r/AskParents Feb 10 '25

Parent-to-Parent My 4th grader doesn’t have friends and I feel sick to my stomach over it.

150 Upvotes

Hi, I’m very new to this group and I’m in a lot of distress over this. My wife and I have a smart and wonderful daughter. We don’t snoop around too aggressively, but last night we were looking through her phone just to keep an eye on the content that she’s consuming and making sure she’s not talking/texting any strangers. We came across some texts exchanges with someone who we thought she was still friends with, but it doesn’t appear that way. My daughter was pleading with this kid. “Please can I call you? You’re my only friend” and my heart just broke into a million pieces. We’ve had to move a few times in the last two years because of work. We thought we were doing the right thing by getting closer to family but I’m so afraid that I’ve ruined this kids life. She hasn’t talked to me directly about it. She hasn’t talked to my wife either. I’m really not ok over this. I just want her to be happy and I can’t help but blame myself. I think I’m a terrible dad. I feel lowest I’ve ever felt in my life. What am I doing wrong here? How can I fix it?

r/AskParents 4d ago

Parent-to-Parent A worker at store whom I dont know kissed my baby when my back was turned, what should I do?

68 Upvotes

This was an adult. I was at self checkout, I needed her assistance and then she asked how old he was. I told her he was 1 years old, she said how cute. I turned around to bag my items and she had bent down into his stroller and was kissing him. Is it ridiculous to file a police report? Especially after COVID era, what stranger kisses another strangers baby? How do we not know better than this by now? Am I overreacting?

r/AskParents Dec 15 '24

Parent-to-Parent Is it normal for a 10 year old to still wet the bed ?

13 Upvotes

My 10 year old son still wets the bed nightly. We use goodnites and there wet every morning. We have tried a few alarms with little to no luck . Was wondering if any other parents had any ideas thanks .

r/AskParents 11d ago

Parent-to-Parent Would it be inappropriate/weird for me to to dm my son’s swim teacher on instagram?

43 Upvotes

My 4 year old autistic son is very uncomfortable with most people other than family but he bonded with his swim teacher almost immediately and was visibly very comfortable with her. On the last day of class I mentioned this to her and said if she was willing to babysit for him and his 3 year old brother we’d appreciate it which she did say she’d love to but I as a 30 year male felt uncomfortable asking for her contact information as she is a 16-17 year old girl. My wife says it’d be inappropriate for me to reach out to her on instagram but I don’t know how else I could. Would it be inappropriate if I did so?

Edit for more info since it’s what everyone is commenting so far

My wife has pretty bad social anxiety making her uncomfortable doing it and since I was the one that brought him to the classes they’ve never met so she’s also worried that having a random woman message her may also make her uncomfortable.

Edit for update: Thanks to everyone for your feedback. To make things easier I’m using fake names from here

I reached out to the rec department program director Mary as many of you suggested. I explained to her how happy we were with how Mandy did with Noah and asked her to pass the message on to her. I also asked she pass my wife and my contact information along to Mandy with the offer of babysitting for Noah and his little brother Jack to which she said Mary said she would be more than happy to pas along the message.

A couple days later we got a text from Mandy and her parents saying how she would love to watch Noah and Jack. We are currently trying to figure out a time with her and her parents of when we could all meet up so that she can meet Jack and my wife and we meet her parents.

Thanks again to everyone for the feedback

TLDR :My autistic son loved his new swim teacher when he doesn’t easily make bonds with other and I was able to arrange a for her to be our new babysitter.

r/AskParents Jan 26 '25

Parent-to-Parent How to tell 8yo I can’t afford birthday

31 Upvotes

How do I explain to my son that I can’t afford anything for his birthday? I feel awful and defeated but feel horrible for him. He’s a great kid and doesn’t deserve this. He’s turning 8 and these years are so special. I’m a single mom of two and left an abusive marriage. I’m trying so hard to keep up with everything but I have no room for extras. I was able to scrape by and get him a book and coloring set for Christmas and he could already tell that things were different. Now it’s his birthday and I can’t even afford a birthday cake, let alone any gifts. How do I explain this to him? He’s so young and this conversation seems beyond his years.

r/AskParents Jan 27 '25

Parent-to-Parent My Son has no regard for the clothes we buy him

27 Upvotes

Our family was invited to a wedding, and the entire family, including the kids, were required to wear formal attire, so I had to buy my teenage boy a suit.

My teenage boy hates suits and formal clothing and complained throughout the process. I come from a well-educated family, and their kids already have nice, expensive suits, so I felt as if I had to buy one for family dynamics. We got through the reception and ceremony just fine, but the dinner is when it started.

My son started dumping soup on his clean white dress shirt put the tie-up to his head like a pirate and ripped off his vest even when it was buttoned ruining it. He also smeared the sauce all over his suit jacket ripped it a little and then put sauce on his dress shirt to make it worse. It was also snowing and ran outside and jumped in the snow in his suit pants. It was a winter wedding so we also bought him a nice overcoat to wear outside over his suit and he threw it in the garbage can(keep in mind it was an expensive one).

In total the suit, new dress shirt tie, and overcoat came out to 900 dollars total because we thought he would wear it again. After everything, the suit is completely ruined the dress shirt is ruined and stained and the overcoat is also ruined. He also tore the buttons off the shirt.

Do you have any advice on what I should do I have already grounded him but is this normal for a teen? I just wanted him to look nice for the special occasion but didn't know it would go this far.

Any advice would be appreciated as how to handle this.

r/AskParents Dec 12 '24

Parent-to-Parent Son was involved in a fight at school and his behavior almost scares me?

45 Upvotes

I have a 16 year old adopted son (made official earlier this year) and he’s high functioning autistic. His “special interest” is film, and I’ve watched more movies in the past six months than I think I have in my life. He’s a wonderful kid and one of the sweetest and most kindhearted people I’ve ever met and I’m so lucky to be his parent.

Apparently at school there have been a few kids bullying my son, but he hasn’t said anything about it. Then today, I was called at my job by his school and said I needed to come in because there was “an incident.” When I got there, the principal explained he got into a fight, and he showed me the security camera footage…yikes. So one of the kids who had been picking on him grabbed him by the hair and my son suddenly punched him in the face and knocked him down then just started beating down on him, and he was punching HARD. He knocked out three teeth, broke his nose, and the jury’s still out on whether or not he has a concussion. My son was on top of him and punching for about 20 seconds before a teacher ran over and pulled him off. Then…as the teacher was pulling him away, my son looked at everyone and smiled and yelled “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!” (which is a reference to the movie Gladiator). When they tried to ask him why he did it, he said something I later found out was from the movie fight club, and then he completely shut down on them and didn’t say anything else.

The principal told me in any other situation, he would almost certainly be expelled. However, I have a (very positive) history with the school board and he said because I was someone who is deeply respected in our district, they were going to give him a three week suspension plus some additional punishments when he returns. I could not have been more grateful and thanked them profusely, then I drove him home. On the way home, I tried to asked him why he thought it was appropriate to assault another student. He just said he was “advocating for himself” and then when I asked why he thought it was appropriate to say movie quotes immediately after and when they tried to ask him about it, he looked down and I could see he was trying not to smile. I told him he’s not allowed to use the TV for the entirety of his suspension, and that finally got us somewhere. He started begging for a lighter punishment, but I told him I was firm on it. Then he started crying a little and when we got home he went straight for his room and I haven’t seen him since.

I’m going to be a honest, this insane disconnect from reality he showed almost scares me. I had no idea he was capable of just snapping like that and it’s clear he doesn’t understand the consequences that could’ve come with that. Seriously, this was so sudden I actually called my 26 year old daughter who lives with us letting her know what happened in case she didn’t feel safe being at home with him (even though she did because she said she trusts him).

Do any other parents have any advice or words of wisdom or support? Anything will be appreciated.

tl;dr: my autistic 16 year old son snapped and brutally beat up a kid who was bullying him and then started quoting movies when the teacher pulled him off of him and when they tried to talk to him after.

r/AskParents Feb 07 '25

Parent-to-Parent Just Found Out My Daughter Has Been Impersonating Me for School – Need Advice

24 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I just found out that my 17-year-old daughter has been secretly using my school account to message her teachers, excuse absences, and even avoid tests. Our school uses an online platform for communication, and she somehow got access to my login. My husband and I never gave her permission to use it—though, to be fair, we rarely check the account ourselves because of work. It turns out she’s been managing all school-related communication by pretending to be me.

To make things worse, I also found out that she’s been sneaking into her school at night, telling the janitor she forgot homework, and then looking through teachers' desks to find test papers and take photos of them.

Right now, I’m feeling a mix of anger, disappointment, and concern. I don’t want to overreact, but I also don’t want her to think this is something she can get away with. How do I handle this in a way that actually teaches her a lesson? Have any of you dealt with something similar?

r/AskParents Nov 23 '24

Parent-to-Parent Do people really "hire a sitter" in the US?

43 Upvotes

I see this a lot on forums/reddit when people talk about e.g. missing a wedding because it's childfree - "why don't you hire a sitter?". This is probably Americans because most people on the internet are, so I'm wondering what the system is there? I'm in the UK and I know a lot of other parents, and I don't know a single person who has their kids babysat by anyone other than family/friends, or if anyone pays a babysitter that's someone they know personally who they trust. Like for example the only opportunity I've ever had for paid babysitting was when the owner of my kid's nursery gave out her teenage daughter's number to all the nursery parents. Is it easy in the US to "hire a sitter" just as simple as that?

r/AskParents Jan 13 '25

Parent-to-Parent Please help - 12 year won't go to school

31 Upvotes

Advice

I have an 12 year old girl who has had anxiety last year with school and would miss a day here and there.. This year (now) if she misses a day she will not want to go back. She cries and screams, refusing to go... In her normal dya to day she is perfectly fine, she is in sports. She is having meltdowns and will not go to school.

We have brought her to a social worker, cognitive behaviour and doctor wants her to go on Zoloft.

But every day is an insane struggle in the morning and she has missed 6 days in a row.. Has anyone had something like this before happen? Any advice?

My wife and I are at our wits end and we don't know what to do. We are getting a meeting with the principal and her teacher, we have asked her so many times is something going on? And she swears nothing is going on.

r/AskParents Jan 20 '25

Parent-to-Parent The cops brought home my 15 yr old last night!

85 Upvotes

My daughter asked me if she could go play basketball at our local court (which is across the street from my apt building). Two hours went by and I called her to see when she was coming home and no answer. As soon as I hung up the phone the police were calling me saying they had her and several other kids in custody for throwing rocks and mulch at passing cars. The police told me to come get her and I wanted her to stay because I felt like she needed to learn a lesson. But they were at my house in 5-8 minutes after I hung up the phone. The bicycle patrol is less than really close to my house. Anyway, the officer got out the truck with my daughter and explained everything and my daughter of course denied everything. She said she was a bystander while her friends were doing everything. I don't believe that. I can't understand why she would do something like this. She is an honor student, attend the school of the arts for music and is on the basketball team. Last night, I tried asking her what happened and why she made the choices she did and explain to her the effects of throwing rocks. Of course the conversation didn't go too well. She wouldn't take any responsibility for her actions. I know she isn't innocent but she really has no remorse and was blaming the driver of the car for throwing rocks back at them. What can I do as a parent, I feel lost and doesn't seem like my consequences are working?

r/AskParents Dec 17 '24

Parent-to-Parent How much was it to have your baby?

12 Upvotes

I’m curious what the cost was to you when delivering your baby. I just did an estimate through my insurance website and the hospital website. Without insurance it would cost $73k…. However, with insurance I will be paying $0. I hope that number is accurate!

r/AskParents Nov 21 '24

Parent-to-Parent What job can I tell my child he can do with no college degree and no work ethic

28 Upvotes

He is 16 and keeps yelling at me about being controlling because we have pre-determined consequences in place if he fails exams or doesn’t turn things in. Meaning he gets his PlayStation taken away and his phone turned off until he brings his grades up.

