As a parent, you’re going to want to defend your kids from rude adults. Even if those rude adults happen to be family .
As one mom on Reddit recently learned, some in-laws need to be put in their place every now and then. But when she dished the same kind of behavior to her sister-in-law that the SIL dished to her son, she began to wonder if it was wrong.
A user posted her story to Reddit to ask if she had been in the wrong.
The user, who goes by UnderstandingOk1255, asked if she had been a jerk ” for doing the same thing to my sister-in-law that she does to my son? ” She then went into the story, which ends on an unexpected note.
“I (32f) have a brother, ‘Dave’ (35m), who’s married to ‘Sarah’ (29f),” she says. “They don’t have children yet.”
“I have a son who just turned four and a three-month-old daughter with my husband (39m). My husband and I live in Belgium most of the time, but we travel back to visit my family about once a month (in England).”
“At home, we speak both English and French to our children (my husband is Belgian), and right now, my son is in this very sweet phase where he’ll sometimes mix up the two languages and say a couple of words in English in a French sentence or vice-versa.”
“This has never posed a problem to us, and even the staff at his nursery have reassured us that it’s very common and they tend to grow out of it once they start at school.”
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According to the user, the SIL doesn’t think this is cute at all.
“My sister-in-law has decided that this is a problem, so when we’re visiting my parents and she notices my son doing this, she’ll correct him, but she does so really rudely, whereas my husband and I will just gently correct him.”
She then talks about how, while visiting her family, Sarah began ignoring the son if he spoke in French.
“My husband was talking to my dad outside and I was feeding my daughter in the other room, and I’d left Louis with Sarah and Dave.”
“When I came back downstairs, Louis was crying, and I managed to understand that he’d tried to ask Sarah for a drink… but that she’d just ignored him.”
When the user asked Sarah, she only said he needs to speak correctly and that she “shouldn’t be ‘ignoring my son’s obvious speech issues.'”
“… That night at the dinner table, Sarah asked me to pass her something, but she said it in ‘bad’ English (she IS English, I just mean that she asked for it in slang).”
“I had a bit of an epiphany and I just decided to totally ignore her. She asked again, and I did the same thing. My brother asked why I was ignoring his wife and I said that I’m not able to reply if she can’t speak English correctly and that it’s wrong of him to ignore her obvious issues with grammar.”
“Everyone’s pretty pissed off with me and I admit it was incredibly childish, but she was needlessly being a [expletive] to my baby.”
The user ends the story by asking if she should apologize to her sister-in-law. Most people agreed that Sarah kind of deserved it.
One commenter wrote, “You completely passive-aggressively defended your kid against a childish adult. Was it petty? Yes. Was it deserved? Hell yes.”
Others think that, no matter how petty OP was, the SIL was out of line.
Another commenter said, “Yeah, I know I’d have been a lot ruder if someone watched my kid cry about wanting a drink and decided that was the right time to enforce their expectations on him about his grammar. OP may have been petty, but her SIL was cruel.”
Others shared their own parenting experiences.
“Your son is 4. Even if he only knows one language, it would be understandable if he can’t form correct sentences every time. I have a 14 month old son and I hope I can help him be bilingual like me. If someone does this to him, they’re TA and I’ll treat them as such.”
For the most part, people were pretty appalled by what the SIL tried to pull off.
“SIL needs to learn that you do not parent other people’s children. Especially when they’ve asked you not to.”
No matter how people saw the story, though, no one thought that OP should apologize.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
