If you’re a parent, one of the last things you want to see your child doing is being mean and bullying people. So, when that happens, it’s important you act quickly to get them to understand how wrong that is.
One woman recently grounded her preteen daughter after she made fun of her cousin’s clothes, but she’s wondering if she was too hard on her.
She and her husband are in their early 30s and have three children, one of them being her 12-year-old daughter, Mia.
She and her family recently went out for a Mother’s Day breakfast with her siblings, their families, and her parents.
One of the attendees was her sister’s 11-year-old son, Dudley.
“Dudley has a friend from basketball whose parents are from the Philippines,” she explained.
“Dudley has gifts from his friend from their nation and has gone on vacation there with them. Dudley was wearing a traditional outfit from the tribe his friend’s family was a part of. I don’t remember the name of the outfit or tribe, though Dudley mentioned it.”
Unfortunately, Mia is going through what she describes as a “preteen mean girl phase,” and when she saw Dudley wearing the unique outfit, she took as an excuse to make fun of him.
Mia immediately teased Dudley when she first saw him, asking him why he was wearing something so “ugly.”
“She asked him if he was shopping for clothes in the dark, [and] I told her to stop, but she continued to make fun of him,” she recalled.
“When Dudley explained what he was wearing, Mia said, ‘Those people must be weird,’ referring to the tribe Dudley’s friend is a part of.”
“At this point, I told Mia to get up and told her we needed to speak. She got up, and I went to the car with her and told her to knock it off. She told me no. After some arguing, we went back and finished our food, and then we drove home.”
When her family returned home, she and her husband decided to ground Mia for her behavior. They grounded her for a week and took her cell phone away for that time.
Later, when she went to her sister’s house to exchange Mother’s Day gifts with her siblings and mom, her mom told her she was too hard on Mia. Her mom also claimed that Mia would only grow up to resent Dudley if she was punished for what she said about him, comments her mom brushed off as “mistakes.”
Was she too hard on Mia, or did her grounding seem to be an appropriate punishment?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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