When you’re a kid, school trips are the absolute best.

A whole day to spend having fun with all your friends, instead of being in the classroom all day?

What could be better?

Well, what if a waterpark was involved? That was the situation facing the daughter of the woman in this story, and she’d been excited for weeks.

Read on to find out what happened to cause the mom to pull her daughter out of the trip she couldn’t wait to go on.

AITA for pulling my daughter from a waterpark trip because her teacher made her stay with a kid she doesn’t like?

My daughter Bryn (female, nine years old) is going on a trip to a nearby water park with her class next week.

She loves water and has been talking about it for months, so I was a bit thrown off when she came home crying a few days ago and told me she didn’t want to go.

I asked her why and she wouldn’t tell me, because she thought I’d think she’s a “bad person.”

When I finally coaxed it out of her, she said her teacher “Ms. N” has forced her to be the “buddy” of her classmate “Ben” for the entirety of the trip.

Let’s see why this made her daughter so upset.

She was to ride the bus with Ben to and from the trip, eat lunch with him, and go on all the rides with him instead of spending time with her friends.

She then said nobody likes Ben because he whines whenever they have to do work and picks his nose and wipes boogers everywhere.

I was horrified, not only because Ms. N had made Bryn do such a thing, but also because she had made her believe she was a bad person for not wanting to.

Unfortunately this wasn’t my first experience with Ms. N, as she frequently used my soft-spoken, intelligent older daughter as a “behavior buffer” for the naughty boys until I threatened to report her to the superintendent.

Read on to find out how she reacted to Ms. N’s behavior toward her daughter.

It’s clear to me that Ms. N is still too comfortable with enforcing archaic gender roles on her kids and forcing girls to do unpaid emotional labor for the sake of the boys.

I immediately sent Ms. N an email condemning her actions.

She sent me back an email with a bunch of ******** that basically ended with “if Bryn goes on the trip, she has to be Ben’s buddy.”

Fine. I informed her Bryn would not be attending then. I immediately booked VIP tickets the same day her class was going so she could still go to the park and see her friends.

And the whole situation was about to get even more explosive.

What happened next I wasn’t expecting. Bryn is quite popular, so I have gotten to know a lot of the moms in her class.

When I let them know what Ms. N did, some of them were so horrified that they also pulled their kids out of the trip. In total, eight kids (out of a class of twenty) are either not going, or going with us.

Today, I got an email from Ms. N saying that because almost half of the class isn’t going, they either have to raise the cost for the other students or not go at all.

She practically begged me to let Bryn go and tell all the other parents to let their kids go, promising she wouldn’t make Bryn do anything she didn’t want to do. I told her she should have thought about that before she tried to make my daughter do her job.

But some people don’t think that she was right to act.

My husband said I was being a bit petty, and that Ms. N clearly feels bad about what she did, and I should let Bryn go as I’ve already gotten my way.

He asked me if I really wanted to deprive children of what they’ve been waiting for all year.

The thing is, if this wasn’t Ms. N’s first offense I probably would have agreed, but she has a pattern of this type of behavior and hopefully this will put a stop to it. Plus, if she has to explain this to her superiors, I have receipts. Is my husband right? Or am I justified?

AITA?

This mom was absolutely right to pull her daughter out of the trip, then find a way to make sure she could go anyway.

The way in which the teacher chose to police other children’s behavior through the good kid is totally unjust, and actually disincentivises good behavior.

What the little girl is learning is that by being good, she is effectively punished by not being allowed to hang out with her friends – it’s poor behavior management and totally unfair to the little girl.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person agreed that the teacher clearly had her own interests at heart.

While others encouraged her to stand her ground.

Meanwhile, many Redditors encouraged the mom to put her own kid first.

No nine year old should be forced to spend time with another child, let alone at the cost of her own fun and friendships.

It’s simply not her job – at nine, her only concern should be having the time of her life at the waterpark.

Moreover, the fact that Ms. N has clearly guilt-tripped the child for not wanting to go along with her plan is really unfair.

Yes, it sucks that Ben doesn’t have any friends of his own. But there are other ways to deal with that and integrate him into a larger group – and being made to feel like someone is forced to hang out with you is no fun either, and not what this little boy is likely to want.

It shouldn’t all be the responsibility of a nine-year-old. His friendships are not her problem.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.