What Is Up With the Grouchy Mommies At The Playground?

Daddytypes has a couple of posts on Daddy/Mommy interactions on the playground, and it couldn't be more timely for us. In our house Daddy does more of the playground time, because I often only go if I have a friend going and a guaranteed extra pair of hands with both S. and L. My darling husband goes with S. on his own, which is a little more straightforward.

Anyway, he came home from the playground Sunday a little shaken, and said he'd learned to be careful what he said. Apparently a smaller boy started trying to walk down the "bridge" which is made of very flexible rubber while two larger boys were bouncing on it. Since the mom of the smaller boy didn't try to stop him, the mom of the larger boys quickly herded her kids off the bridge. My husband told her it was a good thing she moved the boys, as he'd seen kids fall off the bridge, though the wood chips below are pretty soft and they weren't injured.

Later, as the mom of the smaller boy left, she turned on my husband and said "I heard what you said and I didn't appreciate your sarcasm." She was clearly quite angry. My husband didn't quite understand what she meant, but apologized. I said maybe she thought you were being sarcastic about wood chips being soft. But, of course, they are relatively soft. That is why they are there. When my nephew broke his arm under their family swing, the first thing my brother did was put down more wood chips.

Per the commenters on DaddyTypes, there are apparently just a lot of hypervigilant moms out there, and they don't appreciate Dads' jokes.

So today I went to the playground with S. and L. and a friend and her son. Another mom was hovering over her daughter, who was quite small but probably about the same age as S. The mom appeared to be, if anything, slightly older than me. The daughter appeared to be adopted, which I only mention because maybe the mom didn't have a lot of experience with other kids, and maybe that explained the mom's hovering and her actions. A little boy tried to get in front of her daughter to go down the slide, not roughly and her daughter was ready to just stop and yield. The mother then quite literally shoved the little boy out of the way and started to lecture him that her daughter was smaller than him and that he should not get in the way of smaller children. Now, her daughter was smaller than him, but my bet is that she was the same age or older (2). The little boy just stared at the irate mom like a deer in the headlights, uncertain how to respond. Finally he moved a little and the angry mom relaxed a bit and thanked him. He continued to stare at her. I'm not sure where his mom was, but it was a very strange scene.

Later just to check some of my hypotheses I asked her how old her daughter was, and found out she was the same age as S., which I'd figured even though S. was taller. The angry mom also warned me that her daughter had had a rough landing at the bottom of one of the slides, and I thanked her and said we hadn't tried that one yet. I thought about telling her that little boy was too little to understand what she was saying, but I didn't want to make an ugly scene any uglier.

My husband and I were discussing it at lunch and agreed that (1) when there is a rough kid around, we just remove our kid and (2) it is so much nicer to go to the playground with people you know rather than meet the crazies.