I Need a Non-Horrible Way to Tell My New Neighbor We Don’t Want a Playdate With Her Kids (2024)

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column.Have a question for Care and Feeding?Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I have a 6-year-old and rent part of a duplex. Our new neighbors moved in, and they have two slightly older children, both of whom have special needs. I don’t know the circ*mstances, but it is very obvious from the noise, chaos, and their mother’s determination to become “buddies” that they are at the end of their rope.

The first few times we interacted were awful. The neighbor children stole and threw my child’s juice, destroyed a toy, and yanked on my senior dog’s ears so hard that he snapped (and he has never snapped). Then they both had meltdowns.

Their mother keeps trying to set up playdates or ask me for favors. I have put it off with excuses that we are busy, but we live literally next door. I can’t let my child and our dog run around without them peeking over the short fence that separates us and trying to join in.

I am sympathetic to their troubles, but I have my hands full between being a single mom, working full time, and trying to finish my degree. I miss our old neighbors, who would wave hi and nothing more. What should I do?

—Good Fences

Dear Fences,

In the famous Robert Frost poem you’ve quoted as your sign-off, the narrator is not the one who says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It’s the guy on the farm next door, the one who insists on fortifying the stone wall between their properties every summer, all the while citing “his father’s saying” about good fences. But the narrator sees a “darkness” in his neighbor’s insistence on rebuilding the wall every year—his belief that a barrier must stand between them, even as they cooperate, in a neighborly fashion, in the shared task of setting the stones.

I, too, see something dark in your resistance to your neighbors’ overtures. How would you feel if the children who moved in next door were neurotypical and the mother wanted to become friends? I suspect you’d leap at the opportunity for a playmate for your child. Yet now, faced with a neighbor who perhaps needs your help, you’re put out. You’re “sympathetic to their troubles,” you say, but that sympathy does not extend to neighborliness. You’d rather not be bothered; you pine for the old neighbors, who were satisfied to let the fence keep you from forming any real relationship at all. But that’s not how a community works. You share a duplex with this family, and so your lives are intertwined, like it or not.

I’d urge you to try to look past the inconvenience and find a way to build a relationship with this family. Sure, their children might be difficult. But they are precious to your new neighbors, and as fellow human beings on this earth they deserve the chance to become precious to you too. And don’t overlook the fact that just as they need you now, so might you (a busy single mom) need their help in the future.

“Before I built a wall,” Frost’s speaker says, “I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.” What are you walling in when you prefer to keep to yourself? What are you walling out when you wish this family away?

Dear Care and Feeding,

I love my grandchildren, but I am exhausted. I have seven grandkids, and I usually look after one or more of them seven days a week.

My children have chaotic work schedules and do not seem to understand the toll this is taking on me. Whenever I tell them that we need to figure out the situation and scale back, it starts a fight. Everyone thinks their need is greatest and their situation the most dire. They start fighting about my favoritism and bring up ridiculous events from their childhood. They act more like toddlers refusing to share a toy than adults with children of their own.

When I retired, I had plans to travel, and now it seems I am just raising my grandchildren. School starts in two weeks. I am this close to saying that Grandma Day Care is permanently closed unless it is a medical emergency. I don’t want to draw that line, but I can’t keep going on like this.

Can you help me get through to my children?

—Very Tired

Dear Very Tired,

Why don’t you want to draw that line? A line needs to be drawn! Your children are taking advantage of you, and you’re letting them.

I suggest you take a nice, long trip. Be gone a month, at least, and tell them well in advance that for all of September Grandma will be in Reykjavik. And tell them, too, that when you return you’ll need to scale down your caretaking for your beloved grandchildren. While you wish you could help them more often, it is harming your well-being and taxing your time and health, so you have to step back.

Honestly, even drawing the line you suggest—“unless it is a medical emergency”—is likely to create hassles, conflicts, and debates about whose emergency is the most critical. Your children have gotten used to free day care and now feel entitled to it. If you’d like to continue helping them, only under circ*mstances that are more conducive to your health and well-being, you can consider insisting upon a schedule: Each set of parents gets one regular three-hour period per week, for example. Or you can simply shut down operations for a while and tell your children you’re happy to field requests but that you won’t always be able to fulfill them.

