My Neighbor Has Kids. I Have Kids. I’m Horrified by What She Thinks This Means.

Dear Prudence Absolutely not. Advice by Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Jenée Desmond-Harris? Aug 19, 20266:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Dear Prudence is Slate’s advice column. Submit questions here. Dear Prudence, I have twin girls who are 10. Their best friend, “Sarah,” is 9 and lived across the street until a few months ago, when her parents divorced. Sarah moved with her mom across town while her dad moved his girlfriend in with her two girls. It is a huge stinking mess and made worse when we have Sarah most days because her mom works, I work from home, and the girls are just a little too young to stay home by themselves. The girlfriend seems to think I am running a free babysitting service and will send her kids over if she sees Sarah at my place. I have to interrupt my day in order to send them back and text my neighbor that my arrangement was with Sarah’s mom, not her dad, since he gets weekends. The girlfriend is all fake smiles and complaints about not having a “real” community to fall back on since the move. I don’t give a crap. Her kids are several years younger than Sarah, and we have two large dogs and a pool. I trust the girls enough to know that they will obey the rules, come get me if anything happens (my office looks outside to the pool), and feed and clean up after themselves. This woman will not give up. And now with school starting, she tries to corner me every time I get the mail about carpooling. I tried being diplomatic. I tried being straight up. Nothing fazes this woman, and my neighbor has the emotional intelligence of a mud puddle. Sarah confessed she got yelled at because she wasn’t happy about her new “siblings” stealing her stuff. She needs to “share.” I can’t help that. I can only help Sarah by giving her and her mom some room to breathe. My husband is on an overseas assignment, so it is just me. This isn’t going to end because of summer. The school cut the after-school programs and widened the circle of where buses don’t run. I have already agreed with Sarah’s mom that if she figures out her drop-off and pick-ups within reason, I would take Sarah. I still have to live across from these people. Help! —Get Out of My Hair Dear Get Out of My Hair, My first impulse was to encourage you to simply let the girls come over to your yard and play. While you don’t like their mom and shouldn’t have to officially host them, what’s the worst that could happen if they are hanging out in your yard? Then I answered my own question: The worst that could happen is that one of them could drown in your pool or get hurt in some other way. Obviously we can’t let that happen because it would be a tragedy, but it could also put you in a bad legal position. So while it goes against my initial instincts to put you in conflict with your neighbor or deprive any of the girls of an opportunity for fun and friendship, this is actually pretty serious. If you haven’t already said it directly, you should tell the girlfriend (in writing, over text), “It is not safe for you to send your younger girls here to play because I can’t be responsible for supervising them while I’m working. I know you don’t want to see a tragedy involving the pool, the dogs, or anything else that little kids can get into, and I definitely don’t either. The older girls are responsible enough to have the run of the house and yard by themselves, but it’s unacceptable for the little girls to be unsupervised. This is about safety and also about my liability. Please do not allow them to come onto my property. Do you understand? If I see them here, they are at risk, and I will have to contact the appropriate authorities.” If you can muster any shred of generosity, you could add the following: “I understand that they want to see their stepsister when she is here, and I know it must be hard for them if they know she is across the street and they can’t hang out with her. I’ll encourage Sarah and the twins to play inside as much as possible so the situation isn’t as challenging. As a mom, I also totally understand that you need community and support, and I’m happy to have all the girls over for a pre-planned play date for a couple of hours at a time when I’m not working.” While your husband isn’t physically present, he should support you by reiterating this message. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Prudence, My husband, “Mark,” and I put food on our porch every day for a couple of cats that were abandoned by some neighbors who moved away. We are trying to find placement for them, but our local cat rescues are all full and everyone we know has all the cats they want. The trouble is that our next-door neighbors allow their dogs to run loose in their front yard, and the dogs regularly come over and clean out all the food. They also add insult to injury by pooping in our flower beds. Our requests to them to keep the dogs off our property have been met with rudeness and retorts that we are creating “an attractive nuisance.” After the food was stolen for a third time the other day, Mark said he’s had it and plans on lacing some peanut butter with laxatives. I find myself torn here. On the one hand, I think that’s kind of a mean thing to do, but on the other hand, I’m sick of being out the money for food and having dog poop everywhere. Bringing the cats inside our house until we find a new home for them isn’t an option since I’m allergic. Animal control won’t do anything since the dogs aren’t being aggressive toward anyone. Should I agree to Mark’s idea? —Diarrhea for the Dogs Dear Diarrhea for the Dogs, Wait a minute. Explain to me how you two love animals so much that you’ve taken two