Parenting is rough work, and after you’ve been at it for awhile, you realize that you mess up about as often as you get things right.

As long as you realize it and apologize, that’ll have to do.

OP has 4 kids who are all teenagers or older, so we can suppose she’s learned a thing or two along the way. They don’t do big birthday celebrations after age 10, except for the “big” ones.

Her eldest, though, has been having a hard time so she threw her a surprise party.

I have 4 kids, 23, 20, 16 and 13. This concerns my oldest, and I’ll refer to her as ‘Zara.’

We don’t normally do big parties in our family after double digits (and 18th/21st), but Zara has been going through a bit of a difficult time (a close friend just died) so we decided to throw her a surprise party.

It was going well until her young niece blew out her birthday candles.

It was a big family party and Zara was enjoying it.

Then the cake was brought out, I have a lot of young nieces and nephews so naturally they wanted to stand up with Zara, and she had no issue.

When she went to blow out the candles, my 5 year old niece blew most of them out before her.

She got upset and left the room. Her aunt apologized but everyone seemed to feel as if the daughter was too old to be acting that way.

Everyone laughed it off, my youngest actually put 23 candles on the cake and there were still a few lit, so I told Zara to blow those out.

She did, but she looked angry and started crying. She then walked off.

After that it got quite awkward and my sister (niece’s mom) got upset/embarrassed, that her daughter is a kid and didn’t mean to do it, and she didn’t think Zara would act like this.

We all calmed her down that it’s not their fault.

OP told her she was acting like a brat, but the girl’s siblings say mom was being way too harsh.

I talked to Zara and told her she was being a selfish brat and making a scene. She’s 23 getting mad about birthday candles.

She was still upset, and my other kids are telling me I wasn’t being fair with Zara.

Is Reddit going to side with the mom on this one or the kids? Keep reading to find out!

When people found out the daughter’s fiance had just died, the tables definitely turned against OP.

This person says they doubt this is the first time something like this has happened.

And this commenter says concerning behavior should make you worried, not judgmental.

They say OP owes her daughter an apology.

This person says birthdays are supposed to be for people to treat you as the special kid you are.

I feel so sorry for this girl.

At least her siblings seem to get it.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.