When a young child has mental health issues, it can be very difficult to take care of them while also caring for the rest of the family.

What would you do if your younger sibling had these issues, and your parents regularly relied on you to calm them down and keep them under control?

That is what was happening to the older sister in this story, and she is tired of being told that she is the only one who can help keep her sibling calm.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for not helping in family fights

So, basically I am 14 and my family has been going through some stuff for the past 6 or so years (i was around 8 years old when this started).

There are fights daily and whenever this happens my mom asks me for help.

Mental illness can be very stressful for a family.

Some context: my sister has many mental illnesses and breaks down a lot.

My mom tries to get her to calm down as to get my sister to not do anything dangerous or harmful.

My dad sometimes says stuff but mostly when he does it just escalates the situation even more, but it is much worse when he is not there. When my mom says stuff it also escalates the situation most of the time.

When I say stuff there is a chance that the situation will get worse but most of the time after a little while of me being involved, the situation deescalates. Since I am the only person who can do this (save the people from CACTIS who help during crisis but can take hours to arrive), my mom always asks me for help and says that I am the only person who can ‘fix’ it.

That is a lot of stress to put on a young girl.

I hate it when she says this so much.

In my opinion, its not up to me to ‘fix’. I understand you are supposed to help your family because, well, family, but I just cant. I find it extremely hard to help.

It is not fun but obviously neither is listening to my mom and sister fight and my mom yelling at me to help her, but I find it easier to listen.

Am I the one in the wrong? Should I help her whenever she asks? Or am I correct by putting myself first even though its selfish?

AITA?

It isn’t her responsibility to parent her sibling, and the mom and dad need to learn to calm their child down, not rely on this young lady to do it for them. She won’t be there forever, after all.

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit say about it.

The parents need to learn to parent.

Exactly, they need some professional help.

This isn’t a healthy situation for either of the children.

The parents should really step up here.

This could be very helpful.

Forcing children to parent their siblings is not fair.

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.