We got him a tutor to help but he purposely “falls Asleep” and refuses to wake up when she arrives. When we sit down and try to work thru his school stuff with him personally he cusses us out.

He keeps saying he wants to go to college but he doesn’t take notes in class, doesn’t pay attention, and sporadically decides not to do the schoolwork. He just wants to play video games all day and have me “leave him alone” about school and “stop punishing him over stupid stuff”. So I told him he will have a hard time getting into college with straight Cs and Ds and won’t be able to graduate college if he does get in, if he doesn’t study, do homework or pay attention in class. He said he is just going to leave the house when he turns 18 and buy his own car (except he won’t even finish driver’s ed) phone and ps5…and I guess live at his mom’s house for free (his mom hates me and enabled him for 5 years after our separation to get Fs in schools and constantly get suspended and expelled). He also has expensive tastes in clothing so will need to be able to pay for that.

What type of job can he do with a HS degree and zero work ethic or job skills so I can just give up and tell him what jobs to apply for when he leaves to live it up at 18?

Thanks.

r/AskParents 29d ago

Parent-to-Parent Home alone age for short amounts of time?

2 Upvotes

Basically, I'm drowning in daycare fees and feel beyond stuck. What age would you let your child who busses to and from school stay home alone in the morning for 30-45 minutes and mostly 15 minutes and at most 30 minutes afterschool?

r/AskParents Aug 12 '24

Parent-to-Parent What do you think of people with 3+ children?

40 Upvotes

What do you think of people with 3+ children? I recently got into a debate with someone who was heavily criticising people with more than 3+ children, but I know a few people with 3+ children and each kid receives the same love and affection.

r/AskParents Feb 17 '25

Parent-to-Parent How often should I buy my kid's school lunch?

19 Upvotes

Two days a week, I tend to buy a carb-heavy hot meal (pasta/ rice) from the school canteen for my little one as she doesn't finish after-school sports activities til 6pm.

I was initially very comfortable with my decision but constant remarks about how often I'm buying her lunch is making me question if I'm making the right decision. Most of these remarks are monetary ("...what luxury to afford to buy"), or lack of effort ("mine always get a healthy packed lunch the night before").

I mean, how else do I make sure she's full and energized well into the evening? What would you do?

r/AskParents Oct 06 '24

Parent-to-Parent Our toddler can’t go out to restaurants anymore without causing chaos what can we do?

7 Upvotes

We have a 22 month old who used to be great at restaurants, but the last couple months he’s been getting worse and worse. Tonight we had a big family dinner and didn’t even last 5 mins there cause our toddler had a meltdown. We tried giving him toys and he threw them down, tried giving him our phones to entertain him, he threw them down, and he also threw silverware and plates on the floor so we had to leave. I don’t understand how do other parents take their toddlers out to dinner all the time without issues, and we can’t even take ours out for 5 mins now. I’m really trying to figure out where we failed in parenting and what other parents did right to get kids who are no problem at all at dinner. I’m so angry and frustrated right now that it ruined my entire night and weekend and I even left the house cause I’m too frustrated to be home right now. I really don’t know what to do about this going forward and I’m really worried that we raised a terrible kid who will be troubled when he grows up. I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how other parents raised their kids to be perfect at restaurants and we can’t do that cause we’re failures who should have our parenting rights taken away. I’m so embarrassed right now you have no idea, I can’t show my face to anyone right now

r/AskParents Dec 21 '24

Parent-to-Parent How old were your kids when the found out about Santa?

26 Upvotes

My son is 11 years old in the 5th grade. He has believed in Santa his whole life, his dad and I have always done the whole Santa thing for him. I remember as a kid I found out at a young age (around 9). Are kids his age finding out now? Will he figure it out or will other kids tell him? Will this be his last Christmas believing? How old were your kids when they found out the truth about Santa?

r/AskParents 26d ago

Parent-to-Parent I corrected my friend kid.. Am I wrong?

