reddit thread

Single dad of a 6-year-old refuses to babysit his sister’s 3 kids for the weekend after she says he’s not a real parent: ‘She said I wouldn’t understand what it’s like to be a real parent because I’ve never had to deal with multiple kids’ #Fun

So many parents are constantly trying to one-up others. It’s a common refrain for parents to tell childless people, “You think you’re tired now; wait until you have kids.” I understand why people say this, but it’s misguided. You often have no idea what is really happening in someone’s personal life, and acting like their life is a walk in the park just because they don’t have kids is silly. Maybe you didn’t have “real problems” before your children, but that’s not the case for many people. 

Even when the person being one-upped is a parent, this type of person will always find something that makes their life sound so much more difficult. “Having one kid is easy. Hit me up when you have three, and tell me how fun it is.” The mom in this story not only acted like her life was so much harder than her brother’s but also said he wasn’t a real parent because he only had one kid. 

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15-year-old calls out her parents favoritism towards her 17-year-old sister during her dad’s birthday party, uncle agrees with her: ‘I asked why they only talk about Amy, why don’t they care more about me’ #Fun

Favoritism is a sad but common part of many family dynamics. Being the child who their parents didn’t favor can lead to a lifetime of striving to please people and feeling like they’ll never be good enough. There’s enough competition at school and work that there’s no need for it in families. Competing for the basic feeling of being loved can have highly negative effects on the competitors, and yet some parents facilitate it. There are so many reasons a parent could favor one kid over another, and almost none of them are anything the child can control. Sometimes, parents wanted a different gender for their baby, or they didn’t want the number of kids they ultimately had. Maybe they’re judgemental about a child’s appearance or achievements outside of the family and prop up the child they see as superior in those categories. The 15-year-old girl in this story has been through the ringer regarding favoritism, and it’s heartbreaking to read about.

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Mom uses 16-year-old daughter’s college fund to pay for mental health treatment after she stole a car and crashed it, paternal grandparents admonish mom for using their late son’s money: ‘It’s favoritism by taking from her account and not her siblings’ #Fun

College funds are different in every family. Some kids don’t get a cent for their education, and some parents put thousands of dollars away in a protected 529 Fund so that it cannot be used for anything other than education. I’d say that most families are somewhere in the middle, with some having their kids’ college funds stashed away in the stock market and others using a regular savings account that could be repurposed if college isn’t what their kid’s future entails. It makes sense that paying the mortgage is more important for middle-class families than being able to afford $70,000 per year tuition at Boston University. It’s not just broad-familial financial issues that can deplete a college fund. It’s also the actions of the prospective college student. One mother used some of her daughter’s college money (her late husband’s life insurance money) to pay for mental health treatments, and her mother and father-in-law disagreed with this choice vehemently. 

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I will never understand why people want to double up on “special days.” If you could have a 4th of July party and a birthday party on two different days, why combine them into one day? I get that it’s difficult to get people to show up for one special event, let alone two, but as long as they’re spaced apart in a reasonable way, there’s no reason you should have to do a halfhearted birthday celebration because of an unrelated event. I don’t care how old you are; if your birthday is consistently eclipsed by some other holiday or by uncaring family members, it can get you down. 

The teenager in this story got his birthday overshadowed by the gender reveal of his baby sibling. That’s bad on its own, but the fact that his mom gave him the gender reveal in place of an actual gift is wild. 

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Military husband insists on adopting 10-year-old sister, expects 23-year-old wife to become her primary caretaker: ‘I am not ready for this’ #Fun

All families are complicated, and it’s all but inevitable that if you get married to someone you have to accept you are only going to be adding to your own complications. However, it’s also true that there is a fine line between supporting your partner through their issues with relatives and being made to take on an unfair burden. It’s no secret that in-laws can cause all kinds of problems, and you have to know where your boundaries are. 

