Yahoo Lifestyle Parents Reveal The Extremely Petty Things They've Done To Avenge Their Child
It's never easy seeing a child get picked on or bullied, but it's even worse when they feel helpless against it. Many parents would advise their children to be the bigger person in a conflict to de-escalate a situation.
But what happens when the child's best efforts to fix the problems are unresolved? Well, it often results in parents stepping in, which can either defuse the situation completely or ramp up the fury tenfold.
I recently asked the BuzzFeed Community to divulge the extremely petty things they've done to avenge their child, and here's what they had to say:
Note: Some responses come from Reddit threads, which you can view and explore here, here, here, and here.
1."Co-worker (56 yo) who fancied herself as an artist told my daughter (10 yo) she would buy one of my daughter’s paintings. She took the painting and said she would pay later. A couple of months later and several reminders that she needed to pay my daughter, she still hadn’t."
"So I paid my daughter and told her it was from my coworker. Then, I replaced my coworker's coffee with decaf. She kept falling asleep at her desk and finally had to leave the company because she just couldn’t keep up. I don’t regret it all, and I am kinda proud of it. I mean, who tells a kid they will pay them for work they did and then just doesn’t? We aren’t talking about a huge amount of money. We are talking about $20. The coworker had other issues that contributed to her leaving the company, but her taking naps in her office didn’t help."
2."I ghosted them. Hard."
"My child was part of a large extracurricular club (in both age and membership span; we had 5-year-olds through seniors in high school) that needed a lot of time spent receiving training to do activities (Certifications with national sports organizations, learning how to use specialty equipment safely, etc). I have an only child and am a stay-at-home parent, so I used my time to their benefit and got a lot of training to be able to do in-demand activities like archery, rope courses, and the like.
There was another group of parents that decided they didn't like how I managed situations for safety and within the guidelines of our extracurricular national organization. I didn't let kids whose parents volunteered act like adults, and I didn't tolerate older kids acting rudely to younger children just because they were younger. We had several situations where teenagers left kindergarten-aged kids in tears, gloating over how they 'won.'
They tried to get me officially told off by our supervisors. Instead of going to a meeting where I knew I would be chewed out and told to leave, I just ghosted them. On everything. I got calls for weeks asking if I would come and help them do an activity I was trained to do, despite telling them not to contact me for help if I was so offensive to them. I had to block numbers, tell our supervisors I was no longer available, and finally just stopped acknowledging them in person, as well. I am now a trainer for many of the activities they want to do, and I have cheerfully rejected them from the classes I teach. I relish the 'refuse entry' buttons I get to push all the time."
–Anonymous
3."My homophobic neighbor said stupid sh*t about my gay son. I painted my deck spindles rainbow. He has to see it every time he pulls into his driveway."
4."My own mother favored my son and my nieces, but she hated my daughter's father and my daughter by extension. Not a step-grandchild, but another actual grandchild."
Disney
"It wasn't as obvious when the girls were very young, but as they got older, the disdain for my daughter rubbed off. My son saw what was going on, hated seeing his little sister hurt, and voluntarily pulled away. My nieces, sister, and mom continued to treat my daughter like shit, and I went low contact with the lot of them. Even as much as my daughter was exposed, it hurt her deeply.
My mom died earlier this year. My daughter, now 25, didn't even go to the burial (with my complete understanding and agreement).
This will hurt your daughter in the long run, as she sees how differently 'grandma' treats her from the other children. I feel so badly for her."
5."A boy, probably around nine or 10, stood directly above my 6-year-old daughter as she kneeled down to tie her shoes. When she looked up, still kneeling, he threw a dodgeball straight at her face."
"After consoling my daughter, I entered the game. I aimed for no one else but this little jerk. After several tries, I landed a throw that hit him square in the face, breaking his glasses. He left and didn’t come back."
–Anonymous
6."After we finally decided to pull our son out of his special ed program due to ever-diminishing results (we were often called to drive 20 miles to bring him home for bad behavior, which we later learned was often little more than him setting off another kid who could not be sent back to his group home so easily), we had to have a meeting with the school district and the program to decide what came next."
