Do I slow-fade / end this friendship?
June 15, 2023 11:47 AM Subscribe
My friend and I have already talked several times, and now I don't think anything is going to change. I'm feeling bad about our differences in how we handle incidents that happen with our kids. I'm questioning their judgment and wondering if it's worth it for me to let time heal this wound. Should I just see how things go until something else happens? Or do I cut it off now? Tw: cSA
My friend and I have become like family. Our kids go to preschool together. I disagree with how they handled an incident that happened at the school.
At first I thought they realized they needed to set better boundaries with their kids. But then they said nothing was wrong and that they feel fine with their parenting choices.
I'm confused because their kid was on the receiving end of some bad stuff and it's weird how they have changed their tune once it's their kid doing the bad stuff.
So I'm feeling like I'm surprised by their thoughts and actions.
They already told me that they didn't want me to give them suggestions for parenting and they are fine, but when their kid hit my kid in the face at school, I used that as an opportunity to tell them I think it's a pattern of their kid not using their words.
But now I'm just feeling weird about the fact that they don't think their kids did anything wrong when they crossed someone's body boundaries (a different incident not involving my kid). Putting their hands in another kids pants and moving the hands around. Both their kids did it to one kid. I'm sort of at a loss
Their oldest kid will be entering kindergarten at the same time and school this coming fall as my kid.
My friend and I have become like family. Our kids go to preschool together. I disagree with how they handled an incident that happened at the school.
At first I thought they realized they needed to set better boundaries with their kids. But then they said nothing was wrong and that they feel fine with their parenting choices.
I'm confused because their kid was on the receiving end of some bad stuff and it's weird how they have changed their tune once it's their kid doing the bad stuff.
So I'm feeling like I'm surprised by their thoughts and actions.
They already told me that they didn't want me to give them suggestions for parenting and they are fine, but when their kid hit my kid in the face at school, I used that as an opportunity to tell them I think it's a pattern of their kid not using their words.
But now I'm just feeling weird about the fact that they don't think their kids did anything wrong when they crossed someone's body boundaries (a different incident not involving my kid). Putting their hands in another kids pants and moving the hands around. Both their kids did it to one kid. I'm sort of at a loss
Their oldest kid will be entering kindergarten at the same time and school this coming fall as my kid.
well, I would say that not only is it appropriate to end this family friendship, but you have to, for the sake of your kid. Your first duty is to keep your kid safe and you already know that your friends' kids hit faces and do weird handsinpants stuff. So you can't have your kid around their kids.
Do you have a further duty here? I think you did what you could here, by advising them that their kid's behavior is unacceptable. Only thing I can think of beyond that is to warn mutual friends with little kids.
Can you still be friends with them? Doubtful, but possibly if one of the adults is your good friend from before you both had kids, you can have them as a grown-up friend that only talks about grown-up stuff.
posted by fingersandtoes at 12:06 PM on June 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
Do you have a further duty here? I think you did what you could here, by advising them that their kid's behavior is unacceptable. Only thing I can think of beyond that is to warn mutual friends with little kids.
Can you still be friends with them? Doubtful, but possibly if one of the adults is your good friend from before you both had kids, you can have them as a grown-up friend that only talks about grown-up stuff.
posted by fingersandtoes at 12:06 PM on June 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
Distance!!! Distance distance. Your kid will barely notice after a few weeks.
Two examples from my childhood:
-My first sleepover my friend's parent gave me Benadryl to make me go to sleep, and my parents only knew because I told them about the "juice" when I got home the next day. Unsurprisingly my parents were like "wtf" and the other parents were like "not sure what your problem is tbh" and I never spent time alone with that friend or her family ever again. This was age 4 or so.
- Then about a year later I was at a different friend's house on a playdate. She had a new puppy. She wanted to play catch with the puppy, just a tiny little thing, and threw it at me from across the room. The kid threw a dog!!! I didn't react in time and the dog hit the floor and made a horrible yelping noise, so I ran away and hid, and couldn't stop crying when my parents picked me up. Unsurprisingly my parents were like "wtf why weren't you supervising small children with an unknown animal???" and the other parents were like "your daughter broke our dog's leg actually" and I never spent time alone with that friend or her family ever again.