This has become a problem for one newlywed, whose husband placed some lofty expectations on her regarding his family. He wanted to take his 10-year-old sister out of a bad living situation with his mom by adopting her, but he is in the military and most of the childcare would fall on his wife. Understandably, she had her reservations about this proposal, and it gave the internet a lot to think about.

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Mom refuses to take 18-year-old daughter to doctor when she’s been sick for a month, refuses to give her necessary document to go to doctor herself: ‘She started crying saying that how could I go against her better judgements’ #Fun

Every illness requires a different level of medical intervention. If every citizen showed up in the emergency room every time you stub your toe, the medical system, as we know it, would collapse. On the flip side, if you refuse to let your kids see a doctor on the grounds of your religious beliefs, no matter how sick they are, you’re probably not a very good parent. 

It’s a good rule of thumb that you should seek medical advice if your condition has worsened in the week since you first started having symptoms. The young woman in this story probably should’ve sought treatment 3 weeks ago, but her mother keeps trying to stop her. After a week of what was seemingly just a regular cold, she started coughing so hard that it triggered her gag reflex. A week later, she started running a fever and couldn’t sleep through the next because of her cough, and even then, her mom forbade her from going to a doctor. 

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26-year-old single mom living at her parent’s home asks to switch bedrooms with her 18-year-old brother for the second time, gets offended when he says no: ‘She was meant to be saving for the past year to move out’ #Fun

When I was a student, my biggest fear was being unable to get a postgrad job and being forced to live with my parents. It’s not that I don’t like hanging out with them, but the guilt and shame of potentially being a leach to the people I had been a leach to for 22 years already enough to motivate me to get gainfully employed. 

While that neurosis plagues me for better or for worse, that doesn’t mean that everyone who lives with their parents into their 20s is an unemployed slob who contributes nothing to the household. A lot of people work full-time, live at their parents’ house, and don’t disturb the peace in their family. It’s questionable whether the young mom in this story is doing the latter. She has a 2-year-old and is asking to switch bedrooms with her brother for a second time despite saying she plans to move out. 

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Mom cries when her alternative 24-year-old daughter elopes instead of planning a big traditional wedding, dad gives her a reality check: ‘Why are you surprised? Lynn didn’t want a wedding in the first place!” #Fun

Parents should know their kids better than anyone. I wouldn’t expect a mother or a father to be able to predict their kid’s every move, especially in adulthood, but I do expect that when their kid tells their parents who they are, they listen. The mom in this story didn’t do that with her 24-year-old daughter, who said she didn’t want a proper wedding after getting engaged to her fiancee. Her daughter, Lynn, is an alternative in many senses of the word; she graduated college for the first time at 16, has tattoos and piercings, and fully marches to the beat of her own drum. She reluctantly agreed to a wedding after her mom pressured her into it, but after one dispute over the flowers, she quickly went home and eloped. While her dad understands why she did that, her mom can’t get over her devastation over the elopement. 

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Mom makes 16-year-old daughter sleep in the same room as colic baby brother and get up with him during the night, grandma strongly disagrees: ‘I never made my girls take care of one another when they were younger’ #Fun

It’s so rotten to have to care for your younger siblings constantly. The fact that any of the Duggar girls grew up to have their own kids at all is nothing short of a miracle. They did more mothering before age 12 than most mothers do in their first couple of years of motherhood. I know in large families, a lot of chores can fall on kids, but expecting a kid under 18 to take care of a baby while the mom is doing God knows what else is wrong, no matter how you swing it. 

The mom in this story imposed one of the most unacceptable responsibilities on her teenage daughter that I can think of. She allowed her colic baby to sleep in her 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom and expected her to get up with him during the night. The logic is that she (the mother) needs her sleep.

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Husband gets angry when wife says ‘What’s the story macaroni’ to her 5-year-old and 4-year-olds, tells her it’s ‘childish’: ‘Tell him to lighten up’ #Fun

Children are notoriously hard to calm down. They will get upset at something that doesn’t make sense to you, like not being able to have ice cream for dinner, and then nothing will make them feel better. You try reasoning with them, you try bargaining, you try bribes… you do whatever it takes to get this child to stop crying, because sometimes you just need them to put on their clothes and go to school. Some parents develop their own methods for dealing with their children. 

