She said yes once to be nice, and that was her first mistake. Because apparently, letting the neighbor’s kids swim in your pool one time is the same thing as signing up to be the unpaid lifeguard for the rest of the summer.
She didn’t put that pool in to be the block’s backup babysitter, but when she finally said enough, suddenly she’s the bad guy.
This woman lives in a duplex, and she’s lucky to have a generously sized backyard. She moved into her place a year ago and quickly set about putting in an above-ground pool to enjoy.
While her pool is hardly Olympic-sized, it’s large enough to keep her cool during the heatwaves of the summer. Now, her neighbors have two children who are less than 10, and as soon as they spotted her pool last summer, they asked if the kids could come swim on occasion.
She said yes, wanting to be nice and neighborly. Initially, there were no problems with her neighbor’s kids dropping by to use her pool.
“But gradually it turned into them expecting to use the pool almost every day. The parents stopped even asking me if it was okay and would just send the kids over and tell them to ‘knock on my door,'” she explained.
“Sometimes I would come home from work, and the kids were already in my yard because their parents told them it was fine. The final straw was last week when I went outside and saw one of the kids had spilled juice into the pool, and the other had broken one of the pool floats.”
“I told the parents politely that I was not comfortable with them using it anymore. They got defensive and said I was being uptight and unfair to their kids, especially since it is ‘just water,’ and I do not even have children of my own who would use it.”
She’s left feeling like a nasty neighbor since her neighbors are upset that she banned their kids from using her pool. Her neighbors act like she doesn’t exist, and they hardly acknowledge her when she runs into them.
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One of her other neighbors actually said she was not exactly ‘community-minded’ for kicking the kids out of the pool. She’s not attempting to be mean here, but she is concerned about her private property being trashed and treated like a public amenity.
She’s not the one who failed at being neighborly; they are. They saw her kindness, her silence, and her lack of kids, and took advantage of her. They were never grateful, and they acted entitled, so she did the right thing by putting a stop to the use of her pool.
Do you think she was wrong to tell her neighbors their kids are no longer welcome in her pool?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
