Reply to Neighborhood kids destroying our house

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Neighborhood kids destroying our house"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How old are the kids?[/quote]

Kids are 6-8 years old.

I should add that our kids just started the same school this year. I was very friendly to them since we were new to the school. I regret this very much! The parents seem to like us a lot because they are always wanting to hang out with us too. DH and I are just not interested.[/quote]

I think this is a tough situation and it can be really hard to discipline other people's kids as well as turn down invites from neighbors. Nobody wants to get a rep as a a mean parent or a mean neighbor.  Kids go home and tell their parents so and so's mom or dad yelled at us and that turns into you as the hosting parent being a mean, yelling, etc even when the reality is you may have just firmly said clean up and go home.

For starters, to turn down an invite politely, you can just say something like "the kids would love it but right now is not a good time for me as I am cleaning/working/whatever, etc. How about I send them over to your house today? would that work for you?"  If she replies no, then you can just say that your sorry it won't work out for today and you will try for another day.

Any time the kids come over, set a definite time limit before they come in the door.  Say they can stay until 2pm for example. Once it's close to 2pm, go to the area they are playing and start the clean up process and then them home if need be.

have ground rules you tell your kids before they come over - your kids have to ask their friends to clean up, your kids can not join in protesting when the time limit is up for playing and if they do then no more play dates.

give the all kids ground rules once they walk in the door - clean up one thing before moving on to the next, if toys get damaged or play is too rough there is one warning and then after that the playdate will end, food can only be eaten in the kitchen/basement, whatever, no tv, etc or whatever rules you want.  I would say limit the rules to maybe 4 - so they are easy to remember.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics