So, yesterday I went for a short trip to the shops with my girls. An incident occurred involving a stranger happened that I found to have been most frustrating as a parent.
My older daughter was lagging behind (only a little bit) so I had stopped and turned back to her to wait. She was hesitating as she was obviously interested in looking at something so I watched for a moment and had just asked her to catch up with me when an older lady approached her offering a fun size Mars bar and said, "I'll give you this if you do what mummy says." She looked at me and I (quite clearly) indicated not to give her the chocolate which she did anyway and then when Natalie ran over to me she came too. She made some comment about, "It's ok, I have a grandson and I look after him and..."
"Oh, that's ok then if you're a grandmother you must know whether I want my child to have chocolate in this moment and my daughter will definitely be able to distinguish between someone who is probably just trying to be friendly and more sinister people," said NO PARENT EVER.
After the lady was gone, I explained to Natalie that we can't take food from strangers because it's not safe. I told her we needed to throw that treat away and that I was willing to get her something to replace it. Luckily, Natalie accepted that quite easily and was very excited when I picked her up from daycare today with a freddo as a treat (we didn't have anything at home to replace it with after all). The chocolate was packaged and I was confident there was nothing wrong with it, but I can't expect a 3 year old to be able to make that distinction!
Can I just say, please don't ever do something like this! Even if you know the child, offering them a treat without checking with the parent - or blatantly disregarding the parents wishes - is quite rude.
So is it just me, or would other parents also find that highly frustrating?
If you've been in a similar circumstance, how did you handle it? I think in hindsight that it would have been even better to tell her that I appreciated her kindness, but that I didn't want my daughter to think that it was ok to take treats from people she doesn't know.
Tracey
Oh my gosh ..... I cannot believe that this woman thought it was okay to do this. Worse still that even when you asked her not to she continued on with giving the chocolate. This is so not cool. You handled it so well and did exactly the right thing. I cannot even believe that she thought that what she was doing was okay. I would have been quite angry if this were me.
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