Frustrated Mom Struggles With Random Kids Becoming Unwanted Holiday Tag-Alongs

Looking after kids is already a full time job. If you feel this isn’t true, just Google how many daycares and nannies offer their services near you. But the truth is that some folks see a mom with multiple kids and think, “well, what is just one more?” This issue can get particularly annoying when the mom in question is on vacation.

A mom vented online about having to constantly babysit other kids while she was on holiday just because she had four children of her own. We reached out to the mom in the story via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.

Basically everyone agrees that kids of almost all ages need to be looked after. Indeed, if you heard that a parent just left their child unattended at home, you would probably contact the authorities. Remember, a kid doesn’t have office hours, it won’t clock out at five. Looking after a child is literally years of work. Just ensuing they are healthy is a major task, it’s even more work to make sure they are nice.

However, at the same time, if you ask a person what they do and they say that they are a stay-at-home parent, many people immediately think, oh, they are unemployed. This might be technically true, but this hardly means they aren’t busy. This is particularly true if the person is a mother, which is why many call motherhood the “invisible profession.”

This isn’t just limited to social views, for example, in the US, a stay at home parent is considered a dependent for tax reasons. There are some upsides to this, as in a familial arrangement like this, someone does have to bring in income. But it also reflects the idea that parenting isn’t a job and thereby shouldn’t come with the same privileges and benefits.

Yes, it doesn’t generate “income” in the traditional sense, but society as we know it would entirely collapse without it. It takes a mental and physical toll, as well as a hit to one’s career. After all, you can’t just pup “mom” on a resume for the vast majority of jobs, so you’ll always be competing with folks who have more experience.

This is perhaps just one of the many reasons this mom is so annoyed. After all, she is already doing quite a lot to look after her own four kids. Indeed, just looking after one is quite the task. Remember, she is on holiday, technically, although another downside of motherhood is that you don’t actually get that much time off.

Because if it was easy or quick, all these other parents wouldn’t be “offloading” it on to her the moment they had the opportunity. This is not to say that these other moms don’t need a break, but it’s clear that the woman who shared the story is fed up at it being the norm. After all, she is busy enough as it is on her own holiday, no need to add more kids.

As so many other moms in the comments suggest, this seems to happen all the time. Just like parenting is often offloaded to the mother, other parents will offload their own kids onto other moms. This is still somewhat surprising, since so many parents are very particular about who gets to look after their kids. This is not to say that it’s bad for kids to play with other kids at the beach or in a park, but the unequal division of labor certainly is an issue.

Even worse, these situations give absent parents an opportunity to just ignore their kids and sunbathe. After all, not all moms are as committed to the job. This is doubly bad because you can’t just leave a kid alone, even when it’s not technically your responsibility. So instead of relaxing on holiday, these women have to undergo even more stress.

Ideally, one would hire a nanny for toddlers and babies, but let's face it, the cost would probably exceed whatever they paid for the holiday in the first place. Ultimately, the best bet is to position oneself away from other families and hope people just keep to themselves. Moms deserve to rest, particularly when they are already paying to be somewhere.

One major theme linking both articles is the extensive, often unseen workload that motherhood entails. This mom's experience of unexpectedly having to babysit extra kids during her vacation sheds light on the unnoticed challenges mothers face regularly.

Exploring the unseen responsibilities mothers undertake further illustrates why such additional duties can be overwhelming.