A mom on Reddit ignited a debate about the kind of emotional labor people expect from young girls. In this case, a teacher’s request upset her 9-year-old daughter so much, the mom felt like she had to pull her out of a waterpark field trip. And things really spiraled from there.
The mom recently took to the popular “Am I The A**hole” sub-Reddit to explain that her daughter Bryn was excited to head out on a field trip to a local waterpark with her classmates until she suddenly came home and said she didn’t want to go anymore. When asked why, she initially didn’t want to say because she was worried her mom would think she was a “bad person.” Eventually she explained the issue.
“Her teacher ‘Ms. N’ has forced her to be the ‘buddy’ of her classmate ‘Ben’ for the entirety of the trip,” she explained. “She was to ride the bus with Ben to and from the trip, eat lunch with him, and go on all the rides with him instead of spending time with her friends.”
This mom was “horrified, not only because Ms. N had made Bryn do such a thing, but also because she had made her believe she was a bad person for not wanting to.”
When the Reddit user sent an email to the teacher questioning her about the situation, Mrs. N doubled down and said that Bryn “has to be Ben’s buddy.” So she pulled her daughter out of the field trip, booking tickets to the waterpark for the two of them on the same day so she would still be able to go.
After discussing the situation with several parents, there was something of a snowball effect. “In total, eight kids (out of a class of twenty) are either not going, or going with us. Today I got an email from Ms. N saying that because almost half of the class isn’t going, they either have to raise the cost for the other students or not go at all. She practically begged me to let Bryn go and tell all the other parents to let their kids go, promising she wouldn’t make Bryn do anything she didn’t want to do.”
While this mom was worried she was the “a**hole” in this situation, many people on Reddit had her back. Especially those who were also expected to do emotional labor for fellow classmates as children.
“As a student who was often expected to put up with ‘mistreatment’ to be a buddy to other students because I was well behaved and tried to be nice....you are doing right by your kid,” one Redditor commented.
“As an educator I'm so sick of teachers being lazy and using this for classroom management,” another said. “It's unfair to all of the students involved and teaches all the wrong lessons.”
“One of my girls was always put in similar situations until my wife stepped in and demanded that the school stop it,” one more shared. “The school more or less admitted that the students who were paired up with my daughter were difficult for the teachers to handle, and that my daughter was very good at calming them down from temper tantrums and at providing other emotional support. That's not our daughter's job — that's the school's job.”
Asking children to do emotional labor in ways that make them uncomfortable sets a trend that’s difficult to change. Especially when those children become parents. It’s our job to make kids’ lives easier, not the opposite.
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