Every parent makes some mistakes, but there are some parenting decisions that are beyond atrocious. Whether it's borderline abusing their children or just letting their children do whatever they want without consequence, these disastrous displays of parenting will not do anybody well in the long run.
Below are some of the more awful displays of parenting, as told on AskReddit. Check them out! All points have been edited for clarity.
Lock ‘Em Up, Throw Away The Key
“I was waiting in line for a ferry in Washington state. There is a big parking lot and everyone waits in their cars till you load up on the ferry.
The guy next to me obviously does not know I am looking at him and he turns around and smacks a crying 2-year-old while his 6-year-old daughter is watching. He hit him 7-8 times. He looks over and notices I am watching and tries to pretend nothing happened.
I get out of my truck and start to head over to the bomb dog cop they have around. As I am heading over there he runs up stops me and asks me what I think I am doing. I kept trying to get around him without a confrontation, he kept pushing me but I was able to sneak by so he tripped me. I got up walked into plain view of the officer and the dude punches me in the back of the head then spit in my face. The officer saw all of this and came up and put the guy in cuffs. All of this is in view of the small children in his car.
So I took a punch and got spat on my face but in the end, the children were taken into protective custody and I pressed full charges. There was another witness to the guy hitting the kid and they had security footage of the guy assaulting me so I didn’t even have to go to court.”
The Most Heartbreaking Of Situations
“When I was a cashier, this mom came in with her son’s piggy bank. The kid was with her and must have only been about 6 years old. He wanted to buy a candy bar with his money, but the mom told him no, that his money was going to help support the family.
She then proceeded to buy a 6-pack of brews with the money while the kid watched. The poor boy had tears in his eyes the whole time.
I refused service to her, and the manager ended up ringing her up. She was paying with mostly pennies and nickels, and while she was distracted I saw the boy walk over to the candy rack and wipe the tears from his eyes.
I asked him what was wrong and he told me it had taken him three years to save that money, but his mom didn’t have a job so she took it from him.
I bought him the candy bar he wanted and gave him a bunch of quarters for the gumball/toy machines.
His mom saw him trying to get one of those sticky hands from the machine and then took all the quarters he had from him.”
They Don’t Know Any Better
“A few years ago I was waiting at a bus stop when I saw a mother and daughter who couldn’t have been more than 2 years of age, in a rush to catch a bus. It was the mother in a rush, pulling and yelling at the daughter to hurry up. Little kids like that have bad legs and are not very fast, or maybe understand urgency. The poor kid was trying. They eventually missed the bus and the mother shouted at the kid, ‘Look at what YOU did! We missed the bus!’
The kid just replied. ‘I’m sorry, Mommy’ while looking kind of confused and on the verge of crying.
Honestly, the kid looked light enough to briefly carry, the mother didn’t have a stroller or anything to carry besides her purse. This is not the worst but that kinda stuff will make a kid think they are to blame when they continue to grow up treated that way.”
Mom Of The Year Award
“Just a few days ago I was at a cashpoint, at around 10.30pm when some woman pulls up beside me in her 3-door Vauxhall Corsa. In the rain, she sends her kid (who couldn’t have been older than 9) who was wearing a bathrobe, running into the chip shop to get a bag of chips.
He came back to the car without any and said he didn’t have the right amount of money, and she hurled all sorts of abuse ‘I’ve given you the right amount, now get back into the shop and get the food’
Then a few minutes later he comes back to the car, soaking wet, with a bag of food, and she starts yelling that, ‘He better have gotten the order right because it doesn’t look right’.
And she yells at him to get in the car and she just speeds off.”
No Simple Pleasures Here
“I was standing outside a supermarket a couple of years back, and a woman walks out with a toddler in a pushchair, and a kid who might have been about 7 or 8 walking maybe 5 feet behind her.
The older kid had a small rubber ball and was bouncing it on the ground and catching it. He seemed perfectly happy, it wasn’t making any noise or bouncing around or anything, it wasn’t bothering anyone. He was just bouncing and catching his ball as he walked.
The woman noticed this after a minute, spun around and grabbed him hard by the upper arm and then shouted right into his face ‘If you keep bouncing that stupid ball I’m going to SMASH YOUR FACE IN’, shook him hard once and then just turned around and walked on with the pushchair.
The poor kid just looked so… emptied. Like he wasn’t even allowed this one small pleasure.
It doesn’t matter how annoying you find it when your kid bounces a ball, that’s just never an okay thing to say to your child.”
Not Everyone Wants To Be A Star
“An irate mother of a girl in a private school’s music program made a big scene in front of the faculty and students because her daughter had not been selected to sing a solo in a school concert.
The student had been very clear to the faculty that she didn’t want the part, nor was her voice suited for it. Still, her overbearing mother insisted that she audition against her will.
As a result, the girl was yanked out of the school she loved by her parents and embarrassed, all because the mother’s ego required that her daughter be ‘the shining star’ in front of others.”
Dogs Always Know Best
“I lived under some horrible people for eight months.
They would have parties in the middle of the week till 2 am. Regularly.