I didn't get the details on either of these situations until I was an adult. I never realized about the Benadryl, and I've never forgotten about that poor dog, but in both situations my parents noped me right out of situations where they felt other parents couldn't make safe choices for me or their own kids. I don't have any memory at all of missing either of the girls I stopped being friends with.
posted by phunniemee at 12:26 PM on June 15, 2023 [45 favorites]
Two examples from my childhood:
-My first sleepover my friend's parent gave me Benadryl to make me go to sleep, and my parents only knew because I told them about the "juice" when I got home the next day. Unsurprisingly my parents were like "wtf" and the other parents were like "not sure what your problem is tbh" and I never spent time alone with that friend or her family ever again. This was age 4 or so.
- Then about a year later I was at a different friend's house on a playdate. She had a new puppy. She wanted to play catch with the puppy, just a tiny little thing, and threw it at me from across the room. The kid threw a dog!!! I didn't react in time and the dog hit the floor and made a horrible yelping noise, so I ran away and hid, and couldn't stop crying when my parents picked me up. Unsurprisingly my parents were like "wtf why weren't you supervising small children with an unknown animal???" and the other parents were like "your daughter broke our dog's leg actually" and I never spent time alone with that friend or her family ever again.
I didn't get the details on either of these situations until I was an adult. I never realized about the Benadryl, and I've never forgotten about that poor dog, but in both situations my parents noped me right out of situations where they felt other parents couldn't make safe choices for me or their own kids. I don't have any memory at all of missing either of the girls I stopped being friends with.
posted by phunniemee at 12:26 PM on June 15, 2023 [45 favorites]
I think you might want to leave the door open a crack to the possibility that all this denial is coming from your friend's spouse and they are going along with it to keep the peace or because they may even be the object of abusive or semi-abusive behavior from their spouse.
Your friend may end up needing someone they can turn to, and you might regret foreclosing the possibility that they could have turned to you.
posted by jamjam at 12:33 PM on June 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Your friend may end up needing someone they can turn to, and you might regret foreclosing the possibility that they could have turned to you.
posted by jamjam at 12:33 PM on June 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Yeah the one kid was on the receiving end of some stuff at a previous school but hasn't gotten any help for it until next month with a therapist. So I've been there through all of this with them. I just hear that my friend is overwhelmed and slammed at work and so I suggested that I could help with some errands. It's just an awful situation all around.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 12:53 PM on June 15, 2023
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 12:53 PM on June 15, 2023
Usually I'd be one advocating for salting the earth and setting bridges on fire with extreme prejudice, but... in this case I'd also counsel some modicum of kindness. Is it possible that your friend is feeling shame over what happened, or feeling judged? She's working with the teacher and seeking therapy for her child - something that's extremely difficult to get right now, in my experience - so she might be upset and defensive over topics and suggestions that she'd otherwise have been receptive to under other circumstances, especially if this is uncharacteristic.
Protect yourself and your family. Definitely no unsupervised kid time, and you can take space for yourself too. Summer is the perfect time to be "too busy" if you don't want to address things directly just yet, to wait and see if therapy helps address unresolved trauma from what happened at the other school and to see if your friend changes her response to the situation. If you know your friend and you know it's just "well now that it's MY kids it's no big deal," though, then drop 'em like a rock and move on. There will be many more parent friends out there to make, ideally with parental philosophies and values that align with yours.
posted by daikaisho at 3:23 PM on June 15, 2023 [8 favorites]
Protect yourself and your family. Definitely no unsupervised kid time, and you can take space for yourself too. Summer is the perfect time to be "too busy" if you don't want to address things directly just yet, to wait and see if therapy helps address unresolved trauma from what happened at the other school and to see if your friend changes her response to the situation. If you know your friend and you know it's just "well now that it's MY kids it's no big deal," though, then drop 'em like a rock and move on. There will be many more parent friends out there to make, ideally with parental philosophies and values that align with yours.
