Boy Refuses To Do Chores At Home Because He 'Pays The Bills' With His Dad's Child Support
That disrespectful kid sure dug himself into a hole with this comment!
K.Narloch-Liberra, frantic00 / Shutterstock & TikTok A classic comeback from any parent to a disobedient child is: “do you pay the bills?”
For kids, chores are often an inconvenience, rather than an important part of cleanliness with real repercussions. It can be difficult to convince any child, especially a teenager, to do their part when it comes to housework. Understandably, this often leads to frustration from the parent, and phrases like “my house, my rules” and “do you pay the bills?”
However, one teen had a quippy comeback at the ready, claiming he did pay the bills… with his dad’s child support.
In a video that gathered over 8 million views, an in-home camera caught a clip of an argument. After being asked to take out the trash, this teenage boy loudly complained. Frustrated, his mother asked him if he paid the bills for their family. His response was simple.
“Yeah.” He replied. “With dad’s child support.”
Furious, his mother then rushed at the teen and chased him out of the room while his younger brother teased him for the mistake. The short TikTok has a whopping 90,000 comments, all covering hundreds of opinions. Most seem to agree that the teen’s response was disrespectful and rude, but others are amused by the cleverness behind the comeback.
One user suggested that the teen overheard the comeback from his father, claiming that she had been “the same way” towards her own mother. “As I got older I now feel so bad ever bringing it up,” she wrote.
This leads to an important question, and one that many others are debating in the comments:
Was the teen’s claim to paying bills with child support right?
It’s up for debate. Child support varies widely across situations and families. Although there are numerous laws designed to help families provide and have access to the right amount of child support, there are all sorts of complications that can arise.
For example, the average child support paid per month in America is $430, but if a child has “extraordinary” extracurricular costs, special needs, or other things in their life that might make their life more expensive, the support can be more.
However, the support can also be much less, depending on the wages of the parents and financial situations. There is no national guideline for determining child support. It varies by state, and can even change within states as well.
It is also not uncommon for a family member to never receive that support. According to Ebony, a staggering 30% of parents never see a single cent of the support they are legally entitled to, even with a court order. And, according to a report from the US Census in 2018, less than half of custodial parents are actually receiving the full amount of support they are owed by law.
There are legitimate reasons for some parents to fail to provide the money: in cases of poverty, disability, or similar extreme situations. But, unfortunately many of these cases are simply due to the fact that one parent didn’t want to pay the money, and found a loophole to exploit.
Even when families receive full child support, however, not everyone agrees that the amount is enough. Many of the comments on the original TikTok argued that child support doesn’t count as paying bills because it is barely enough to support the child.
Again, these numbers will vary by situation and family, so it is possible that isn’t the case for everyone, but it does seem to be a popular opinion. After all, a few hundred dollars a month is hardly equivalent to a full-time salary of a former spouse or partner.
With other factors such as inflation, housing, gas, and food prices on the rise as well, it’s easy to see how child support just isn’t equal to paying expensive bills.
For the teenager in the TikTok, however, it is highly likely that he was just repeating something his dad had said, rather than actually understanding the process.
Either way, he certainly isn’t going to get out of chores that easily!
Hawthorn Martin is a news and entertainment writer living in Texas. They focus on social justice, pop culture, and human interest stories.