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'AITA for telling my teen they can’t have a birthday since they skipped school over a rash?' UPDATED 2X

'AITA for telling my teen they can’t have a birthday since they skipped school over a rash?' UPDATED 2X

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"AITA for telling my teenager that they can’t have a birthday dinner today as they chose not to go to school because of a rash?"

My teenager turned 16 today. They are also autistic. This morning they came out complaining about a rash from shaving, stating that it hurt too much to have air blow on it or cloth against it & therefore they weren’t going to school. I gave them a few hours and tried again. They still wouldn’t go. Gave it a few more hours, same result.

Now it’s too late to go to school. So I told them to text their friends & tell them that the dinner party at a midprice restaurant is off. Now they & their sibling (21) are calling me an AH. I feel like if I let them have the dinner out tonight after they called out of school is rewarding a negative behavior.

If they were diabetic & had to go to the ER because of a low blood sugar then were released I still wouldn’t let them go out to a dinner. Not that they’d feel up to it then I imagine. So is this just me being a good parent or me being an AH?

Not long after posting, OP shared two updates with more context.

EDIT: I’m still going to give them their birthday card/gift tonight. I haven’t decided if the makeup dinner would be here or @ the original restaurant on a later night.

EDIT TWO: They used to chew the collars off of their school uniform shirts because they didn’t like the feeling of the fabric against their neck. So when they showed me that they did indeed have a raised/red rash from shaving that was too painful for school I agreed to let them stay home. I gave them medicated creams/lotions for the rash.

I checked in on them several times throughout the day to see if they were feeling better. If the rash is the reason that you are staying home from school @ 0830, 1100, & 1300 then it’s also the reason that you aren’t going out to dinner @ 1700.

Clarification of EDIT TWO: using the shirt collar chewing as an example of understanding that they do have sensory issues. The rash is not on the neck and also showing that by offering to let them stay home/offering medications throughout the day to show that I understand that the sensory issues can lessen with a little time as could have the rash.

Clarification 3: It is a known rule in our household that if one is “too much” of something to go to school that day then one is not allowed to do “fun” events the rest of that day. That expectation as a consequence was reiterated each time that they were checked on & asked about whether or not they wanted to go to school. To have to explicitly state that feels really weird.

The internet had a lot of thoughts about the situation.

justbeenice_ wrote:

NTA. Just be sure to reschedule the plans for another day. It's not a punishment, it's just saying "you said today you couldn't leave the house so we aren't. We will when you feel well enough again."

OP responded:

Exactly! I’ve told them to message their friends for another day that works for them all instead. I still want to celebrate my kid.

Sudden_File4569 wrote:

A soft YTA - the consequence for the decision makes sense, but it came up way too late. As others have said, you should have told them, "If it's too uncomfortable for school, it sounds like it's too uncomfortable to have a birthday party." I think it's hard for most people to relate to your kid's exact feeling. But I think we can all empathize with the feeling of being too sick for work, but not too sick for videogames.

Or an outfit being too uncomfortable for school, but worth wearing to a party. It's easier to power through discomfort when it's softened by the comfort of friends or fun. It's harder to power through discomfort when it's amplified by the hardships of school. And sensory shit can earnestly be very overwhelming.

That, of course, doesn't make their decision reasonable or rational and it is behaviour they need to work through to navigate the adult world. They shouldn't be coddled, and it is your responsibility as a parent to call them on things like that. It's just a matter of letting them know the consequences of their decisions, instead of surprising them with those consequences.

Waste_Worker6122 wrote:

Not going to school because they have a rash from shaving? Accepting that at face value, there will be air blowing on it at the restaurant and presumably they would have to wear clothes at the restaurant so there would also be cloth against it. Canceling the dinner is in their best interests; they would face the same pain at the restaurant that they would have felt at school. NTA.

cressidacole wrote:

Too sick for school, too sick to play. That was my mother's rule when I was a child.

I'm in my 40s now and still abide by it. If I'm too sick for work, chores, or obligations, then I'm not going out for dinner either.

muslimmeow wrote:

Honestly, NTA - but you should probably try to tell your kids the consequences from the start so they have a chance to make a good decision. I hated surprise consequences. Growing up, my mom always made my birthday an event where if it fell on a school day, I would have a full day with just her to do my favorite things. I'd never expect my mom to pay for a bunch of my friends' dinner.

FragrantImpostor wrote:

The thing that all the commenters are forgetting is autistic sensory issues and stress processing. A very common thing with us autistic folk is a weird pain level scale. A lot of bigger pains, we don't notice as much. Smaller pains, especially "uncomfortable" types and sensory ones, can feel bigger because the brain doesn't filter it out as much.

When you're in an environment that provides additional stress, like school, it further impacts the brain's ability to filter out the background stuff. Stress can literally make pain worse because of how our brains work.

If a kid is not regularly calling out for low level pain like this, then when it does happen, it's usually because there was already a higher stress level in place and the current issue just pushed it past the threshold. When we're doing something that we like, gets us excited, or that we have a hyperfocus on, then our brains start filtering out more of the other stuff.

Positive experiences can actually help our brains to function better and let us filter out the constant background stress. I did positive reinforcement experiments on myself as a teen to improve my pain tolerance and lower my reactions to things that upset me or I was scared of.

I actively reprogrammed my responses to various stimuli because I didn't like the idea of phobias controlling my life (I was undiagnosed at the time). It took years, but it helped. For a regular kid, "lessons" like the commenters are saying can work well. For an autistic kid, you're teaching them that they will be punished for having trouble regulating their stress.

If they do bring it up, they will then have the positive, de-stress events removed, increasing their levels on top of their current ones. This usually causes them to endure stuff that is actively stressing them. In small doses, this is good. However, it's generally not in small doses, and we're very bad at recognizing when it's actively harming us.

There's a reason why most of us have massive burnout and trauma issues. What might seem like regular, normal stuff to an allistic person can be very different from an autistic person. One of the most repeated comments I get from my mom is when I talk about my childhood from my perspective, and she says she had no idea that I thought that way.

She was operating on an entirely different set of assumptions on my thoughts, motivations, and logic. Autism is a different communication structure and doesn't get the same messages from parents' actions that a different child would. ESH.

OP responded:

I included the fact that they are autistic because I get that autism makes responses to stimuli be greater than for neurotypicals. & that knowing that information may change the way that people respond to the situation. I offered them creams/lotions to apply to the rash.

Then I gave the meds time to be effective. I approached them several times about it because once the meds have been effective they could then go to school for the remainder of the day. They didn’t want to be at school dealing with the rash being in air flow/contact with clothing. I get that. I respect it.

But how is that different from being in a noisy restaurant that also has air flowing through it or having cloth over the rash then? What difference in the two situations other than that one is a thing that you have to do & the other is a thing that you want to do? I’m totally cool with them having a birthday dinner with friends on another night just not tonight as they were too sick to go to school today.

Busy-Team6197 wrote:

NTA. Did you warn your teen this would be the outcome though? “If you aren’t well enough to go to school, I will need to cancel your dinner tonight.”

Sources: Reddit
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