But, in one particularly disturbing story, their little girl around 10-12, was having regular night terrors. She would wake up screaming and we could hear the dad stomping down the hallway and slam open the door and start screaming at the top of his lungs
‘You better knock that nonsense off! Stop crying! They’re nothing but DREAMS! YOU HEAR ME DREAMS! it’s nothing worth crying over!’
They were the worst neighbors ever. We never felt sorry that our dog barked all day. He hated them. When their kids started crying our dog started to cry and whine and howl in sympathy. But the adults he would bark and snarl at. I could trust his instincts of a good human.”
Awful Things Happen With Persistence
“I was a lifeguard for four years in my teens. Long story short, parents expect the lifeguards to do their job for them- either they just drop their kids off, or they don’t pay attention. This was a city pool. We didn’t have too many terrible things, but we still saw our fair share of weird stuff.
This guy, let’s call him Guy, probably late twenties early thirties, dove head first into the very shallow kiddie pool. I saw it, blew the whistle, and gave him a head shake. He acknowledged, rubs his chest because he scraped it on the bottom, and I thought it was over with.
Five minutes later, he dives head first into the kiddie section of the pool about two feet deep. I blow the whistle, call him over, and talk to him sternly about how I’m not reprimanding him for any other reason than that I don’t want to have to backboard him for a spinal. Guy agrees, says it was stupid, apologizes and walks away.
Guy walks away from me, over to this 6-foot water slide we have for the little kids. This is the cutest water slide but still towers over its primary users- 2-year-olds. Along his way to the slide, Guy scoops up what I assume is his son, and puts him at the top of the slide- still standing up. This kid couldn’t be more than 2-3 years old, had floaties on and all. Guy points at me, and over the regular pool ruckus, I hear him yell ‘See that lifeguard? He told me he wants you to jump off the side of the slide.’ He then proceeds to point at the concrete.
I see the kid’s knees buckle as he goes to jump, and my heart sinks like a rock to my stomach. I immediately shoot out of my chair and yell ‘HEY!’.
Two things of note: First, as a guard, you’re never to stand on your tower unless you see someone in apparent danger. This is so other guards have a clear sign that something’s going down, and to pay attention/get help. Secondly, I have a deep voice. A very deep voice. I’m quiet often, but when I get upset, I utilize it to my advantage.
What one of my friends later described as ‘The Voice of God’ echoes across the pool, and the entire place falls quiet. Guy immediately puts his son down on the ground and starts walking towards me. I call over my manager, explain it all, and she tells him he will be removed by the police after any other incidents. He apologizes, then goes on about his pool experience.
Two hours later, I’m in the 5-foot section. Guy is walking along with friends, sees me in the chair, and goes ‘Watch this.’ He runs and dives in really deep.
In front of his son, who was behind the legs of some other bro and peeks out after his dad submerges, Guy floats up to the surface of the pool- face down and unresponsive.
We had to evacuate the pool, stabilize and backboard him.
Guy kept entering his name into Darwin’s Lottery, and won.”
Sugar Is Bad News Bear
“I was outside Tesco a few weeks ago when I saw a young woman and her three quite cute kids. She was on her phone obviously waiting for someone to pick them up and they were entertaining themselves. One of them, a boy about 6 years of age, had a go and managed to pick up one of the big weights that were holding down the corner of one of those RAC stands outside the shop while the hi-vis guy was looking the other way. He staggers over to the woman with it, so proud of himself, going, ‘Mum! Mum! Look what I’m doing! Mum! Look! Mum! Look what I’m doing! Look, Mum!’ Eventually, she tears her eyes away from the screen and sees what he’s doing. She screams at him, ‘Put that down now! You can’t do that! What are you doing!? Put it back where it came from! Don’t pick it up again!’ The kid was all flustered, trying to do what he was told, while the RAC man quietly took it from him and gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
Also, a mother who was saying her young toddler wouldn’t go to sleep at night. She handed him a beaker of something while we were talking and I asked what he was drinking– tea. I looked surprised and she apparently thought I was surprised by a toddler liking tea and she was like, ‘They like it if you put a couple of sugars in! He always wants it now!’ I explained that maybe the caffeine wasn’t helping him sleep and she gave me the most skeptical look ever.”
Hindsight Is Always 20/20
“A couple years ago, I was on a shuttle in Yosemite. A little girl approximately age 10 had this nasty tight cough. Being in the medical field, I was concerned and asked if she had asthma. The father answered in a curt and rather annoyed tone that she was fine. They were doing controlled burns in the park which was causing my own asthma to act up. The girl was not fine as she clearly was struggling to breathe.
I bit my tongue but to this day wish I had somehow persuaded the father to get her help.”
Too Easy To Pushover
“I was buying a Nintendo DS game, another 5-year-old child was here begging her mom to buy one game. she eventually accepted after begging enough.
Then this kid proceeded to ask another game. The mother said, ‘No, you chose this one first, we get this one.” But the kid was begging.
