Parenting is a hard job, for sure, but that’s never an excuse to just drop the ball.

When the kids giving you trouble aren’t yours, it’s tough to know how to handle things.

This person, though, decides to take matters into his own hands.

AITA for scoldings kids who were harassing me via calls?

My brother is currently super angry at me and we’re not speaking.

It all started with kids just being kids.

For context, a few days ago my nephew (10y) and a group of kids (9-10y) he knows decided to crank call people (but it’s 2025 so it was crank FaceTimes).

We’re talking 30 in 45 mins.

When it first happened I thought it was spam, then after the 4th or 5th I picked up and saw my nephew (other emails were the ones making the call).

Thinking I got added to his group chat playing a game or whatever accidentally I got his attention and said that I’d been added and have a good time.

The joke got out of hand and something needed to be done.

They kept calling, and calling, I answered again thinking they couldn’t remove me and told them they might need to reform the group since they were still calling me, and to please stop as I was out.

At a super important event as well.

They continued, I contacted my brother and sister-in-law asking for them to intervene which they didn’t at first because of a call they were on.

I kept getting the calls for another 30 mins at which point I said “guys, enough, knock it off and get me off this call before your parents get involved).

They finally stopped.

And then it got even FURTHER out of hand.

The next day it started again without my nephew, and I work in a client centered job that requires me to use my phone, which they kept interrupting.

No amount of blocking was working because they just kept adding new numbers and emails.

I text my brother again and told them to stop or I’d call their parents…the last remnants of my youth dying in that moment.

That’s when everything blew up.

I finally block enough that the calls stop and my brother calls me and starts lecturing me about how I’m causing my nephew to be bullied and they’re just kids.

I can’t tell them what to do much less yell at them.

Now I was stern, but there was no yelling, no screaming, no inappropriate language.

Just no-nonsense cut it out.

And suddenly my brother and I are fighting because he’s blaming me for my nephew’s bullying, and “how does this look that his aunt is yelling at kids!?”

I tell him he could handle it or I would but he cannot tell me what I can and can’t do.

That’s when he lost it claiming he can and now there’s a whole meeting at the school and it’s all my fault.

Needless to say I hung up.

Was any of this even true?

Fast forward and now, via my sister in law I find out, my nephew isn’t being bullied, a couple of kids made a comment or two but he’s fine and handled it.

There’s community outrage because obviously it didn’t just impact me, but others as well and I could have been in my right to file charges which I wouldn’t do.

Our storyteller is entirely befuddled at this point.

Am I living in the twilight zone?

If I called some random adult as a kid 50 times in an hour and they yelled at me and called my mom I would have been grounded for a month.

Much less impacting someone’s work?

WTH is happening?

The thing about the digital era is there’s a pretty definitive record of everything.

This is clearly not a great response from dad.

Many were flabbergasted.

Some perspective is needed.

Maybe you could take this all the way to the top?

To be clear, the right response from the parents isn’t to lose their mind on the kid, or hurt them, or anything awful like that.

But kids have to learn at some point that fun on their end can mean harm to others.

Apparently parents do, too.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.