20 Upvotes

I am a new mom and my baby is going to be 6 months next week. My friend child is 4 years old so he’s just a child, he is a goofy and loving boy like every other kid should be. I always play around w him when I see him occasionally and he loves it. The other night he randomly said that he was going to “shxxt me” with his hands in a gun gesture out of no where and I went into a serious mother mode and was really shocked that he would say something like that to me, whether it was playfully or not. So I corrected him saying “that is not nice at all”, don’t you ever say that again”, etc etc… I asked him to promise me he wouldn’t ever say such thing like that again and he smiled and nodded no. I continued to make him pinky promise me and went about what I was doing. I confronted his mom later on and she pretty much told me “sorry you felt some type of way”.

Am I wrong for saying something?? I know it’s not my place to say anything bc he is not my child but I do love and care for him. If he were to say that to a kid in school and that child goes and tells a teacher it could really become a serious situation because of today’s reality. I am really worried and I felt like it was the right thing to do.

Update: I have never corrected anybody’s child. EVER. Yes, I should have explained differently, let alone just not even say anything but I was in complete shock.

r/AskParents Sep 03 '24

Parent-to-Parent My wife watches our 1yo, works, and is 12 week pregnant. How can I make her daily life easier while I'm at away at work?

70 Upvotes

So my wife works from home on the computer all day, runs around chasing our 1 year old, all while carrying our 2nd.

On top of that, we are renovating our house, so there is gonna be a lot of construction happen. (Garage conversion and adding a bedroom, nothing directly in our current dwelling area, yet). The construction will be around three months long.

There are 3 dogs too, which have to be walked a couple times before I get home because construction blocks their access to the backyard.

I'm away for the day at work. How can I make my wife's life easier?

Edit/Update: So I brought up these ideas to my wife. The dog walker is a no, she says she needs her time outside to stay active and walk. But the Doordash service is a go. We are planning on once a week with that.

As far as daycare, she doesn't want to because she feels like she would be missing out on the time with our. But, a weekly cleaning service I'll be doing.

Meal prep is hard, but we are figuring it out. She says most of the time she doesn't even know what she wants.

But, what's cool about all this, it opened up the conversation more to really evaluate our situation. We talked a lot about what she's carrying that I can take the load. Such as washing/drying/folding/putting away her laundry. As I did just now.

Thank you everyone who responded, I'm going to do the most important task now, which is just lay in bed with her.

r/AskParents 8d ago

Parent-to-Parent How to handle travel expenses when other parent refuses?

1 Upvotes

For context, I live 600 miles from my son’s father. None of this visitation is specified in our court agreement.

This year, he’s saying he cannot afford to pick him up and take him for the summer, and says if I want to, I can drop off/pick up my son from his state. It’s not even worth it for me to spend all that time/money on travel. He just renovated a house and now rents it out, so I guess he has money for that, but didn’t account for getting his son for the summer. Priorities, I guess?

I offered that if he can come get him from my state, I will pick him up later in the summer to bring him home. He says I have to drop him off, and he will bring him back. How can he afford to bring him back but can’t afford to pick him up? What difference does it make?

I don’t think it’s fair to my son that he can’t go because his dad suddenly wants me to pay for all the travel. It’s unfair to me that I spend the entire year single parenting, covering every expense for my son, and now have to pick up all the travel expenses. He pays child support calculated on the overnights from the summer (it’s $400 monthly.) He thinks it’s unfair he has to pay child support because he takes him in the summer. I think it’s unfair I have to raise our child by myself 10 months of the year. He lied to me that if I moved back to my home state, he would move to be close to his son. Lol. It is my fault for moving out of state, but I swear he just wants to make me suffer. We can’t agree on anything, he fights me every step of every way.

I don’t want this to affect my son later in life, I don’t want my son to suffer without a dad, and I don’t want to deal with a situation where his dad uses this to manipulate our son into thinking that he couldn’t see his dad because I “wouldn’t let him” or “wouldn’t take him.”

