One of the most important things that parents need to do is prepare their children for becoming adults, and in many cases, part of that is encouraging them to get their driver’s license.

What would you do if you thought you didn’t need a license, but your parents bought you a car as a graduation gift, but they also wanted you to start driving your younger siblings around?

That is the situation that the young lady in this story is in, so she wants to refuse the gift and continue taking public transportation everywhere she goes.

ATIAH for refusing to accept the car my parents want to gift me?

I, 17F, recently graduated high school in September and finished my exams at the end of October.

A lot of major milestones all at once.

My birthday followed close which is when my parents started asking if I had booked my PS test. (In Australia once you turn 16 you get your Ls and can drive with a supervising driver only and once you’ve had them for a year you can get your red Ps and drive on your own with restrictions).

I told my parents I wasn’t planning to as I catch public transport pretty much everywhere and it’s also very convenient, they brought up how I’d need a license if I needed to drive to uni starting next year.

Still, having a license is important.

I explained how expensive it would be to drive a car to uni, how expensive parking is and that it’s useless considering there’s a tram that’d drop me off right in front of the school.

They dropped the subject for a bit until I got my hsc results back yesterday and did fairly well, my parents told me that they would buy me a car as a reward.

Oh, now their motives are becoming clear.

I asked them one question “who’s going to drive my brothers 12M and 14M to school when I get this car?”.

They replied that it would obviously be me as it would make their lives much easier and it’s the least I could do considering that they’re paying for this car.

It is really a gift to themselves.

I said no, I’d have no use for this car other than driving my brothers to school, and after I’d dropped them off I’d have to catch a train to uni anyways so what was the point.

They told me I’m being ungrateful and that they didn’t get me a present for grad or my birthday because they were saving to get me something big.

Maybe they are trying to push her to get her license, which is important.

I never asked them to do this, I literally just wanted an amp for my birthday that I ended up buying myself anyways because my old one broke.

I talked to my friends about it, and they said that I was kind of a jerk to turn them down especially since this is something that they put a lot of thought into.

So AITAH?

It really seems like the parents have some selfish motivations, but they also want her to have her license, which is a very good thing.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This person knows someone who did something similar.

They clearly want her to help out.

This commenter says not to take the car.

Here is someone who would refuse the gift.

This person thinks the car is all to make the parent’s lives easier.

A gift with strings attached is no gift.

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.