Good teachers are extremely hard to come by, so when a school gets a hold of a teacher who is loved by the students, the parents, and other teachers, you'd think the school would do everything to hold on to that gem of a teacher. However, a school is no different from other places of work, which means that the people in power often make stupid decisions. Decisions that make absolutely no sense to anyone involved, like firing extremely good employees. The teacher in this Reddit story was sure sh…

I remember being so frustrated as a kid and into my teenage years as my extended family tried to optimize Christmas further and further every year to ease the burden on the family member hosting. And, to be fair, with a large extended family hosting a holiday was no small thing, and being young and completely blind to the exhaustive burden that life as an adult brings, I didn't appreciate that an additional monumental task of planning, cooking, cleaning and hosting that having the family around…

Having relatives stay with you is difficult for everyone; the person visiting is displaced, and the person hosting has their life and normal routines disrupted with someone else always suddenly present. And in a small home or an apartment you really begin to feel the effects of this. This is further complicated by the needs of any babies, children, or pets who live at home with you, adding another often less predictable element to the mix. The trade-off is that you get to spend a whole length o…

Stealing is stealing

"They hand me all their work and leave the office at 2pm"

You won't find many people who would argue with you for wanting a child-free wedding—except, of course, those parents who think their little darlings are the exception to any and every rule. It can get a little harder to sell this idea, however, when you try and pass the “child-free” rule for one specific individual: your “bad apple” 9-year-old cousin. Let's consider here that in most cases, for a kid that young, the problem is actually the parents themselves… regardless of what “attempts” they…

Let's check in on today's parents: How are they handling things lately? When it comes to kids, some things never change. All babies have the same needs, more or less. They get hungry and cry, they sleep for a while, then wake up and cry some more. Once your kid gets a little older, though, the toddler stage can be both really fun and completely insane. Having a toddler in your home is like trying to care for a tiny velociraptor. You spend a lot of your time watching as your tiny beloved child d…

We all have the idyllic When you grow up and realize that your kid's grandparents are also your in-laws, everything gains a new perspective. What's somehow even stranger, though, is coming to find that you're either “dad's side” or “mom's side” of the family for your sibling's kids. If a kid is telling you in earnest that they don't feel comfortable going to grandma's house, that alone is saying something.

As the saying goes, the punishment must fit the crime, and if the repercussions are too severe, no one is learning anything, and you're simply going to create a bad memory and lifelong resentment that will get brought up in 20 years at tense family dinners and when your kids attempt to talk to you about the trauma that you unintentionally caused them. Of course, as a parent, even if you have the best of intentions, you're not going to get everything right all of the time . And as teenagers, we'…

Memories are a funny thing in that each memory is shaped and reformed every time you recall it, making them easily susceptible to suggestion. Essentially, every time you recall a memory, you destabilize it and partially “destroy” it with your brain, then completing a process called reconsolidation to re-store it with your current thoughts and emotions added. As a brief tangent, this one one of the reasons why witness testimony is so problematic. This fluidity and fallibility of memory and abili…

This mom isn't 100% sure that she's doing the right thing here. After her son ate an inordinate amount of pizza, she turned to the internet to steer her in the right direction. After that, read about the ridiculous requests that hotel guests had, like one guest who “demanded a room upgrade because ‘their aura didn’t vibe' with the one they booked.”

Regardless of whether or not you've achieved immaterial enlightenment or are neck deep in the current iteration of the social-media-fueled consumerist frenzy, it's more than likely that you possess things that are your favorite. Chances are these items have some sort of sentimental value—a keepsake from a loved one or photographs that are irreplaceable despite having no measurable value. They may have some monetary value, too, regardless of whether or not you'd ever want to sell them. Heck, may…

It really should go without saying that you can't just go around renaming people just because you don't like their name for some reason. Even if—no, especially if—that person is a foster kid under your care. Some things like this are so outrageously laughable and out-of-pocket that they would be silly if they weren't so cruel… This 16-year-old foster child found himself facing hostility from his new foster family's extended family, who apparently came to the decision that his name, “Nico,” was…

As a kid, bedtime is one of the ultimate constraints; being forced to go to bed right at an exact time every night feels like authoritarian oppression, almost symbolic of the limitations being imposed upon you. Of course, when you're seven years old, your bedtime is really for your own good, it's not really like you can be trusted to make your own decisions at that point for whether or not you're tired. But still, who among us didn't “cheat” our bedtimes, playing in our rooms long after our par…

Spending the holidays with your husband's ex-wife sounds like prime material for a straight-to-streaming holiday-themed romantic comedy, but the reality is that it's not nearly as funny when it is your reality. This stepmother turned to this online community for advice on a complex personal problem she was facing and wondered if she was in the wrong for encouraging her 19-year-old stepdaughter to speak up about ending their joint family holiday gatherings with the stepdaughter's mother, her hus…

Are you even a real family if you DON'T have at least one argument during Thanksgiving dinner?