Some obstacles in parenting are significantly more challenging to overcome than others. It’s every parent’s worst dread to discover that their children are lying about them on the internet. And that dread became a reality to this mom in the story. She took extraordinary measures in an attempt to alter this conduct. Scroll down to read the rest of the tale and who do you believe was at fault here? In this situation, what would you have done?
Source: Reddit
I’m 39f, my daughter, Jane, is 20f. I am by no means a perfect mother, and my husband, Tom, isn’t a perfect father but we did our best all her life and tried our best to make sure she never wanted for anything. I know exactly where we went wrong as parents, and I honestly think giving her unrestricted Internet access was the problem.
Jane is offended by everything, and she claims a lot of things caused her trauma. One of the major things that caused her trauma, in her own words, was my migraines, which I started to experience in my mid-20s. During a migraine of mine, Tom would either take Jane out for a few hours, or take her for a playdate, or to either set of grandparents. Jane claims this was traumatic because she was forced to separate from me, despite the fact she did not even know until she was in her teens. I had, at most, 5 migraines a year.
Jane claims that going back to work part-time when she was 15, 3 days a week while she was in school was deeply traumatic because it meant a change in her routine. That change was that dinner wasn’t on the table ready for her as soon as she got in the door and she had to wait an hour.
Jane is unemployed. She’s not in college and she does no housework, she won’t even walk the dog she brought home without permission, and has decided the arguments it has caused between us all are also traumatic. She runs a tiktok account, which recently came up on my for you page, and like the terrible awful mother I am, I decided to snoop. Jane has over 10k followers, but most of the comments are genuinely making fun of her, calling her a snowflake, telling her to touch grass. She had a few videos about how she grew up below the poverty line, essentially in the ghetto, which is a complete lie because she was raised in a lower-middle class household in a pretty affluent area.
A lot of her posts with the nasty comments were about me and Tom, and how much we traumatised her over the years, by being awful terrible parents. I confronted Jane pretty much as soon as I got done snooping, and she blew up saying I had no right to call her out on it. She was saying that it was going in the traumabank (not her words but pretty much what she meant). I told her if she wants trauma, she very much needs a different kind of help.
I don’t know what got into me, but I ended up unplugging the WiFi router, locked it in my bedroom and spent ages on the phone to our service provider cancelling her phone contract. She’s crying all day, saying it’s unfair to cut her off like this. My husband thinks I’ve gone too far and that Jane will just weaponise this against us, making our lives more miserable. Am I a AH?
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
