Imagine coparenting your teenage son with your ex. Would you agree to follow the same bedtime, snack and screen time rules, or would you set your own rules when your child is at your place?

In this story, one dad doesn’t enforce the exact same rules as his ex-wife, but when he REALLY bent the rules, she was furious.

Did he cross the line, or is she overreacting? Let’s read the whole story to decide.

AITA for “ruining my son’s schedule” by letting him stay up later with me? and playing video games?

To start, I am divorced as of 2023, I’m 35M, and my ex-wife is 36.

We coparent pretty efficiently, and I have my son (13) every other week; she has him on the other weeks, and on Saturday, we try to do something together as a “family” before we send him off to stay with the other parent.

I should make this distinction, we parent pretty differently from each other.

He has a much more laid back approach to parenting.

I’m much more lax so long as he keeps his grades up and stays out of trouble; his mother, on the other hand, is much more hands-on and more of a manager mom to put it in words.

For instance, she only lets him play video games on Friday and for no longer than an hour or two. He has a strict bedtime of 9 PM no matter the day, and she cooks all of his food. She doesn’t like fast food or anything like that and does not let him eat it.

I, on the other hand, do enforce a bedtime of 9 PM on school nights but 11 on Fridays and on Fridays, I couldn’t care less if he games for a few hours so long as he makes it to bed on time and has done his homework.

His son is a good student.

With that out of the way, this week I noticed he was studying a lot more than usual, and he told me he had some tests coming up on Friday: an algebra test, an English test, and a history test.

I offered to help him study, and he denied my help and said he could do it on his own.

He’s generally alright in school, being a B student most of the time.

He decided to reward his son with a fun night.

Friday comes, and when he gets home from school, he’s super happy, telling me he passed all of his tests and, even more, he aced all of them.

I was super proud and congratulated him, and decided to reward him a bit.

He had recently been talking about playing a game with me, so I found some games we could play, and we settled on Diablo 3, and I ordered us some pizza.

From about 8 PM to 1 AM, we played Diablo, cracked jokes, ate some pizza, and had a fun time. I made sure to tell him that we only played this long, however, because he passed his tests.

His ex is furious.

Come today, and he tells my Ex-wife what he did, and she blows up at me in private and claims I was ruining his diet, sleep schedule, and their relationship, saying he’d prefer me from now on.

I argued back, saying it was a reward because he got all A’s on his test, and he should get to have fun being a kid sometimes.

We went back and forth for a while, but it ended in her calling me an AH and leaving with my son, as it is her week next.

I’m a bit conflicted because I think he deserved to have a reward for this, but I can see how she might see it as me trying to be like the “fun parent” I suppose. AITA for this?

He IS the fun parent.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person agrees with the dad. The reward was age appropriate, fun and harmless.

His house. His rules.

This person thinks his ex needs therapy.

Someone who can relate to having a fun dad and a controlling mom shares their perspective.

His ex may be controlling, but she can’t control him.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.