attention from asking trivial questions. There's a horrible forcefulness about getting her own way, she sounds very domineering.

    It looks like people have to tip toe around her because of the way she steam rollers them.

    Does she get some kind of thrill out of intimidating people who are too polite to push back? Is it all a game to her or is her life so empty that unless she's around other people, she doesn't feel like she exists?

    Is she on some kind of spectrum of behaviour where she just doesn't get social clues and hints? Or does she simply only care about her own needs - someone feeding and entertaining her and her child? I mean, she literally hands her kid over to people to look after without a backwards glance.
  • BigAunty
    BigAunty Posts: 8,310 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    By the way, I had a really needy friend who dominated our social plans and always needed everything done for her. People tended to feel sorry for her and forgive her constant demands because of this. She usually got her way all the time in group situations. She rarely reciprocated favours and used to refuse to do simple things for other people, regardless of the fact that they bent over backwards for her. If she did do something, she usually did it badly so she wouldn't be asked again.

    Unlike your friend, she was not overtly aggressive but actually flattered and charmed people into doing stuff (unless you resisted, in which case she got really angry and upset).

    She ticked all the boxes for passive aggression according to Wiki - the entry seemed to be a full description of her personality -

    "Passive-aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullenness, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

    In psychology, passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a habitual pattern of passive resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, stubbornness, and negative attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected of others. Most frequently it occurs in the workplace where resistance is exhibited by such indirect behaviors as procrastination, forgetfulness, and purposeful inefficiency, especially in reaction to demands by authority figures, but it can also occur in interpersonal contexts."

    It's also been described as a way of getting what you want by doing very little.

    If you view the following statement in a social context, rather than a work context, so that its about social plans, you can see that even if the PA agrees to do something, they will actually sabotage it.

    "A person with a passive-aggressive personality actually opposes the plan but says that he or she agrees with it. The person promises to follow the plan. Instead, he or she passively resists following the plan. He or she may purposely miss deadlines, turn up late to meetings, and work against the plan in other ways"

    However, your friend doesn't seem to have the kind of wavering and indecision that belongs to that type of personality, nor the sugar coating of aggression - it's not far from the surface. Perhaps she's just aggressive, rather than passive aggressive....

    However,there is an interesting observation here about the consequences of PA on others and this chimes with what you've been describing. There are tips there on how to cope with it (its aimed at those within a relationship but can be applied to friendship).

    "When on the receiving end of passive aggression, you can feel confused, upset, offended, guilty and frustrated. You may think you’ve done something wrong, but have no clear idea what it was." She has really outrageous and unreasonable demands accompanied by insulting behaviour yet it is those around her that feel as if they are in the wrong in some way. She doesn't lack assertiveness though - its explicit, not disguised.

    http://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/counsellor-articles/what-is-passive-aggressive-behaviour
  • themull1
    themull1 Posts: 4,299 Forumite
    She sounds like a nightmare, if I were you I'd be tactfully distancing myself. She isn't taking the hint, and you don't know her well enough to be blunt with her about her behaviour. She sounds exactly like my sister, who brings her little Tasmanian devil to my house then sits back on the sofa on her phone the whole time while her daughter trashes the place, bullies and excludes my son, screams at and hits my cat, makes my daughter cry, helps herself to food, NEVER does as she's told. She will come in the morning and stay until bedtime, at which point my kids are thoroughly fed up and overwhelmed. It is simply lazy parenting.

    I am not a control freak, I don't mind mess but emptying draws etc is where I draw the line. When my kids are in other people's houses I hover like a helicopter to make sure they are behaving themselves. She sounds like she has no respect for your home or your choices, if you would like morning visits you shouldn't have to explain yourself, she is after all a guest in your home!

    Why don't you tell your sister?
  • themull1
    themull1 Posts: 4,299 Forumite
    My kids never had play dates, they started inviting their friends round when they were 8 or so, but there's no way i'd have a toddler trashing my house for hours, not even ten minutes....
  • I would expect some mess but at the same time would expect the other mother to be half responsible for clearing it up. I would never leave a play date without helping to clear up. Unfortunately not everyone thinks that way. Try not to let it upset you and remember your child will grow up with a level of respect for other peoples possessions.
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