As a former mischievous neighborhood kid myself, neighborhood kids are menaces to society.
If it isn’t wreaking havoc with toilet paper on halloween, its running through your yard during an intense game of tag, or even trampling your well-maintained gardens!
But not every neighbor will let the little gremlins trespass all over their yard, especially if they’re actively doing damage to their property!
So when this user’s neighborhood kids were repeatedly vandalizing his yard, he warned their Mom about the possibility of his guard dogs defending his property, but she didn’t listen!
Was he wrong for scaring the kids off his yard by letting his dogs go? Decide for yourself!
AITA for potentially traumatizing my neighbors children after they kept coming onto my property and trying to get into my house?
Me and my now fiancé have lived in this house and neighborhood for a few months now. I have a 1 year old son myself, so I know how kids can be.
However, my neighbors have 3 children. A 9, 12, and 14 year old. All of them are boys.
At first they weren’t too much trouble, I would just seem them running around, throwing sticks, riding scooters across the street.
Then the boys decided OP’s house was their neighborhood hangout, much to OP’s misfortune!
But as of recently they had started getting a lot closer to my property.
This all started with the oldest one throwing various trash into our yard that my fiancé would continually have to pick up.
Then, all 3 children started digging holes in our yard, banging on the door, and I even caught them trying to “lockpick” my front door with a bobby pin.
This had happened 4 to 5 times already. Of course, I brought this up to their mother who has done little about it.
They seem to have very little supervision and apparently cps had already been called numerous of times because of how often they seemed to be left alone.
And OP warned the Mother that if their kids did get inside his house, he wasn’t responsible for what happened to them!
I warned the mother that we have 2 big dogs, whose sole purpose was to protect against intruders.
So if their sons happened to actually get into my house they would probably end up hurt.
I did not want these little children to end up hurt of course, which was why I was warning her.
She brushed it off, saying if anything happened to her boys she would have me promptly arrested and my dogs put down.
But instead of letting these kids actually get hurt, OP decided to teach them a lesson and scare them off.
All the boys screamed and start yelling. They ran and ran all the way until they got to their house, getting wet by the lawn sprinklers on the way.
I called my dogs back( they stopped at the end of the lawn like I had trained them to) and we didn’t hear much for a few days.
Their mother and the police came knocking at the door. She said some stuff about how my dogs bit her children and I was a danger to the neighbors.
But I showed the security footage from my camera to the police and it pretty much died down from there.
While the Mom wouldn’t let the whole issue go, OP felt like he hadn’t done anything wrong!
She’s still trying to keep the case open, but I feel as if I’ve done little to no wrong.
Her boys don’t bother us anymore, and her children aren’t hurt and were never going to be.
AITA?
So these kids were fully trying to BREAK INTO HIS HOUSE, and OP’s dogs simply scared them off? If anything the police should be looking into the Mom for blatantly disregarding her kids’ safety!
Reddit assured OP he did absolutely nothing wrong, and that he wasn’t at fault for letting his dogs out on his own property!
And this user said OP’s neighbor seemed to ignore that her kids were trespassing on his property!
Many warned OP to make sure the family didn’t retaliate and try to hurt his dogs!
Finally, this user suggested OP start weaponizing his sprinkler system against them!
This Mom needs to be held accountable.
It almost seems like she wanted her kids to get hurt so she could take legal action against OP!
If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.