Playgroup Dynamics

At our playgroup yesterday, we were talking about another playgroup. A while back our playgroup got too big and we decided to split it in halfish. 4 moms came to ours and 3 moms went to theirs. I personally was thrilled because I had some personality conflicts with some of the other moms. I guess this other group recently decided to stop having playgroup all together because the kids were beating each other up. I can understand how putting 5 2-year-olds in a room together would cause some tiffs but beating each other up?

We weren't gossiping about this other group. We were really just saying how happy we were because the dynamics of our group works so well and that we got out of a bad situation before it came down to never having playgroup again. We decided that there is one key thing in making a playgroup work. It's not so much that the children have to all be alike (while one hard child can really mess a group up), it's that the parenting styles have to match. The 4 mothers in our group all are very alike in the big parenting areas like discipline, eating habits and routines. We rarely disagree on things that pertain to parenting and when we do it's ok to disagree. But before we split, I could see that the parenting styles were conflicting enough that people were getting offended because her child did this at my house and mom didn't do X or whatever. Playgroup has been a lot of fun and the Babe has learned a lot from being with the other kids. He looks forward to it every week. The mothers have become great supports to me and we all strengthen each other. It's sad because one of our girls is starting kindergarten next week. So her 2-year-old sister will come alone now. I hope that we can continue to get along while our children grow.