Each parent has their own tactic they employ when things get tough. Maybe you have a special treat you offer, a special song you sing, or a magic little phrase you say to wash away all the toddler angst. Whatever works, right? Apparently not, according to one woman’s husband, who had an issue with her magic phrase. Read on for the story and decide what you think.

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23-year-old uncle smashes his brothers phone after her refuses to pay for the TV his 12-year-old son broke: ‘My mom said it was an accident, my dad said I could just replace it myself’ #Fun

Back in the day, breaking a TV was a huge deal. I will never forget the night all the families on our cul-de-sac went to a party, and my neighbor Nile broke our other neighbor’s giant flat-screen TV. Nile was about eight and broke the TV screen by throwing a toy at it. This was around 2007 or 2008, so it wasn’t a time when TVs were remarkably inexpensive like they are today, nor was it a time in American history when many families wanted to put their disposable incomes into multi-thousand-dollar purchases. I don’t exactly remember what was said after the TV broke, but even a kid could tell there was a lot of tension in the air. After that night, we didn’t have many more hangouts inside our neighbors’ houses.

The cost of TVs has lowered so much that the parents of this 12-year-old don’t think it’s necessary to pay for a replacement for the TV he broke. The times, they have ‘a changed.  

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Parents force pregnant 15-year-old to drop out of school and raise the baby against her wishes: ‘I just want to give the baby up for adoption, but they won’t listen to me’ #Fun

It’s pretty bleak how many people see pregnancy as a divine punishment for women who “misbehave.” I don’t know about you all, but I don’t think forcing irresponsible young women to raise babies that they can’t afford and never wanted in the first place is a great idea. I don’t think most people who tell pregnant teenage girls to “accept responsibility” and make motherhood their #1 priority actually believe it will lead to the best results. They want her to be punished for daring to have s*x, and not allowing her to have any choice in her future puts her in her place. I understand that a lot of people feel negatively about abortion, but adoption should surely be an option for a pair of 15-year-olds who have their whole futures ahead of them. The parents of the pregnant teen in this story don’t see adoption as an option.

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Dad walks out of 5-year-old son’s kindergarten play after his wife makes a scene in the audience: ‘She began loudly ranting to herself. Over time she gradually got louder and louder’ #Fun

As a former community theater child actor, I have seen my fair share of crazy stage parents. The craziest ones weren’t screaming from the audience saying, “Sing out Louise,” but were constantly putting ideas in their child’s head about how they had to be the best puppy in the production of 101 Dalmations KIDS or else! I definitely think giving notes to your 8-year-old about how they could improve their performance is much more damaging than being an overly enthusiastic audience member. 

The mom in this story is both a bad audience member and a harsh critic. When her 5-year-old son was onstage during his Kindergarten play, he was sucking on the strings of the giraffe hat he was wearing. If he were ten and doing that, it would be cause for concern, but at this age, parents can only laugh at harmless mistakes like that, or so I thought. This mom decided to bark at him from the audience to tell him to stop sucking on the string, much to the dismay of her husband.

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There are few things almost guaranteed to stir up trouble in a family unit like money, and people trying to claim what they think they are owed. Inheritance is a topic that elicits strong emotions and the more family members there are the more likely it is to get complicated. Usually everyone wants to have a piece of the pie.

This is something that one mom and stepmom came up against when she was helping her parents with their estate planning. Her mom and dad had allotted half of their assets to be split between their grandkids, including her stepdaughter. She suggested to them that this wasn’t necessary as the teenager would have a sizeable inheritance from her dad’s family, but her husband overheard and was not pleased with her advice. Reddit wasn’t so sure that when it came down to it, everybody involved deserved a share of the more modest estate.