Eventually, after enough begging, he got her to go ‘Okay, you pick this one instead.’ But the kid was still begging, because he wanted the first game he chose too.
‘It’s one of the other! We’re not getting both!’ mother voice started building, kid whim going back and forth between the two games he wanted.
Eventually, the mother sighed, and proceeded without another word to buy both games”
Just A Casual Unsupervised Child
“I was at a family reunion a few years back, me and my friend who we brought along decided to go swimming in the hotel pool. We were swimming and this little girl tried playing with us so we played with her, after a while my friend told me ‘I don’t think anyone is watching her’ so we ask her and she said ‘no’. This girl said she was five and she was with her brothers, I went to the front desk and told them their is a little girl unsupervised in the pool and told them her name, and they called the family.
We waited with the girl for a few hours and even fed her. Finally, someone did come and get her. ‘Are You Paul’s Kids?’ the man said and they responded with a ‘yes’ and they left. The sad part is the Dad couldn’t be bothered to watch or come get his 5 year old kid and her like 8 year old brothers.”
Set A Good Example, Please!
“I work in a pharmacy and we have one woman who is constantly being an awful mom, we’ll call her Jane.
One day, I was working with the pharmacist and we both happened to be on the phone with other patients when she came up. I saw her come up and acknowledged her, put my hand over the receiver and said I’d be right with her. Most people understand when this happens but Jane did NOT. She started literally screaming like a banshee and told her kids to ‘mess this store up’ so I had to basically hang up on the person on the phone because they were literally breaking things.
I came over and asked what the emergency was and she told me she didn’t want to wait. I rang up her scripts and for one of them, she had to pay an extra dollar, and then she lost her marbles again and started calling me every name in the book and having her kids tear up our store again. Another one of our patients was waiting in the store and saw her acting all crazy and was like ‘Hey I’ll pay for you, but here’s the thing- you need to learn how to act right. Your behavior is appalling and you need to set an example for your kids, I heard you say you’ve ‘been arrested and don’t mind going back’ really, that’s what you want your kids to hear? That’s how you want them to behave? Be better.’
That woman is my hero, she’s amazing all the time. The awful lady has since been banned from our pharmacy and her kids’ dad now has full custody.”
Get This Kid A Drink!
“I use to work in a country pub, just outside of London which was what you would call a child-friendly, with a large back garden for children to play in and so on.
There was one occasion when a large group of, parents and children turned up to the pub and started having a few brews in the garden. I was working the floor at this point and clearing glasses where possible. I had been over to their table a few times and was aware that they were starting to get a little bit loud, by this time it had been two hours since they arrived.
It was roughly an hour later that I was working behind the bar when all of a sudden I noticed on the opposite side to be a child of around 7 years old boy, holding some money and asking for a brew. Of course, I was shocked by this, as the child proceeded to tell me it was for his dad.
I was so taken aback I walked the child back over to his parents’ table, where I explained that (as they should have been fully aware of), I was unable to serve to anyone under 18 years old. However, one of the fathers started berating me and asking me if I think it was funny to suggest they would let their child drink brew.
To this day I have never gotten over this moment, how or why would they even consider sending their kid to get a brew for them? And how could they not have thought that I would question their actions?”
Grandparents Need Not Apply
“I used to nanny two kids, and the boy was very shy and cautious just by nature, and it took time for him to get used to new things and people. His grandparents lived an hour away and would sometimes babysit, but of course a two-year-old doesn’t really remember people they only see once every couple months.
One day the grandparents came over to babysit and brought a new kiddie pool. The boy had played in a kiddie pool as a baby the previous summer, but of course, he doesn’t remember that…he’s two.
So the grandparents set up their gift, fill it with water, and I got the kids changed. I’d always stay an hour or so after the grandparents arrived to make sure the kids were comfortable with them first. Grandpa was so excited for the little boy to see the gift, but the little boy wasn’t sure about it because he’s basically never seen a pool before.
I started getting him used to it, put his sister in, dipped my toes in, encouraged him to put his hand out and feel the water. It was taking time, but he was warming up.
Well, grandpa ran out of patience. He grabbed the kid and just plopped him into the pool. The little boy immediately started panicking and crying, and then grandpa started mocking him for crying about ‘a little water’.
I took the kid inside and told his parents what happened. Scaring a shy toddler is pretty mean, but mocking a baby for crying when he’s scared? That is just foul.”
That Kid Will Grow Up Nice 🙂
“I was in a department store and this couple was shopping with their 3 kids. The boy child, who looked to be around 8, picked up a hairbrush and smacked his sister, who started crying. The mom said, ‘Alex, don’t do that, that isn’t nice’.
The boy replied, ‘Forget you!’. The mom, still ignoring her crying daughter, says ‘Come on Alex don’t say that’, to which Alex then hits his mother with the hairbrush. The mom bends down and says, ‘Alex that really isn’t nice’.
Alex responds by slapping his mother across the face and saying ‘Forget you!’. The mom simply says ‘Alex that wasn’t necessary’ and kept on shopping. The dad, he just watched all of this like it wasn’t his problem and eventually just walked away.”