Mom Wonders If She Is Wrong For Asking Daughter's Father To Stop Giving Her Lunch Money

A mother recently took to Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole” subreddit with a family conflict that was turning one of her daughters away from her.

While she was frustrated about the disagreement between her family, she came to Reddit’s “AITA” to gain insight from anonymous third parties as to who was in the wrong, as so many others have.

In the mother’s post she shares that she has two daughters: Emily, who is 16 and mostly lives with her ex, and her stepdaughter Laura, who is 15 and lives with her.

However, Emily and Laura go to the same school together, and the mother’s ex gives Emily a weekly allowance of $25 for lunch. Meanwhile, the mother and her partner cannot afford to give Laura that kind of money.

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She goes on to explain, “Emily's and Laura's school is down the street from a lot of restaurants so, instead of buying school lunches, she leaves campus to buy herself and her friends lunch. The problem is she sees Laura at school and won't get her anything even though she gets her friends lunch all the time.”

When she spoke to Emily about it, she said it was because Laura couldn’t pay her back like her friends could.

She tried to convince Emily to but Laura lunch, recounting, “Emily knows we can't afford to give Laura that kind of money and I know she works part time and gets an extra allowance from her dad so I asked her to occasionally buy Laura lunch to make her feel better. She refused.”

The mother called her ex after Laura was crying one day when Emily got food from her favorite restaurant without bringing her anything.

As she explains in her post, “[She] told him that he needs to stop giving Emily lunch money and have her make her own lunches because she was hurting Laura.”

But Emily’s father felt that Laura’s feelings were not up to them, saying “that if she wants to buy lunch off campus, she should get a part time job like Emily.”

Laura’s has commitments with sports as well as mental health restrictions that keep her from working part time, so her mother felt that this was unfair.

Now, however, her ex told Emily about what her mother asked, and Emily has stopped speaking to her “except to say that she's going to stay at her dad's full time for a while.”

The users of Reddit quickly decided that she was the a**hole.

The users of Reddit definitely did not side with this mother, and the comments reflect that accordingly.

In one case, many users point out that Emily’s father isn’t exactly giving Emily an exorbitant or unreasonable allowance for lunch, and that trying to take that away is unnecessary.

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And many point out that, since Emily is also working part time, a big chunk of the money spent going out to restaurants is probably her own. Many users express in her comments that their mother is teaching Laura that she is entitled to Emily’s own earned money.

Others felt that, regardless of the little details, she should not be telling her ex how to parent just because she couldn’t do the same for Laura, and that she shouldn’t be focused on taking away from Emily just because she has something that makes her happy.

Overall, there were very few positive comments in favor of the mother, and some accused her of failing to even consider the confrontation from anyone else’s perspective.

Comments like this seem to imply that they believe the mother didn’t truly expect to be labeled “the a**hole,” but merely wanted outside support.

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Amanda Hartmann is a writer and editorial intern at YourTango who writes on various topics such as entertainment and news.