A 34-year-old mother with excellent parenting skills made her 14-year-old daughter sleep outside in the cold for a night after she caught the teen degrading a homeless man for no reason other than to be extremely cruel. Livid at the girl’s behavior, she decided to teach her compassion in the most intense way possible: forcing her to camp out in their backyard on a cold night so she could understand how good she has it and how abhorrent her behavior towards the man was.
- While the single mom has provided well for her girls, she doesn’t want them to become ungrateful brats. User coolestthrowaway4 took to Reddit’s AITA sub to ask everyone’s opinion on her version of discipline. In the post, she explained that she’s a single mom of 14-year-old “Jessica” and 16-year-old “Jasmine” and she’s worked hard to ensure they’re well-provided for and can live comfortably. However, she was livid at Jessica’s behavior, which seemed to come out of nowhere.
- Jessica’s older sister is the one who turned her in. OP revealed that Jasmine sent their mom a video of Jessica’s outburst towards the homeless man, in which she shouted at him, “Stop asking me for money, you’d earn it yourself if you weren’t so f***ing lazy and spending what you earned on substances.” She then told him he shouldn’t be complaining about being cold because “people camp for fun” and he’s “living someone’s holiday.”
- The mom knew she had to teach Jessica a lesson. She not only drove Jessica to find the man and apologize to him, but she had to put some of her own money towards paying for a hotel room for the man for a night. However, OP wasn’t done there. She also made her daughter sign up to volunteer at a food bank and then locked her room, putting a “Closed for the holidays” sign on the door. She then “pitched a tent in the garden and filled it with blankets and the sleeping bag I used when I was camping in Norway on a family holiday as a teen (aka really bloody thermal). I slept in the room closest to the garden for that night so I was nearby if anything was to go wrong. She was reluctant to do it, but chose it over the option of not having access to her phone until the Christmas holidays are over.”
- The night outside seems to have made a major impression on Jessica. OP revealed that her daughter came in the house the following morning “crying about how horrible it was to wake up on a cold mat and get disrupted sleep due to birds.” She then had a frank discussion with Jessica about her actions and began crying as she sincerely apologized. She even came home later in the day to find Jessica cooking a meal for the homeless people who live near their house.
- Not everyone agreed with the lesson. OP revealed that her sister believed the punishment was “too harsh” and that she should have just made the teen pay a part of the hotel room and volunteer at the food bank. However, OP is standing behind her methods and it seemed most people agreed with her.
