This Kid And Her Mom Are WAY Off-Target

I used to work at a camp as a children’s entertainer. 

One day, we had this girl come join us for archery. You had to pay €10 to join the archery activity. We had one dude come over to teach it, and my job was to basically babysit the kids (which was 90% of that job anyway, so that was all fine and well).

This girl would not listen to me, or to the archery dude, whenever we said, “Wait until everyone has shot all their arrows and then go pick up your arrows.” She would just shoot her arrows and immediately go to get them while the other kids were still shooting. This was obviously very dangerous. After warning her multiple times, I decided that enough was enough, and I told her to leave the activity.

A couple of hours later, I had just finished another activity, and I saw the girl and her mom coming toward me. I’ve seen this before, and generally, I get the parent asking the child, “Now what do you say?”, followed by a reluctant apology from the child.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case here. It was the opposite. The mom wanted me to apologize to her daughter, and she also wanted her money back. Obviously, neither was gonna happen.

But it gets worse. Apparently, this girl had stolen €50 from her mom’s purse, she’d paid for her archery thing at the service desk, and with the leftover €40, she’d gone to the shop and bought €40 worth of candy. And the mom wasn’t mad at her! She was mad at us for allowing the girl to buy that much candy and buy a ticket to the archery thing without her permission. It was all our fault.

So, we all came together and decided that if that was the case, she would not be allowed to do anything without her mom’s permission.

Going to buy some bread at the little shop in the morning? Better get your mom. Want to join the arts and craft hour? Not without your mom’s permission. Want to pay a one-euro deposit on a locker for the swimming pool? Nope.

They quickly tried to backtrack, but we didn’t. The mom had to constantly supervise her daughter — which meant she was also witnessing all her bad behavior. It was still all our fault, though.