I really don’t know what could be crazier, dealing with the actual kids or dealing with the parents and their unexplainable yet completely unreasonable demands. As if it weren’t already enough to keep your children alive and well while in the meantime also trying to keep ourselves from going insane. Most of the time, parents comprehend that we aren’t superheroes and we aren’t necessarily built to meet all your random requests but some of them for some strange reason think that it’s completely acceptable to hound on you when you try to clarify why the reasons for not rubbing their child up with petroleum jelly is not acceptable. The crazy pile of demands on this newly unveiled Reddit thread had me bawling for hours and I couldn’t just NOT share it with the world. It’s so alarming to me that some of these parents are actually parents to these poor children who know no better but then again, if it weren’t for them we wouldn’t have these stories to cackle at.
yoshikahime:
I am a camp counselor at an overnight camp. One kids mom called to tell us that her kid cannot drink water or take a shower because he was going to have a mental breakdown from the “minerals” in the “contaminated water”. She said he could only be exposed to “pure water”, whatever that means. Long story short, she tried to sue us for unsanitary water conditions.
john8214:
I babysat a lot when I was a teenager. Now most parents I babysat for were awesome but one family in particular sticks out.I started babysitting for this family who had 4 year old girl. She was really sweet and a joy to be around. Her mom not so much. Her mom was also terrified that her daughter was growing up to fast. Because of this, she would hinder her own daughters development in hopes of keeping her “baby” a little bit longer.I quit when she put her daughter back in diapers and expected me to change her. She didn’t even tell me about it, she thought I’d be totally ok with changing a 5 year old’s dirty diaper. I quit as soon as she got back.
f3tid:
Not really something they wanted me to do for their kids, but for their dog. The mom told me that the neighborhood HOA had a big thing about dog poop on people’s grass. Fair enough. But I guess even the smear of it on the grass after it gets picked up?? This woman literally asked me if I could put a bag on my hand and try to catch the poop as it fell out of her dog’s backside, so as not to leave a smear on people’s lawn. I nodded, said “oh yes of course”, and just picked up the dog poop after he did his business like a normal human because I love and respect myself, what the fuck.
moribundmaverick:
High school teacher. I had a parent ask if she could write in her will that, if she died, I would take custody of her kids.
elephantqueen14:
This one kid told me he didn’t have to listen to me because I am a girl, so I told him to sit in the corner for 5 minutes and reflect on what he had said. When his parents came to pick him up, they asked that I don’t discipline their child as it is against their religion to take orders from women. Uh… pardon?