Woman slammed for refusing to give her nine-year-old daughter’s friend enough food during sleepover
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: A woman was slammed online for deciding how much her daughter's friend should eat. The woman, who goes by the username u/kewlkat2012, took to Reddit to post the incident, titled 'AITA for monitoring the portion sizes of my daughter’s overweight friend?'
The woman wrote, “My daughter ‘Lily’ 9F recently had a sleepover birthday party with 5 of her close friends, including ‘Tina’ (also 9F). Tina is significantly overweight and well on her way to becoming obese, and I’ve noticed her parents (both also overweight) have not taught her proper nutrition and portion control.”
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‘It isn’t her fault she is overweight’
She continued, “She’s always the first to reach for a cookie or a donut, and consume three times as much as most kids her age. I feel sorry for her because it seems it isn’t her fault she is overweight but her parents’ fault, and I worry she will develop severe weight issues later in life. At the sleepover party, I decided I was going to try to monitor her portions and nutrition as much as possible.”
The woman said that for the children’s party she “ordered pizza for dinner, and I imposed a two-slice limit, knowing none of Lily’s other friends would eat more, but Tina was begging for a third piece and I said no. Then, for the cake, I cut everyone a small piece, and again this wasn’t a problem for anyone but Tina was really upset and on the verge of tears. For breakfast, I imposed similar limits, and when Tina’s parents picked her up I heard her say, ‘I’m starving.’”
‘Her daughter had to follow the same rules as all the other girls’
Later, the woman revealed that she even “got a call from Tina’s mom calling me fatphobic and telling me it’s not my job to parent her child. This ticked me off. I could have said, ‘It’s your job, but you’re not doing it, so somebody else has to,’ but I just politely explained to her that her daughter had to follow the same rules as all the other girls and hung up.”
The woman wrote, “My husband got home later that day though and after I explained what happened he said I could relax a little since it is a birthday party after all,” before adding, “We went back and forth for a bit, but the point that stuck with me was that while I held everyone to the limits I put, I DID set them specifically with Tina in mind and with the assumption (which held true) that only Tina would want to eat more. Does that make me the AH?”
‘Fat-shaming a child’
Lots of people shared their thoughts below the now-deleted post as a user said, “YTA. Especially since it was a sleepover. If you'd have 2-hour party and you didn't serve enough food to satisfy one guest's appetite, she could have at least gone home immediately afterwards and had something else to fill herself up. Tina's appetite control, or lack thereof is none of your business. And restricting her for 1 day isn't going to have any kind of positive impact on her life. You just invited a child to your daughter's birthday party and chose to make her miserable. How positively inhospitable of you!”
A second user commented, “YTA. This is the core of it here. You are NOT Tina's parent, and it is NOT your job to parent the child. You have no idea what could be going on. Yes, you see her eat food that you determine to be unhealthy. Every child does, at some point or another. But is there a medical reason for her weight?
“Is there a reason her parents aren't addressing the nutrition, OR are they addressing the nutrition privately in their own way in their own home but not making that info public? What it comes down to is, we're talking about a nine-year-old child who is hungry. If there's a child at my kid's birthday party who is hungry, I'm going to feed them. If it bothered me that much WHAT they were eating, I would offer healthy options: fruit, veggie sticks, low-sugar fruit juice ice pops, etc. But it's a birthday party, let 'em be kids.”
“Exactly. OP deemed Tina's choice of food to be unhealthy, so what does she do? She served Tina Pizza and cake... Clearly OP doesn't care about health and nutrition, just about judging people, being ignorant, and fat-shaming a child,” another added.
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