homeless cats under your wing, but you’re willing to give innocent dogs gastrointestinal distress to punish their owners. That doesn’t make any sense. Also, it’s so mean. Don’t do it. There must be another solution. For example, have you really explored the power of antihistamines to allow you to make the cats indoor pets? Far be it from me to dispense medical advice, but if my memory is correct, I once had a friend who was allergic, and she simply took allergy medication every morning. Ask your allergist about it! I realize that would be a big commitment, but poisoning the neighbor’s animals would be too. Alternatively, what about waiting until the cats meow at your door each day and then setting out the food for them to eat while you supervise and monitor the perimeter? If none of that works, this feels like a letter that might have a menu of big box hardware store solutions. I don’t feel comfortable endorsing any particular product, but do some research on “ways to keep dogs off property,” and you’ll find some options under $40 or so. Prudie Wants to Hear From You! Readers often have great suggestions for our letter writers, occasionally disagree with a point Prudie makes, or simply want to provide some additional advice. Each week, Prudie will be replying to some of these comments and suggestions from readers, which will be featured on the site on Fridays for Slate Plus members. Write to us! Or submit a question here. Dear Prudence, I was certain that I would never have to worry about my siblings falling down the online Nazi pipeline. Now I’m the one spiraling. I’m a 32-year-old woman, and the oldest in our white, Catholic-raised, progressive-leaning family. My brother, a 28-year-old man, blindsided me last year in a video call: He’d been going down conspiracy rabbit holes about the Epstein files that have culminated in horrifying conclusions about Jewish people. He was citing AI sources like they were objective facts and saying that Grok was giving him the same information Google would. I’ve now pored over the Epstein files to dismantle every nonsense conspiracy he’s spouted, sent pages of texts dispelling the things he’s claiming, picked apart the sources he’s cited (they’re Holocaust deniers), and broken down his claims about the objectivity and veracity of an AI-based news feed. I finally talked to my parents and other siblings about needing to address this as a unit. We all live far from each other, and they’re all too conflict-avoidant to be proactive—they told me they didn’t see the need to talk to him about it because he “didn’t say anything like that while we were visiting.” I’ve told everyone (him included) that I refuse to let this go because we’ve reached a point where this cannot be ignored, and I will not let someone I love so dearly become a Nazi. My brother was defending trans rights to his best friend when he was a teenager. He was calling out racism from his professors in college. He was the guy who always made the effort to befriend the kid that didn’t look like they belonged. It’s been eight months since I’ve attempted to reason with him. We’ve barely talked this year. I told him I loved him. He’s tried reaching out and checking in. I’m angry and at a loss, but I can’t cut him off. I feel like I still need to try to get through to him. —Needing Hope and Help Dear Needing Hope and Help, Plenty of people have reasonably close family relationships with parents and siblings with beliefs they find totally abhorrent. But if you were the kind of person who was capable of that, you would simply be doing it (and then probably writing to an advice columnist for help when you had to see the beliefs written out in a Facebook post, when the beliefs meant the person was unkind to your partner or children, or when something else totally predictable happened!) not feeling angry and at a loss. Your strong reaction to his views is telling you something about your values and who you want in your life. Your angst over having been unable to get through to him so far is showing you how thankless it is to try to do something you don’t have the power to do. I suggest that you try to stop telling yourself, “I will not let someone I love become a Nazi,” and replace it with, “I will not let myself sacrifice my time, energy, and emotional well-being for a Nazi.” It’s impossible to decide what another adult becomes. People don’t want their loved ones to become drug addicts, abusers, or serial killers, but sometimes they do anyway. It’s unimaginably awful. But what compounds the hurt is wearing yourself out trying desperately to control someone who you can’t control. Your brother has access to all the information you have, on top of his demonstrated familiarity with the general concepts of decency and compassion. Something has changed in him, and I really don’t think you’ll be able to fix it by lobbying for a fair fact-checking process. So stand down, and figure out how much of a relationship you can have with him, exactly the way he is now. It’s OK to still love him. It’s OK to not cut him off. It’s not OK to waste your life and sacrifice your own well-being caring more about his inner life than you care about your own. Classic Prudie My husband has a history of cheating. Last year I found conclusive proof that he had yearslong sexual relationships with two women and inappropriate relationships with several more. We separated for several months but never stopped sleeping together. He eventually moved back home. We have attended counseling. We are trying to make things work. Then a position opened up unexpectedly with my husband’s employer, and lo and behold, one of the women he carried on with was hired to work closely with him by sheer coincidence. Advice Dear Prudence Kids Parenting