A single mom lost her cool when she saw how her daughter treated a homeless man on the street.
The 34-year-old shared the story on Reddit, where she said she knew what life “at the bottom of society” was like because she lived through it after her partner died.
“I was barely making paycheque to paycheque but I managed to get a degree, become successful and we live well,” she said.
Today, the mother lives a good life with her two daughters, 16-year-old Jasmine and 14-year-old Jessica.
“Jasmine showed me a video of Jessica cussing a homeless man out and telling him, ‘stop asking me for money, you’d earn it yourself if you weren’t so f–king lazy and spending what you earned on substances,'” she wrote on Reddit. “When the homeless man complained about the cold (we live in NE England), Jessica responded ‘Yeah people camp for fun, even in December, you can’t complain, you’re living someone’s holiday.'”
The fighter mom thought she raised a strong and compassionate child but after she saw the footage she was deeply angered and decided to teach Jessica a crucial lesson.
“Along with finding the homeless man and making her apologise and help pay for a hotel room for a night for him (she paid £20), as well as signing her up to volunteer at a food bank – I decided to take her up on her offer of sleeping outside,” she wrote. “I locked her bedroom door so she couldn’t go in, put a sign on it saying Closed for the holidays, pitched a tent in the garden and filled it with blankets and the sleeping bag…”
As Jessica spent the night in the tent, the mother slept in the room that was nearest to the garden so she could check on her.
“In the morning, she was crying about how horrible it was to wake up on a cold mat and get disrupted sleep due to birds,” the mother wrote. “After comforting her, I asked her would she like to do that everyday like the homeless man. It struck a cord with her and she was crying over her actions…”
Jessica also cooked some food and gave it to the homeless in the area. And that made the mother extremely proud.
But when the mother’s sister heard about what had happened, she talked to her and said she went too far by making Jessica sleep outside. And that is when the mother turned to Reddit to ask whether she was an a**hole for punishing her daughter this way.
Many in the comments supported her choice.
“Sounds like the apology and £20 wasn’t enough,” one person wrote. “Walking a mile in their shoes taught her empathy.”
Another said:
“Good on Mom. Her kid was never in danger and had a luxury of learning a lesson in safety and from a place of love.”
Some, however, disagreed…
“If you need to communicate with your kids via such a harsh punishment, something is terribly wrong with your relationship, and you should ask yourself how and why did it happen,” one person commented. “Also, the extreme reaction of the daughter to a homeless man sounds like a perfect reflection of her mother’s general attitude.”
Another said it was
“a little bit of a militaristic reaction, I would have tried more to dissect why she did that, rather than the immediate punishment, by the sound of it she is still young and not to mention by putting a young daughter out in the cold at night you are putting her in unnecessary danger. They were other options such as giving her chores, or putting her on restriction, but the punishment you chose seemed to be a bit of a mildly sadistic choice, in my opinion.”
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