Mom Says Other Carpool Parent Should Have Called Her Son To 'Wake Him' When He Wasn't Outside & Blames Her For Him Missing School
She seems to have confused a carpool mom with a hotel concierge...
SB Arts Media, RaksyBH / Shutterstock via Canva Pro "It takes a village to raise a child," as the saying goes, but one mom might be taking that aphorism just a touch too far.
A mom on Reddit shared the sticky situation she got into with another when they joined the same school carpool. In a post to Reddit's "r/AmItheA--hole" (AITA) subreddit, she described how the entitled parents' expectations turned out to be more in line with a hotel concierge's job than a carpool mom's.
A carpool mom got blamed for another mom's son missing school.
As anyone who has done it will tell you, running the school carpool gauntlet is hard enough without dealing with entitled parents having outsized expectations. TikTok is full of stories from harried moms and dads getting caught up in all kinds of drama while just trying to get their kids to and from school.
Given that the carpool mom on Reddit carts around five different kids, the drama she deals with is probably on a whole other level. But that didn't stop another mom from insisting it was her responsibility to make sure her 16-year-old son got to school on time.
Her teenage son was not ready to go to school when the carpool mom showed up.
The Reddit mom drives her own teens and three others to school in the carpool, which is a lot of people to try and get to school on time. She shares these duties with three other parents.
Everything went fine the first couple rounds of carpooling, until one morning when a 16-year-old boy never came out of the house when the carpool mom showed up. She writes that she had even had her daughter text all the kids to remind them of what time she'd be picking them up. "She did and showed me the positive responses from the twins," she writes, but "the 3rd kid didn’t respond."
When she got to the third kid's house, he wasn't waiting outside like usual, so she sent her daughter to go knock on the door. Nobody answered, so so I sent my older to knock on the door. "She knocked twice and no answer," she writes, "so I just took the other kids to school."
That did not go over well with the boy's mom at all.
The boy's mom berated the carpool mom for not taking responsibility for waking her son up for school.
"When I got to work at 8:15 I had 3 missed calls and a couple of angry voicemails from the kid’s mom calling me an [a--hole] for not picking up her kid," the carpool mom writes. She called the mom back and explained the situation — how her daughter had texted to confirm the pick-up time and had knocked on the door several times — but the mom wasn't hearing it.
"The mom said I should have called her kid to 'wake him up' before I left my house, and that I should have 'waited until he was ready,'" she writes. She replied as most of us would. "I told her that waking her kid up is not my responsibility," and explained that waiting around for her son would have made all of the kids late for school. "She called me a b--ch and hung up on me."
Other parents in the carpool reported having problems with the boy's mom in the past.
The carpool mom, deeply offended by the other mom's tirade, called the other parents in the carpool and dropped out, saying she would not be able to take the other parents' kids to school.
That's when she found out that other moms and dads have had tons of problems with this kid's entitled parents in the past. "The other mom told me that no, she’d had trouble with this other kid and his mom too," she writes. The other parent suggested they kick the boy who overslept and his mom out of the carpool instead. "If I was willing to still drive her kids she was still willing to drive mine," she said, "essentially getting this kid & his mom kicked out of carpool."
She knows the other mom was out of line, but she still feels bad about how it all went down. Her fellow Redditors were not quite so empathetic, however.
Parents on Reddit said that the other mom was asking way too much of the carpool mom, and experts agree.
"She’s nuts," one Reddit user wrote. "It’s insane to expect anyone else to be responsible for getting your kid up and ready for school. I wouldn’t even feel badly about it. That level of entitlement is astonishing."
A teacher on Reddit weighed in as well, saying parents like these are all too common nowadays. "I once had a girl that kept missing first period (and only first).... Mom SCREAMED at me over the phone when I told her no, I would not fax 'all of [her schoolwork]' to her office."
Another Redditor pointed out that "most parents would have had their kid call or text to apologize for making you wait," and as a social psychologist, Dr. Susan Newman told us in December 2022, a kid who "pass[es] the blame when things go wrong" is a key sign of "entitlement issues" arising from a parent who refuses to "teach [their] kids to take responsibility for their actions."
The video below reveals psychologists attribute all kinds of detrimental impacts to kids from being raised by entitled parents, from hindering their emotional development to drastically injuring their self-confidence.
But for lots of parents on Reddit, what stuck out to them was simply the entitled moms' audacity. "Should [the carpool mom] have also gone into their house and cooked him breakfast?" one Redditor cracked. "Maybe get some cleaning done and some laundry going? I’m gonna qualify this as not [her] responsibility and agree on the entitlement."
Yeah, at the end of the day, she's a carpool mom, not a hotel concierge. Wake-up calls are not really part of the deal!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.