Bm is an attention seeker. She puts crap all over Facebook about how ill/poor/sad she is so all her crappy friends can give her sympathy. More worryingly, she seems obsessed with her kids health and is always posting on Facebook that she's looking after a sick kid, hasn't slept due to sick kid and is taking them to the doctor or hospital. It often seems to happen during the night or at weekends so she has to call out of hours emergency medical services.

Skids live with us and go to bm's EOWE and half of school hols. They are healthy kids who don't get ill very often, and it's very rare we have the need to take them to the doctor while they're at home with us. They don't have any medical conditions or need to take regular medicines, so we can't understand why there are so many medical emergencies when they're at bm's where one of them will have a temperature and simply must be taken out of the house in the middle of the night to see an emergency doctor. We only get to find out about this through Facebook and she never tells us directly. The kids are always fine when they come back to us - not even antibiotics most of the time, so there's obviously nothing seriously wrong with them that a dose of paracetamol, plenty of cool drinks and a good rest wouldn't solve. If she's not taking them to the doctor in the middle of the night she has to take them to the pharmacy for something and then complains that she's had to spend money on some expensive and usually unnecessary pills or lotions to cure some non-existent or very minor problem.

She's a single parent to a kid who's nearly 3 and every week there's something on Facebook that he's not well or has hurt himself. The kid never seems to go for more than a few days without something being wrong with him. Every sniffle or sneeze is a cause for a major panic and if he gets a bit of a temperature or goes off his food for a bit it's a major drama. Dh said she used to do it with the 3 skids when they were young, only he was there to make sure she didn't get to make a huge drama out of it and talk her out of running to the doctor every two seconds.

Her latest one was convincing ss10 that he had a sore foot. Skids came back at the weekend from a few days stay with her during half term. Bm rang SS10 tonight and he said to dh afterwards that bm had reminded him that he needed to tell his dad he had a sore foot and needed to go to the doctor. Dh asked him where it was sore and he couldn't say. Dh asked why he had not told us before and asked to look at his feet and there isn't a mark anywhere. SS10 had not mentioned anything about a sore foot and the first we heard of it was tonight after bm rang ss10 to remind him about it. After speaking to his mother, ss10 then decided that yes, his foot had been a bit sore today when he was playing football but he didn't think to mention it to us. BM then text dh to demand that he take ss10 to the doctor, to which dh replied that ss10's feet are fine and he doesn't need a doctor. She's done this kind of shit before - convincing ss10 he had earache when he didn't and making a big drama out of him having head lice, like it was something serious and shameful.

We know what she's up to. She is trying to get custody of ss9 and ss10 and she has been told that the only way a court would consider a change of custody is if she could prove there is evidence that the kids are at risk in our care. Because the kids are healthy, happy and doing fine with us for the past 6 years this is the best she can come up with and it's pathetic. She's going to turn the kids into hypochondriacs at this rate and I can't imagine what kind of life her toddler is going to have being raised by her thinking that every cough or sneeze, ache or pain is life threatening and means he needs emergency medical care.

I've looked a definitions for munchausen syndrome by proxy and some of fits, but I cannot see even her being stupid enough to deliberately harm the kids herself, more like she's taking advantage of typical minor childhood ailments and turning them into a massive drama to gain attention and sympathy from her friends and medical professionals. She is definitely a hypochondriac judging by all the FB posts about every little ailment of her own, and dh said this was always the case and she'd refuse to get her lazy butt out of bed if she had so much as a sniffle, but what she's trying to do to her kids is wrong and dangerous, as we don't want skids to pick up her bad habits - we've already had ss10 trying to use fake illness to try and get off school when they were doing something he didn't want to join in. We don't pander to fake illness and when they're genuinely ill they don't get fawned over - they get told to rest and no games/tv or fun things till they feel better.

Anyone with experience of knowledge of this and what we could do to stop bm's obsessions rubbing off on skids?