posted by daikaisho at 3:23 PM on June 15, 2023 [8 favorites]
To my mind, there's a big difference between, "It sounds like your son is struggling to use his words when he has big feelings. Have you tried XYZ?" and, "I'm concerned because your son hit my kid. Do you have a plan for working on that kind of behavior?" I wonder if you didn't feel comfortable saying something direct and/or critical about how you would limit her kid's impact on your kid (e.g., "I don't want my kid playing with kids who hit") and so instead took the hitting incident as a kind of permission to give advice. The big problem seems to be whether your friend can look at the concerning behaviors her kids are having and take them seriously, not the details of what taking them seriously might look like. I don't know if she went into brush-off mode because she was reacting to the un-asked-for advice, or because she genuinely doesn't see hitting and fondling as concerning behaviors. If I were you, I might think about broaching the topic more directly but with maybe a little more curiosity than problem-solving--something like, "Hey, I was really surprised by your reaction to the hitting incident, and I want to understand better: can we talk about what happened?" And then listen to how she describes it and judge whether you're comfortable with her plan for addressing the behavior (without suggesting additions or changes to the plan).
posted by theotherdurassister at 3:32 PM on June 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by theotherdurassister at 3:32 PM on June 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
To me, a critical component of friendship is mutual respect. You don't have to agree, but you should respect their decisions or points of view. Doesn't sound like you do. It also sounds like you fear what their child might one day do to your child (again).
As an outsider who has only heard your point of view, and that is all you need, I would end the friendship.
What is the upside of continuing a friendship with someone whose decisions you don't respect? People can read into what you wrote and start making assumptions about things, but based on what you wrote, I cannot find one reason to continue the friendship without making leaps and assumptions about the situation that are not written.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:55 PM on June 15, 2023
As an outsider who has only heard your point of view, and that is all you need, I would end the friendship.
What is the upside of continuing a friendship with someone whose decisions you don't respect? People can read into what you wrote and start making assumptions about things, but based on what you wrote, I cannot find one reason to continue the friendship without making leaps and assumptions about the situation that are not written.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:55 PM on June 15, 2023
I don't think your kid needs any unsupervised time around her kids right now, but I think your friend is poised on the edge of serious trouble and her kids are at risk and she desperately needs someone to process to if she's going to internalize it.
I think she needs a trained expert's help in parenting and this is something you can't do for her and she doesn't want from you, but it's not parenting advice to observe "this is bad" and "this is really serious" and "are you/they safe?"
I also am not sure your parenting advice is all that great if you're telling her the whole problem here is her kid "doesn't use his words". You understand that there's a skillset underneath that phrase? And that kids who don't or can't or have been threatened to not "use their words" - which has apparently come very easily to your kid, that's awesome and at best only partially creditable to you personally - may well have a serious issue. OR that these are preschool kids and development is really unevenly distributed? These are, at best, five year olds. Most of them are not as developed as you think they are.
I think you have an opportunity here to build a stronger and more appropriately-supportive friendship out of one that has been beneficial to you in the past, but you will have to make some choices that go against your instincts. One of them is leaving the parenting advice to all the experts who are about to get involved, and focusing your attention on "what is our strategy for dealing with this thing that actually happened between these specific kids". If their kid hits your kid, consider you still have more recourse here - and a more satisfying course to resolution - than if one of the other 20 kindergarteners hits your kid, which is going to happen, some kindergarteners are hitters and biters and throwers because they can't give a powerpoint presentation about their feelings yet. (Or maybe ever - your kid may have to share airspace with kids with developmental or environmental dysregulation issues all their life.)
It sounds like your friend is already scheduled for some wakeup calls that will probably shake off her denial, and may well put her under the scrutiny of outside intervention. If this friendship has been supportive through high stress in the past and you have benefitted from her support, you should consider standing with her for now. Doesn't mean your kids need sleepovers with hers. Might even mean a lot of your support is phone-based for now. I think it's worth sitting with some discomfort and holding your tongue a bit and giving her room and encouragement to process through this, and being there in the moments where she needs support to face the scary things.
If that is something you can't give, or don't want to, then obviously you need to bow out. But for those of us who rely more heavily on "found/made family" models, you may find yourself leaving supportive friendships over and over in ways that someone might work harder to work it out with a sibling or other close family member.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:04 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
I think she needs a trained expert's help in parenting and this is something you can't do for her and she doesn't want from you, but it's not parenting advice to observe "this is bad" and "this is really serious" and "are you/they safe?"
