This past saturday I took D7 to a new dance class. She danced for a good portion of it and I guess then got a little intimidated because the kids were older than her. She is 7 and it is a class for 8 to 10 year olds. But D7 is so tall her mom put her in there. Well W shows up and D7 was sitting over in the corner towards the end. This didn't go over well with W. She said that is unacceptable and we need to tell her that. I said wooa. This is her first time in this class. She danced most of it. Give her a chance to get comfortable before you start telling her what is acceptable and what isn't. Let her ease her way into it. W didn't say anything to D7 about it after I said that. But its things like this that are just constant about W feeling like everyone has to ask how high if she says jump. There are other examples to. That is just one of them. She is a major control freak. She signed D11 up for a solo without asking D11 if she wanted to first. D11 had to come to me and tell me she didn't want the solo. I told D11 that she needs to let her mom know then. She just takes it upon herself to assume what everyone should be doing without asking people, especially the kids. It drives me batty.
I wanted to offer a kernel of insight about what she might be doing here. I think she's overcompensating because she's worried that the kids will be "overwhelmed with life" and sit in the corner, so to speak, and not get out there and take risks. Any behavior she sees in them that she is attributing to you, she is likely to overreact to. Especially if she perceives it as you possibly encouraging them to hang back if they are not comfortable, or not try if they are afraid.
I think it's always hard to find the balance with children, knowing when to push and when to back off, even without parent problems.
I say this because I was guilty of this myself recently. My youngest is the most like my H, and he's very dreamy and imaginative, but sometimes he goes into "pretending" something didn't happen as opposed to outright lying about it and it makes me crazy, because I am SO AFRAID he's going to be like his father and live in pretend land instead of taking responsibility for his actions. I wrote on my thread about an incident with a dead frog and I was so angry with my poor kid and that was why.
