Everyone has their own parenting style, but some take this to such an extreme that they make sure no one but them can discipline a kid. Which is all well and good until they need a babysitter.

This is the precise situation one teen ended up in when their brother asked them to babysit a niece and nephew. A pretty normal family request, until the kids started trashing the brother’s house. Naturally, OP tried to give them a time-out for trashing their parent’s house only to later be yelled at by their brother. So the next time OP was asked to babysit, they got comfortable and relaxed as the kids wreaked havoc across the house.

Disciplining children is often best left to the parents, but some take this concept too far

Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)

A teen took a babysitting job only to get yelled at for trying to stop the kids from wrecking the house

Image credits: Avi Waxman (not the actual photo)

Image source: Cakey-Cavy

Parenting strategies are ultimately up to the people actually raising the child, but this assumes there is even a strategy in place

Image credits: Monstera (not the actual photo)

Parenting is one of those topics that has a thousand methods to fit a thousand circumstances. Every culture, demographic, and philosophy has its own ideas of how it should be done. So a parent telling someone that only they have the right to discipline their child is, on the surface, understandable and maybe even preferable. While there are certain acceptable norms that vary from country to country, the role of raising children is not really something that should be approached democratically. However, it’s vital that whatever choices are made, they are actually designed to raise a child and not just a side effect of lazy parenting.

OP’s choice of a time-out is an age-old classic that many readers might remember from their own childhood. For those that never experienced it, a time-out is when a child is forced to just sit in a separate area, a room, a chair, or even the corner and just do nothing for a set period of time. Being “grounded” is a variant of this, the word itself originating from aviation where a pilot was forced to stay on the ground. Often this would be a result of weather or maintenance requirements, but sometimes pilots, like children, would be grounded due to poor behavior. The time-out uses a number of different psychological methods to punish the child for misbehavior. First, there is good old FOMO (fear of missing out,) where the child feels sadness at not being able to hang out with friends and do stuff.

Sending kids to time-out is a tried and true discipline method

Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)

Many adults might think that sitting in silence for an hour or two sounds perfect, dreamlike even, but research shows that it’s an effective way to make a child calm down and start to assess why they are in the predicament they find themselves in. However, some behavioral specialists think the method has some significant flaws. First, it does not actually make the child more likely to avoid the problem behavior, it just teaches them that they shouldn’t be caught by an authority figure. It is also very passive, not helping the kid develop any conflict resolution skills or communication methods or even talking through the events to better understand what they did wrong and why they are being punished.

More shrewd, contemporary parents may have noticed the other flaw, that a lot of kids don’t mind “sitting around,” as long as they have internet access. But all of this discussion is somewhat moot, as the parents in OP’s story didn’t seem to have a parenting strategy at all, just some unrelated feeling that it was their job. OP notes that Nick and Mya are a force of chaos, ignoring all orders and just tearing the house apart. While this could be a novel parenting method that Casey and Mandy were trying out, they also seemed very unhappy at the results of their own children’s behavior later in the story, indicating that they don’t actually want the chaos they have done anything to prevent. To quote the Simpsons, they have tried nothing and are all out of ideas.

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Readers wanted to get some follow-up on the whole situation

Others agreed that OP was not to blame and the parents really need to sort out their priorities

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