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Brother calls CPS on his sister solely because she isn’t sober like him, demands that she forgive him without apologizing: ‘I told him I never wanted to see his face again’ #Fun

No parent is perfect. There is no parenting SAT you can get a perfect score on, and there is seldom a kid who will grow up and say that their mom and dad did everything right. Every parent has their own idea of what the best practice is for raising a kid, and while those ideas differ from family to family, we’ve largely accepted some acts that will warrant a call to Child Protective Services. A mom who drinks and smokes all the time might spur a call, but what about one that isn’t totally straight-edge? Obviously, if every parent who drank and smoked got their kids taken away, nearly every home in America would be broken up. But that logic didn’t stop one sober brother from tattletaleling on his sister to CPS for bogus reasons. 

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Mother-in-law forces bride to take wedding pictures against her will, groom sides with his mother: ‘He said let him down by making such a fuss over a normal part of weddings’ #Fun

We’ve all heard of bridezillas, and some of us have encountered them in real life. It’s easy to think of a bridezilla as an unrepentant and unreasonable monster who wants it her way or the highway, no matter how unreasonable her way is. While those brides do exist, it’s much more likely for a bride to be unreasonable for a reason that’s sympathetic if you know the context. Maybe a million family members are whispering in her ear, telling her that her wedding has to be perfect, or else. She might’ve spent her life’s savings on this one day, and anything short of exactly what she wants would feel like an absurd waste of money. Or perhaps she’s feeling bad about her self-image and doesn’t want there to be photos of her big day because of how insecure she’s feeling. As unusual as it sounds, the latter scenario is what happened to this bride. 

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Mother-in-law calls 31-year-old daughter-in-law’s cooking skills ‘pathetic’ during family dinner, husband faces fallout for not defending her: ‘She refuses to cook and claims there is nothing wrong with not being able to cook’ #Fun

Knowing your way around the kitchen is one of those skills that many would deem to be essential, yet there are plenty of people out there who are clueless when it comes to the world of cooking. It’s amazing that there are individuals who manage to traverse adulthood without knowing how to so much as boil an egg, but they exist—and they rely on others to take responsibility for what they eat.

This is something that one man has come up against since being with his wife, who does not know how to cook. The issue came to a head recently when they invited his mother over for dinner, and she criticized her daughter-in-law for not being able to cut fruit. His wife was annoyed that he didn’t defend her against this, but Reddit was not so sure that he deserved the backlash. There were layers to this confrontation.

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Dishonest woman consistently asks situationship for 0 or more, expects him to pay up without question: ‘She’s scamming you’ #Fun

Love, or infatuation, can sometimes shield us from reality. We put on our rose colored glasses and in the words of BoJack Horseman, “All the red flags just look like flags.” You don’t see people for who they truly are, you want to see the best in them. We think that the reason they’re not texting us back is because of that insane Verizon outage, not that he’s just not that interested. We believe them when they say they’re going to change, for real this time. It happens to the best of us, and we really can’t be blamed. Sometimes we need the harsh light of say, a Reddit thread, to show us that we’re actually being taken advantage of. 

This thread is a prime example of that. A dude, blinded by affection, fails to see the scam a woman is running on him. Read on for the wild details.

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Foster parents demand that 12-year-old foster child constantly cooks and cleans for them, get offended when she doesn’t want to help them out of debt as a 32-year-old adult: ‘After the way they treated me, they have no right to ask for anything’ #Fun

Being a foster kid isn’t easy. Unless you get really lucky, there is a high likelihood you will spend a lot of your childhood bouncing between homes without the level of care that you deserve. Even those who manage to find a semi-permanent home are not guaranteed the best treatment. It can be a punishing system to go through.

This is something that one woman knows all too well after the ghosts of her foster childhood past came back to haunt her recently. At the age of 12, she was placed in a home with foster parents who treated her as their “live-in maid”, a situation that she gladly escaped once she went to college. Now 32 and with a successful career in marketing, her so-called family called her expecting her to help them out of a tough financial situation. She refused, and they weren’t happy. It’s no surprise whose side the internet was on. 

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