To give a bit of background context, we live in a cul de sac with 6 children total, everyone gets along well and hangs out a lot. The children pretty much daily. The adults about once a week.Except the family next door. They might come to one in ten get togethers and the little girl maybe comes out to play once a month. I thought very little of this. The little girl is tied up in a lot of activities, the father works shift work and the mother seems very shy/ anxious. I assumed our tight knitness just wasn't for them, they liked to keep to themselves, prioritize the little girl's activities, rest otherwise but didn't seem hostile or unfriendly.They have lived here about 14 months and in that time the mother has come out as a fairly chronic liar. She has money problems which she hides from her husband by buying items with cards, returning them for cash and using that to cover her debts.She has had three car accidents (REALLY!) since she moved in here, and despite being at fault for at least two (she backs into stuff) claims they weren't her fault.She has a pain medicine issue that she seems to use neck and back pain to cover (I might be projecting here, maybe this is true).She "lies" by exaggeration and omission A LOT. I have dozens of examples of this, but a recent one is she said that her daughter got into a local charter school on academic merit. I also happened to apply. She doesn't know this. It's 100% lottery.Basically she's not very trustworthy and admits to lying, and gets caught in lies frequently.So onto these accusations. My son is 5 and my daughter is 6, next door is a family with two boys that have similar birth dates, meaning the kids are in school and preschool together. They are VERY tight knit. The two little boys play for at least 2 hours every day. We only loosely supervise them. They would spend 75% + of this time in my back yard, and the remainder in the front yards of the two houses and across the street in the yard of a man with grown children who explicitly allows them to use his playground equipment.On occasion all of them have been known to run into the front yard of the keep to themselves family. This is not allowed and we nip it directly in the bud.Anyway, a few months ago, keep to themselves mother accused the two little boys of banging on her garage door so often/ hard they damaged it. My son admitted to once (which by my timelines was true) and we made him write an apology note and we laid down the law about their yard "If I catch you again, you aren't allowed outside.". I did not deal with the damage then because I actually think she hit it with the car and wanted to fob it off to her husband as something else to prevent being in "trouble".Anyway, more recently the daughter has been coming out on weekends, so I began to allow my daughter to knock for her on Saturdays and Sundays. This was a new policy, as I don't allow knocking on our door so extend the same courtesy, and also the aforementioned no going in the yard rule. After one of the times my daughter knocked and got turned away about a month ago, the mother posted on Facebook about hating being a mean mummy and not allowing her daughter to go out when she's over extended from her activities.I also learned around the same time that while my daughter is allowed to enter their house when the daughter is not allowed out, my son is not.Okay, whatever. I told my daughter no more knocking.Fast forward to this week and apparently my son and the little neighbour are frequently ding dong ditching them. My son typically folds like a deck chair on questioning and he swore he never did any such thing. He said he hadn't even been in their yard without the daughter. Apparently this is frequent occurrence and has also happened on weekends, so I asked my daughter, and she takes great delight in throwing her brother under the bus, but she said that while she couldn't be sure he had never done it, she had never seen him do it.There are no other reports from neighbours of the same behaviour.Apparently they also tried to enter the locked garage and broke the handle so badly it will need replacing. They have never done this to my house or my neighbour's house, and all that's kept in our garages are cool toys. They are 5 and 4, they can't bang or turn anything industrial hard enough to break it, in my opinion.I think she's lying. In regards to the property damage to cover up her wrong doing and in regards to the ding dong ditching to make sure they stop asking for her daughter as this causes her parenting grief.She wants a sit down cul de sac meeting. Not even kidding. I have no idea how to proceed, but my immediate instinct is to protect my son and not give into her rubbish.What should we do? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2mEA4t6
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