Imagine having divorced parents and living at your dad’s house most of the time.

If your mom started texting you a lot, would you reply back to all of her texts, or would you explain that you don’t have time to respond to all of her texts?

In this story, one teenage boy is in this exact situation, and he went with the second option. Now, his mom and stepdad are both upset.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for setting a texting boundary with my mom?

I (15M) recently tried to set a boundary on texting with my mom and it didn’t go that well. Now I’m wondering if I should have done this at all. Here’s the context.

My mom is a caring person, but can be a bit overbearing. Over the past month or so, her texting has increased a lot.

To clarify, I live at my dad’s house about 70% of the time (this isn’t because I don’t get along with my mom, it’s just because I have sports/activities/school/friends in my dad’s community.)

The texts became a little much.

This weekend, I had an important dance competition. My mom said she was going to come watch, but arrived late and missed most of my performances.

This is a common pattern for her.

She blew up my phone for most of the weekend (like 20+ texts in less than 48 hours) with “how did it go?” types of texts, but also a lot of “I’m sitting over here, come see me,” or “I brought you cookies, where are you?”

I was trying to focus on my own dancing and support my friends, so I responded to the text messages mostly with quick one-liners or thumbs up. But they continued into Monday / Tuesday of this week, and it honestly began to feel intrusive.

He was honest with his mom.

To clarify, my mom has good intentions. She’s probably just interested in my life and wants to stay connected.

But she’s also an insecure person, and relies on external validation and affirmation to make her feel better. So it feels like these anxious texts are more about her saying “I matter, right?” or “you still care about me, right?” instead of curiosity about my life.

So yesterday I sent her a message.

I said I’d noticed a lot of texting from her lately and I was having trouble keeping up and didn’t always have time to respond, especially on a busy competition weekend. But I also said I would talk to her about my week on Friday when I go back to her house.

His stepdad got involved.

Immediately I’m getting texts from my stepdad saying that I was rude and put my mom off, so obviously she got upset and went to him.

I told my stepdad that I wasn’t trying to be rude or disrespectful, and that I would talk to my mom about it on the weekend. I asked my stepdad not to text me about this again as this is between me and my mom.

I thought I was trying to set a boundary respectfully, but now I’m questioning whether this was a good idea.

AITA?

I don’t think he was rude at all. He didn’t even tell her to stop texting or say that it was too much texting. He put the blame on himself saying that he can’t keep up with the texting because of how busy he is and set a day and time to talk in person.

I can’t think of a better way to handle it.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person doesn’t think his message was rude.

Here’s another vote for turning off his phone.

Tone might be the issue.

Here’s another vote for talking instead of texting.

Texting isn’t always better than talking.

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