Parents, how would you react if another parent constantly, intentionally got your kid’s name wrong ? This is the predicament one dad found himself in recently.
To determine whether or not he was being a jerk or not for the way he reacted, he posted his story — and asked for feedback — on a subreddit dedicated to determining whether people are being jerks.
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It’s quite a read.
“Am I the [jerk] for yelling at another parent during pickup?”
To get things rolling, let’s get the details out of the way: OP has a son named Robin. It’s a unisex name , and a pretty common one at that. Famous male Robins include Robin Hood (in the fictional realm) and Robin Williams (in the real world).
Another parent keeps calling his son ‘Robert.’
“Now, the first few weeks I brushed it off because learning the names of a bunch of different kids is hard,” OP wrote . “I would just tell her when she came back over with my son, ‘Actually, his name is Robin.’ I’ve said this almost every single day for over a month now.”
Eventually, OP was more firm.
He writes that he made a point of introducing himself and saying, “I’m Robin’s father. You might recognize me from pickup. By the way, his name isn’t Robert.”
The mom’s response was wild. “She said Robin is a girl’s name,” OP wrote. “And not a good nickname for Robert, so she’ll call him by his real name instead. I tried to correct her, since Robin isn’t a nickname, but she wandered away. The next time she walked up to my car I got annoyed and said “I’m here for Robin. R O B I N.”
At this point, she’s just being malicious.
After she called the kid Robert another time, OP writes that he asked in a very loud voice what her problem was. The commotion caused a teacher to come to the scene, and this teacher evidently didn’t understand what was going on. “The teacher looked at me like I had three heads,” OP wrote.
There’s another layer.
The mom who refuses to call Robin by his proper name also calls another kid, a girl named Charlie, by the wrong name: Charlotte. Charlie’s parents and Robin’s parents have discussed the fact that another parent in their sphere has a weird hangup about unisex names.
OP wasn’t being a jerk.
The verdict is in, and Reddit believes OP was in the right.
“I am a teacher and we try very hard to honor student names,” wrote one commenter . “The parent in this scenario is trying to push her gender bias on your son and on all of you.”
It’s hard not to see a clear villain in all this.
Some commenters called out the woman’s behavior for being bullying.
“If this were another child doing this to Robin, I’d expect the school to intervene and stop the behavior,” wrote a commenter .
There’s an update.
OP acknowledges that it’s a bit anti-climactic, but at least it’s closure. After the issue was discussed with school administrators, the mom in question refused to look OP in the eye or call Robin by any name at all. So she’s angry, but at least she isn’t calling kids by the wrong name anymore.
How would you handle this?
Some names are tougher than others, but there’s a big difference between slipping up and getting someone’s name wrong versus intentionally using a different name, even after you’ve been corrected. Let us know what you think of this story, and how you might handle this situation, in the comments section.