I also am not sure your parenting advice is all that great if you're telling her the whole problem here is her kid "doesn't use his words". You understand that there's a skillset underneath that phrase? And that kids who don't or can't or have been threatened to not "use their words" - which has apparently come very easily to your kid, that's awesome and at best only partially creditable to you personally - may well have a serious issue. OR that these are preschool kids and development is really unevenly distributed? These are, at best, five year olds. Most of them are not as developed as you think they are.
I think you have an opportunity here to build a stronger and more appropriately-supportive friendship out of one that has been beneficial to you in the past, but you will have to make some choices that go against your instincts. One of them is leaving the parenting advice to all the experts who are about to get involved, and focusing your attention on "what is our strategy for dealing with this thing that actually happened between these specific kids". If their kid hits your kid, consider you still have more recourse here - and a more satisfying course to resolution - than if one of the other 20 kindergarteners hits your kid, which is going to happen, some kindergarteners are hitters and biters and throwers because they can't give a powerpoint presentation about their feelings yet. (Or maybe ever - your kid may have to share airspace with kids with developmental or environmental dysregulation issues all their life.)
It sounds like your friend is already scheduled for some wakeup calls that will probably shake off her denial, and may well put her under the scrutiny of outside intervention. If this friendship has been supportive through high stress in the past and you have benefitted from her support, you should consider standing with her for now. Doesn't mean your kids need sleepovers with hers. Might even mean a lot of your support is phone-based for now. I think it's worth sitting with some discomfort and holding your tongue a bit and giving her room and encouragement to process through this, and being there in the moments where she needs support to face the scary things.
If that is something you can't give, or don't want to, then obviously you need to bow out. But for those of us who rely more heavily on "found/made family" models, you may find yourself leaving supportive friendships over and over in ways that someone might work harder to work it out with a sibling or other close family member.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:04 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
Not to derail, but did the hands-in-pants business happen at school, and if so did you tell the school people? Because that is so, so, so not okay. Regardless of what happens with your friends, the schools needs to know what's going on so they can take action around that.
posted by mccxxiii at 2:54 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mccxxiii at 2:54 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Yes, it happened at school and the director and all teachers/staff know about it. They've made some changes to separate kids into cohorts so these kids don't interact anymore. They are trying to support my friend's kid in changing behavior. My friend is going over body boundaries with a few books and the younger kid is already using that language. The parent whose child was touched works there and wanted my friend's kid to be expelled (but it's a private preschool). The director wasn't going to do that but to make the few changes.
My friend's kid will see a therapist next month. There has been no availability on their insurance til then. They don't have financial resources to just throw money at this.
This question has helped. I'm still upset but I think the main issue is like... does my friend not think this is bad (the hands in pants)? But I'm thinking there's just a lot of overwhelm, stress, and denial going on and it seems like the teachers are handling it for now. This was a good check-in for me. I'm gonna bite my tongue, do mostly phone check-ins and hope things get better.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 4:03 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
My friend's kid will see a therapist next month. There has been no availability on their insurance til then. They don't have financial resources to just throw money at this.
This question has helped. I'm still upset but I think the main issue is like... does my friend not think this is bad (the hands in pants)? But I'm thinking there's just a lot of overwhelm, stress, and denial going on and it seems like the teachers are handling it for now. This was a good check-in for me. I'm gonna bite my tongue, do mostly phone check-ins and hope things get better.
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 4:03 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
Mod note: A couple comments removed. Hi, OP, please keep in mind that Ask Metafilter isn't for back and forth discussion on a topic, but to get answers to a specific question. It's fine to pop in to clarify if people want or need more info, but otherwise best to just relax, take in the answers, and determine for yourself what is useful for your purposes.
In general, we require that AskMe updates from the asker be a) relatively few and b) focused on clarifying the original question as necessary, rather than discussing the answers as they come up.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:25 AM on June 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
In general, we require that AskMe updates from the asker be a) relatively few and b) focused on clarifying the original question as necessary, rather than discussing the answers as they come up.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 11:25 AM on June 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Yes, those are reasonable situations to take some space from someone. Are you worried about your kid's safety? Are you concerned that these kids are being abused themselves?
posted by bluedaisy at 11:57 AM on June 15, 2023 [18 favorites]