14-Year-Old Girl Won't Stop Slamming Her Door And Waking Everyone Up, So Her Parents Took It Away
Is her bedroom door a right or a privilege?
Min An / Pexels Despite all the glowing things one mom on Reddit had to say about her 14-year-old daughter, there was one fatal flaw that she couldn’t see past — her slamming of her bedroom door.
“She does her homework, helps with chores without too much complaint, doesn’t bug her little brothers (too) much,” but the one thing she cannot stand behind is the door slamming — so she and her husband came up with a little solution.
She took her 14-year-old daughter’s door away after she wouldn’t stop slamming it.
After taking her daughter’s door away, she took to the subreddit “r/AmItheA--hole” (AITA) to see if she made the right decision or if the punishment did not fit the crime.
In order to provide some context and explain how bad things had gotten — to the point where the only option left was to take the door away — she wrote her story from the beginning.
“When she gets up to use the bathroom at night she slams her bedroom door on her way out and back in,” the 40-year-old mother explains. “When she gets up in the morning or goes to bed at night she slams it. Pretty much any time she enters or exits her room the door gets slammed.”
If you’re asking yourself, “maybe she just has a problem with doors,” she actually explains that she only slams her bedroom door — no other door in the house gets the same treatment.
She slams the door so hard that the walls and the house will shake, sometimes waking people up because she shares walls with her family.
They tried talking to her about it to no avail.
“We’ve talked to her about it and asked her very politely to please be more mindful about it because it is disturbing the rest of us but it’s in one ear and out the other,” she continues.
“We tried being more forceful about it saying that if she continues to slam her door there will start to be consequences. Still nothing changes.”
She claims it all came to a head recently when she had finally gotten tired of the broken sleep and confronted her daughter, who screamed “WHAT?!” at her when she knocked on the door.
“I told her as calmly as I could that if she slammed that door one more time she was going to come home and find it gone,” she explained. “She proceeded to yell at me to leave her alone and then slammed it 5 times as hard as she could.”
Well, gone is exactly where that door went. Her daughter freaked out, and her mother said she went too far, but she thinks she made the right choice.
In order to maintain her privacy, they installed an industrial curtain that blocks light and sound, and they still knock on her wall if they want to come into her room, she just can’t slam a piece of fabric.
There was overwhelming agreement that the mother was not in the wrong.
“Interrupting everyone's sleep is unacceptable. You gave her plenty of opportunities to change her door-slamming behavior and she didn't do it,” the top comment read.
They suggested that they use the curtain as a sort of trial period — hopefully, when she’s learned her lesson, she can have the door returned to her.
There’s a large controversy surrounding the removal of your child’s — especially a teenager’s — door, and one person touched on the subject.
“This might be controversial but since you've replaced it with a fabric alternative I'm going with [Not the A--hole],” they wrote. “I do agree with what will no doubt be many comments about the importance of privacy but I do feel like this argument is satisfied with the use of the curtain.”
According to Psychology Today’s Carl Pickhardt, you can’t go wrong with removing your child’s door so long as you understand their four basic “room rights.”
Those rights are “the right to personal sanctuary, the right to territorial control, the right to privacy, and the right to self-expression.”
Most parents who remove their child’s doors without respecting these four rights are abusive, but this Reddit mom seems to know what she’s doing.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.