Kids can test every ounce of your patience, especially when nothing seems to calm them down.

So, what would you do if the child you were looking after spent the whole day screaming because his toy trains kept falling over?

Would you keep allowing the cycle to repeat itself? Or would you step in and take the toys away to teach them a lesson?

In the following story, one woman made that exact call while babysitting her young cousin, but the boy’s mother was not happy.

Here’s what happened.

AITA for taking a child’s toys away for the afternoon?

I’m a 25F and currently live with my aunt, her husband, and their two kids (16 and 3).

The 3-year-old is potentially on the spectrum, but my aunt keeps putting off getting him evaluated.

He’s obsessed with cars, trains, and dinosaurs at the moment and has a wooden train set with tracks.

He has a habit of trying to roll them on his play rug instead of the tracks, and we have tile floors.

So, when his trains roll over the grout, they tend to fall over, and when they do, he gets upset, really upset.

He tends to make noises when he’s upset, but when the trains fall, it’s not a grunt or a pout. He screams, loud and shrill.

And he’ll do it over and over and over again. Even if we put the trains on the track, he’ll put them back on the floor, and the cycle repeats.

The boy’s mother wanted to know why his toys were taken away.

I was watching him, and he had a particularly rough day, especially with his train.

So, after I put him down for his afternoon nap, I took his train and track buckets and locked them away in a cabinet for the rest of the afternoon until his mother got home, which was only another 2-3 hours.

I explained what happened after she asked why I took his toys, as I was bringing them out to put them away in his toy cupboard.

I told her I tried everything: helping him fix it, redirecting him, and telling him to stop screaming, but nothing was working.

Here’s where they disagree.

So yes, I got fed up and took his toys for the afternoon.

He honestly wasn’t even affected by it and spent the afternoon playing with his dinosaurs and magnets instead.

She thinks it was a bad move to resort to hiding his toys from him, but what else was I supposed to do?

I sure wasn’t going to sit there and listen to him scream all day because he won’t just pick the trains up and keep them on the track.

I love her kids, I really do, but there’s nothing I hate more than hearing a child scream, especially that constantly.

Looking back, I do feel bad, but I’d exhausted all my other options and wasn’t going to fight fire with fire by yelling at him, because what example does that set?

AITA?

Wow! These types of situations are always tricky.

Let’s see what advice the folks over at Reddit can give her.

This parent eliminates toys that cause problems.

According to this reader, she did the right thing.

As this person explains, she did it in a thoughtful way.

Here’s another reader who thinks she did the right thing.

That was her best move. Otherwise, letting the behavior continue would have only increased stress for both her and the child.

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.