When you host a dinner, you should assume there may be a mess to clean up, especially if children are invited.

So, what would you do if your sister-in-law sent a rude email saying she wanted to scold your young child over crumbs that they got on the floor during dinner?

Would you let her speak to your child? Or would you handle it yourself and let your SIL know it’s done?

In the following story, one mother finds herself in this situation and decides to speak to her child on her own. Here’s what happened.

AITA for responding tersely to a SIL’s rebuke over email?

On Sunday evening, we (me, F46, husband M46, and daughter F7) were invited to dinner at my husband’s sister’s house.

She put out a spread of delicious food for adults, but our child rejected most of it. (Curried fish, eggplant salad, quinoa salad, etc.)

My child wolfed down multiple pieces of a very crumbly bread loaf from a bakery. She knew that she was spilling some crumbs onto the floor beneath the dining room table, but didn’t think much about it. We (parents) were in a group conversation and did not notice.

They were busy talking and didn’t think about the crumbs.

Admittedly, we could have and should have checked the floor afterward, noticed it, and cleaned it up.

We thanked her, hugged goodbye, and left at 7 pm.

At 11 pm, we get an email from her informing us that she discovered that (in her assumption) our daughter swept lots of bread crumbs from her chair down onto the floor, and that this is extremely unacceptable behavior and that SIL had to vacuum it up.

Her SIL was very mad.

My SIL would have told our child to vacuum it if SIL had seen it. SIL says this is not the first time she has observed our child leaving “garbage” on the floor without cleaning it up, this is completely unacceptable “(in MY home, at least.).”

Moreover, SIL wants to address this directly with our child, in addition to telling us we need to correct this bad behavior. It was three paragraphs of histrionics over this, and no small amount of shaming us as parents.

We spoke with our 7-year-old, who said she ate a lot of bread and knew it was making crumbs, but she didn’t sweep them onto the floor. They just happened while eating. We spoke gently about being a considerate guest. No big deal.

Now, her husband thinks her response was too rough.

I, however, was quite shocked and offended by the intensity of judgment and shaming in SIL’s email to us. I waited 24 hours, then simply wrote: “Apologies. We spoke with her. Thank you.”

Now, my husband is saying I “went nuclear” with my response, and SIL is angry about it.

It is true that the reply is a completely different tone and terseness than my normal communication style, and the terseness was intentional.

But why am I now the villain when, if anybody went nuclear here, it was SIL who flipped out over finding a bunch of bread crumbs on the floor under where a 7 yo child sat at her table?

AITA?

Yikes! It’s easy to see why she sent such a sweet and short email.

Let’s check out who the folks over at Reddit think is in the wrong.

This person doesn’t think anything is wrong with her response.

 

For this reader, her husband is also a problem.

Yet another person who doesn’t see that she did anything wrong.

Standing up for her child is right, and her SIL needs to back up and let the child’s parents handle it.

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.