Sure they’re a joy and all, but there’s a lot that is stressful about having a kid.

They get cranky sometimes, they make a mess, they get sick at the most inconvenient times – the beauty of having a child of your own definitely means some trade-offs.

And that’s before you even get thinking about childcare.

The person in this story is childfree, and has taken some time off to visit family.

So when they are expected to drop their plans to watch a random relative’s child, they’re not exactly happy.

Read on to find out what happened.

AITA for not babysitting a family member’s toddler on my vacation?

I live in a different part of the country to my family. They live pretty far away, and I only see them a couple times per year.

A while back I was visiting during the Christmas holiday. I’d taken a couple weeks off of work to spend some time with them.

I was chilling at my parents’ house and looking forward to a day of shopping, eating at my favorite restaurant and other fun relaxing things.

But then this family member called the house and asked somebody to watch her three year old for the day. She had to work and hermother-in-law had backed out.

Uh-oh. Read on to find out what happened next.

My parents said no, they also had to work.

She asked them to ask me – she didn’t ask me herself, she had somebody else do it.

I said no, that I had plans, and went back to my coffee, thinking that would be the end of it.

Nope. The next few hours I get messages like, “Really. REALLY?! You can’t watch a three year old for a few hours?” and “She has a car seat. You can literally take her anywhere you go.”

And the harassment didn’t stop there.

When I didn’t answer she started posting to Facebook – stuff like, “I can’t believe how selfish people are.” “I have to call in to work because some people can’t possibly take a minute from their busy schedules to watch [toddler], Hope I don’t get fired.”

The statuses continued, “Wow. Just wow.” “You’d think family would be there for you.” “Must be nice not to have any responsibilities.”

Just posting all day. Instead of looking for alternate, more appropriate child care she blew up Facebook.

It was never brought up again, but I do get the sense that she holds this against me, since she drops a lot of “must be nice” type comments.

Yikes! Let’s see how they felt about being publicly called out like this.

I haven’t talked to the rest of our family about it beyond, “yeah I think those Facebook posts were about me. Oh well.”

I’m pretty sure they think I’m selfish anyway so I guess what’s one more thing? I dropped it because I don’t see my family often and I don’t want to spend that limited time arguing. Nobody’s brought it up to me.

I honestly could have cancelled my plans and watched her kid. I just didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like I should have to, and besides that I don’t even live there.

She’s also really bad about expecting every family member to be free on call childcare, and to be honest I don’t want to set a precedent where she thinks she can rely on me when I’m in town.

AITA?

As if this relative just randomly expected someone who was in town for a couple of days to visit family to just drop their plans to watch the kid.

Who does that?

It screams of entitlement and bad manners.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This person thought the family member was being unfair.

While others thought they could’ve helped her, but they weren’t obliged to.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that really, the mother-in-law should’ve been taking the blame.

The fact that this family member thought it was okay not only to demand childcare, but to then harass this person during their vacation time, and turn to Facebook when they didn’t backdown is not okay.

It really suggests that she’s not used to not getting her way, and has no respect for the people around her.

All this points in one direction: this family member is not a good person.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.