Imagine having two children, and one of them is developmentally delayed. Would you scold this child when they misbehave even though they wouldn’t understand?

In this story, one dad thought this was the right thing to do, but his wife disagrees. Now, he’s wondering if he really did make the wrong decision.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for scolding my daughter to make my other daughter feel better?

I (38M) have two daughters – “Aspen” (8F) and “Ivy” (4F).

Aspen is severely developmentally delayed, her cognitive function is similar to a baby or very young toddler’s.

Recently, she has been into that getting-into-things phase. Everything also goes straight to her mouth, even though we provide chewies/alternatives for her.

It gets even worse.

Recently, she has developed an interest in Ivy’s baby dolls.

We try to keep them out of reach, but every so often she finds a stray one.

This frustrates Ivy. So when it happened today, I (lightly) scolded Aspen for taking her sister’s stuff.

Of course, Aspen had zero clue what I meant, but it made Ivy feel better.

His wife thinks he did the wrong thing.

My wife was very unhappy about this.

She says that it was mean because Aspen doesn’t know what’s going on, and that she didn’t deserve a scolding. She thinks that we should have sat Ivy down and told her how her sister doesn’t know any better and that we need to be patient when she does stuff like this.

She is mad that I didn’t “include her in the conversation before I did this”.

AITA for scolding my daughter to make my other daughter feel better?

This is a tough situation. Is the mom right, or did the dad make the right decision?

Let’s see what Reddit has to say.

This is a good point.

A grandparent weighs in.

Another person is on the dad’s side.

A parent with a 1-year-old weighs in.

Favoring one child over the other isn’t going to end well.

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.