Mom Asks For Advice On How To Deal With Entitled Neighbor Sending Her Unsupervised Child To Her Pool

The nice thing about having a yard is the privacy it gives you, a little plot of land to have what you want and do what you want. It’s great if one has kids, as it can be a perfect outdoor play space. Water activities are great in the summer heat, but kids always need to be supervised near pools and other similar constructions, so some parents are hesitant to overdo it.

So one mother asked the internet for advice when her neighbor would keep sending her children over to use a paddling pool. The neighbor made such a fuss about OP being a “killjoy” that she really thought that she needed a second opinion.
More info: Mumsnet

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Setting aside the already sufficient factor that it is OP’s property and that should be the end of any argument, there are other risks to adding another kid to a, reportedly, pretty full paddling pool. Bodies of water, no matter how shallow and “friendly”, have some risks associated with them. OP mentions having a whopping five children already, more than a handful, so even one more is already pretty unreasonable. Pools are, ultimately, a common cause of death for children who may not know how to rescue themselves even in shallow water and may panic. In the US, for example, a child is more likely to die from drowning in a pool than from a gun.

OP indicates that the neighbor child is wild and “uncontrollable,” adding more supervision challenges on top of the aforementioned five whole children. Furthermore, none of the children are quite old enough to be a backup lifeguard to the mother and she has to look after a newborn. It’s worth adding that OP’s children seem to enjoy the pool less when this neighbor kid shows up, which is enough of a red flag that even if OP was more open to allowing an extra kid around.

Ultimately, it’s hard to blame a four-year-old, instead, the real perpetrator here is the mother. Instead of, for example, getting her own paddling pool or even offering to help babysit, this mom attempted to gaslight OP into just accepting her child and calling her a killjoy, which is pretty ridiculous behavior when you are using someone's property for free. Unfortunately, she seems to fall into the category of being deeply entitled, which is often the worst kind of person to deal with.

Entitlement, or at least how it originates, is not well understood, as it, by definition, tends to defy rationality and logic. Entitled people believe themselves “worthy” of things that they have no real reason to own and tend to get angry and aggressive when this is pointed out. Some researchers believe this could be the result of a personality disorder, distorting how a human sees themselves and their relations to the world by extension.