Tristar Images
"I wrote a statement for the meeting in which I included a paragraph repeating complaints I’d heard about the program’s principal from the staff about how, even accounting for some of the difficulties resulting from budget cuts, he wasn’t following through on things with them. I really had been holding my temper whenever we came to pick him up early because I believed this guy. Though he was nice, he wasn’t trying anymore, and our son was suffering for it. So I told my wife to go to the meeting instead of me and just pass out copies of what I wrote because if I’d gone, I might have asked him to step outside.
I was right. She told me he was very pissed off about what I said about him, which pleased me to no end as IMO he had it coming. I found out sometime later that he was sacked two weeks after that meeting by the program’s board. I don’t know that my statement had something to do with that, but I’d like to think that it did."
–Anonymous
7."My eldest daughter was assaulted at an inflatable park when she was about eight. The business said they don’t control what happens, and we signed a waiver. Ok. Cool. I called the police. It was a 13 year old boy, her front tooth was chipped, her glasses broken, and she was bruised."
"I was scared to death, too. I was the party pooper, that place emptied out as soon as the police rolled up. I was not quiet about why, and how management was not the least bit concerned. The police were able to view the recording from when it happened. They arrested the boy responsible. He worked his way through the juvenile justice system on an assault charge. I am not sorry at all. She still has a scar almost 20 years later. The chipped tooth still visible, every time the dentist corrected it, the little correction would fall out. She’s finally just owned it!! I am still not sorry all these years later. I hope he learned a valuable lesson that day. My daughter learned I will not let some random kid hurt her for no reason, and I will not let some random manager of an extinct event location stand between myself and the person who wronged her."
8."I took my son to a fair on his fifth birthday, and we went to get cotton candy. The man scooping the cotton candy accidentally dropped the cotton candy that my son had bought on the ground and then picked it up and handed it to him, thinking neither of us had seen it."
"I was furious because he could have easily given my son a disease that could have killed him. Without saying a word, I wheeled the cotton candy machine to the top of the hill, and I shoved it down as hard as I could. It was severely broken, and the fair manager told me I would have to pay for the damage. I yelled at him about how food contamination is something that needs to be taken seriously and left with my son."
–Anonymous
9."My daughter was disinvited from my brother-in-law's secret wedding as it’s 'only for close family and friends.'”
"This is my husband’s only sibling, and our family is extremely close. Well, we were… My husband took his side and 'couldn’t understand' why I was upset, so I told everyone in the family that I could about the wedding. AND I’D DO IT AGAIN."
10."My kids have these selfish, bratty cousins that got tablets for Christmas one year that they absolutely would not share, not even letting my kids watch videos with them."
"They were so bratty and selfish and would rub the tablets in my kid's face. Well, I finally had enough of it and bought my kids their own newest of the new, best of the best tablets, plus kid smartwatches AND kid real phones and had them take all of it over to their cousins' house and told them to make sure you watch and play them EXTRA loud, and NO you absolutely CANNOT share them!"
–Anonymous
11."When my son (he is 26 now) was in kindergarten, he had a teacher that the first time they misbehaved, on fun Friday, the one who misbehaved would have to sit in a room and listen on a baby monitor while the other kids had fun."
"What the actual f&$k? Crap hit the fan. She’s really lucky I had my temper under control. When I was done with her, the class had three warnings before any action was taken, and after that, it would be an appropriate action. They were four and five years old. Also, the teacher was to be monitored. She still hates me. I don’t care. She’s real lucky I didn’t kick her a$$."
12."Father-in-law took a sh*t in their neighbor's bush when my partner was a kid because he kept busting his and his brother's balls."
13.And finally, "Once, a group of friends went to the movies with our kids. This one mom bought coins to play at the arcade and gave each kid a coin except my child. I had no cash on me, so I couldn’t buy any. My son was only 3, so thankfully didn’t notice. But I vowed one day, I would get my sweet revenge."
"Well, that one day came when she reached out a few years later, asking if she could put me down as a reference for a job she was trying to get at the company I worked for. I was like, nope, sorry, I don’t do that. She didn’t get the job."
–Anonymous
H/T: r/Parenting, r/Mommit & r/pettyrevenge