The key is that you will have to become comfortable saying no to your children. That can be difficult! I suggest pursuing some hobbies, joining some charitable organizations, and scheduling more vacations. This won’t stop them from grumbling, at least not right away. But it helps you come into those conversations in a position of greater strength.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband, “Kyle,” and I have an 8-month-old son, “Quinn.” I’m facing an unconventional dilemma and could use some guidance. A month ago, I had to spend a week caring for my grandmother after she broke her hip in a fall, before I was finally able to arrange for a live-in health aide to stay with her. While I was gone, Kyle entered Quinn in a beauty pageant for babies in a town several hours away in which the grand prize was $10,000. The thing is, this was a beauty pageant for baby girls. Kyle entered Quinn in the contest as a girl (Quinn’s real name is unisex), and Quinn actually won!

I’m torn about how the money came into our possession. On the one hand, the money Quinn “won” will be incredibly helpful for his college fund. On the other hand, its acquisition involved deception. Should I tell the truth and return it, or should I swallow my misgivings, let it alone, and be glad Quinn has a good start toward saving for school even if it was obtained through questionable means?

—Weighing a Windfall

Dear Weighing,

This question is fake, but if it were real, I would tell you to keep the money. Who cares! Quinn was the prettiest baby at that pageant, and he deserved to win.

Dear Care and Feeding,

Here’s a nice, low-stakes question for you: How long should “dibs” last? Our son, 15, has been working part time for a year, and he’s incredibly proud of his ability to pay his own way. He puts some of it aside for savings and long-term purchases (like computer upgrades) and enjoys spending the rest on clothes and treats.

Recently, we were out shopping, and he found an unusual flavor of a popular cookie brand, which he bought with his own money. He told his younger sister, 12, that the cookies were in the kitchen and that she was welcome to try one. About a week later, she went to the cupboard and the cookies were gone. She was upset, feeling that he’d promised to save her one, but he invoked the “You snooze, you lose” rule, saying she’d had plenty of opportunity over the past week to try one before they were gone.

I don’t think the world is ending for anyone involved. But what’s interesting is that my wife and I (who are usually on the same page when it comes to parenting issues) are of two different opinions on how to approach this. One of us feels that once the offer was made, our son should have set aside a cookie for whenever his sister was ready to eat it, while the other agrees with him that coming back a week after the offer was made and expecting a cookie to be waiting is not reasonable. If we had brought this case to your family courtroom, how would you rule?

—Is That the Way the Cookie Crumbles?

Dear Crumbles,

This is an excellent question, and I’m glad you came to me with it. Before I ruled, I looked back at the history of the word dibs to see if that would yield any clues. Per Merriam-Webster, the term likely comes from a 17^th-century children’s game called dibstones, which took many forms but resembled jacks or marbles. By the early 20^th century, dibs was commonplace among children calling their ownership of some object or concept.

Native Midwesterners like myself know that the duration of dibs is a subject of great debate following large snowfalls. In cities like Chicago, enterprising shovelers place chairs, milk crates, or frozen pants on the street to call dibs on a parking place for days, weeks, or months—often to the annoyance of neighbors who do not believe that shoveling should necessarily convey droit moral to a parking spot until the end of time.

Within families, dibs are a crucial common law, inarguable and inviolable in determining who gets the last Pop-Tart, who gets to sit in the best chair at the table, or who gets to choose the first game on the Switch. I would argue, though, that a dibs-ing must be acted upon immediately. If, approaching the house after a long road trip, I call dibs on the good bathroom (the one with the Japanese toilet), but then dillydally upon arrival, my dibs must lapse. The Toto is up for grabs.

In this specific case of a purloined cookie, I polled a representative group of teens and adults and the response was unanimous: Not only is a week much too long to expect someone to save a cookie for you, this was not even a situation in which dibs were called. By their nature, dibs apply only to items whose ownership is communal or in question. These cookies were clearly owned by your son, who kindly offered his sister one of them. But such an offer lasts only the natural life span of a sleeve of cookies, which any reasonable person would expect to be less than seven days. Your son behaved honorably. Your daughter has learned a valuable lesson: When someone offers you a fancy Oreo, eat it.

—Dan