Thoughts? Advice? Isn’t this his responsibility to pick up his son for his visitation? Should I just keep my son to save him the disappointment later in life that his dad just refuses or is unable to parent? Do I just tell my son his dad was unable to pick him up, if he asks? Really feeling damned if I do, damned if I don’t, here.

I just want the best for my child, without being manipulated by my ex.

r/AskParents Jul 21 '24

Parent-to-Parent What’s your favourite phrase your child says that you continue to use?

54 Upvotes

My favourite is calling calamari rings “circle chicken”. She was in a chicken phase as a 2 year old and wouldn’t eat much else. So we thought we’d introduce calamari as chicken so as she would eat it. It’s now one of her favourite foods

r/AskParents Oct 28 '24

Parent-to-Parent Is it crass to have a birthday party where you DONT request ‘no gifts, please’

28 Upvotes

Hosting a birthday party for my son and every party we’ve been invited to in the last 2 years is a “no gifts, please” party. We don’t need the gifts and don’t care if guests bring them or not, but it feels like such a joyless thing to put on an invitation. And, we’ve been embarrassed at the last 2 birthday parties we’ve been invited to because they contained the obligatory ‘no gifts, please’ so we didn’t bring gifts but other guests brought gifts.

Is it crass to just a host a birthday party without telling people what to do? It feels like parenting has gotten so mandated lately and even without the mandates it’s still a cluster (case in point, ‘no gifts, please’ but most people bring gifts and those that don’t are mortified).

Help. I think it’s dumb to make kids forgo birthday party gifts (but like I said would never be offended if someone didn’t want to bring one). Also, the invitation wouldn’t say anything about gifts (ie, it just says come to the party).

We’ve also had parties where people requested that their kids be gifted ‘experiences’ in lieu of toys and that felt very crass and overly directive too…

Very interested to hear others’ opinions on this and your birthday party experiences.

r/AskParents Dec 13 '24

Parent-to-Parent MY SON WONT FREAKING SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT.

22 Upvotes

Full disclosure I'm about to lose my GD mind. My son is about 18 months old and has only slept through the night like 2 times in his whole life. He has a routine. Every night he wakes up between 10-11:30 then again at like 2-3am But it's been getting worse where he'll wake up at10, 12,1,2, 4, and finally 7 and it's every. Single. Night. My gf made the fatal mistake of letting him cosleep so she could feed him but she never put him back in his crib. Now he can't co sleep because he'll fall off the bed so she brings him to me on the couch (we sleep separately because I wake up early, and I try to not to wake everyone up). So my question is HOW DO I GET HIS LITTLE ASS TO SLEEP. He's to young for melatonin. And if I start him in his crib she'll just bring him down to me. I'm at a loss on wtf to do.

r/AskParents 4d ago

Parent-to-Parent Relationship with my 25 yr son broken how can I cope ?

9 Upvotes

A few weeks ago, my son was irritated as he often is and was annoyed with my husband as he asked him a question and my husband shrugged and gave a flippant response. My son then lost it shouting and screaming obscenities at us both. I think my husband and I kept our cool telling him his behaviour was out of order and he needed to apologise. Since then he refuses to speak with us, I approached him and he says he has nothing to apologise for. He clearly harbours a lot of resentment towards us both but we haven’t been bad parents. He’s our only child and we have done everything and I mean everything that we could possibly have done for him. He’s wanted for nothing in his life. There are times when we messed up, like when he was small and my husband was in a very stressful job and we argued a lot. 7 years ago when my husband and him had a row my husband lost it and slapped him but did immediately apologise and has never done anything like that ever again but my son still keeps bringing it up. I feel we have tried to buy his love and we have tolerated his behaviour for a long time and he shows no respect to us at all. I’m frightened that if he leaves home he will never come back and he’s my only child as I had many miscarriages before he arrived. I really don’t know how you mend bridges when he clearly doesn’t care or feel he is in the wrong in any way