Siblings can often pick on each other and make each other miserable.

In today’s story, one older cousin knows this first hand because she’s a live in babysitter for her younger cousins.

However, she’s noticed a pattern that one child tends to bully the other child.

When the tables are turned, she makes a decision that her uncle calls unfair.

Let’s read all the details.

AITA for giving my niece and nephew different punishments for doing the same offence?

So I (19F) took a gap year off of university after my first year for my health and also to earn some money.

My aunt (42F) has two children 11M and 7F, and she asked if I could live with them and help her as an in help childcare, and she pays me for it.

I accepted, and have been staying with her and her husband (43M) for a few months now.

The boy is a bully.

Problems started because I realized that my nephew frequently picks on and bullies his younger sister.

Ripping the heads of her stuffies, breaking her toys, ripping her drawings, etc.

He frequently makes fun of her and is overall terrible to her.

I have tried multiple different attempts to stop it, having a heart-to-heart with him, taking away his gadgets, grounding him, etc, but the behavior stops for a week at best before he starts again.

The kids’ parents aren’t helpful.

His parents are not much help because my Aunt is always tired, she makes a lot from a demanding job and comes back and cleans up around the house, and makes dinner.

My uncle comes back from work and doesn’t contribute to the house chores in anyway, and when I brought up taking my nephew to therapy he dismissed it as ‘pseudo science.’

He is very averse to therapy.

This time the little girl was to blame.

Now where the issue started, is I overhear my niece and nephew fighting again, and I immediately assume he’s started something again and ask him to please give his sister a break.

I learned that his sister was the cause of the fight this time, she poured water on his Nintendo switch, damaging it.

I apologized for blaming him, and pulled her aside and asked her why she did it as she is not the type to do that.

She said that she wanted her brother to stop picking on her and she wanted to get back at him.

The Uncle thought she was playing favorites.

My Uncle comes home and says that I should give her the same punishment as his son to be fair.

He was angry that I only made her write an apology letter to him, instead of grounding her or taking away her tablet.

I don’t believe it’s fair to punish her the same way for her first offence, but he said that I was picking favorites and that he could see I was biased.

So, AITA?

A lesser punishment for a first offense sounds reasonable.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

The little girl finally had enough!

This person thinks her punishment decision was reasonable.

How do you punish self defense?

The parents should be making the punishment decisions.

Another person points out why the boy doesn’t obey her.

The boy had it coming!

Everyone can see that.

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.