Recently, a dad turned to the AITA community on Reddit for a moral judgement. In a post that amassed 3.5k upvotes and 1.2k comments, dad explained that he overheard his 16-year-old son talking about something he didn’t like.
“My son recently had some friends over and things were going fine, I went upstairs at one point to bring them the pizza they had ordered when I overheard my son talking about how his friends owed him something,” the dad wrote.
It turned out the teen son pulled a prank on a girl in his class and this didn’t sit well with his father.
A dad wonders if he crossed the line by punishing his teen son for pulling a prank on a girl from his class
Image credits: valeriygoncharukphoto (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Max Fischer (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Kindel Media (not the actual photo)
Image credits: advicedadneeds39
Social media and, especially, YouTube are filled with pranks—DIY ones, hidden camera stunts, scare gags, you name it. There are countless different prank categories, from children pranking their clueless parents and grandparents to parents even pulling pranks on their little kids.
But as much as they are liked online, in reality, most pranking is very controversial. We’ve all heard about pranks going wrong, people getting real and lasting trauma from the prank scares, and victims having their self-esteem shattered.
Asking someone out on a date as a prank is commonly viewed as extremely problematic. Danny Jackson, an LGBTQ+ writer, recounted a hurtful high school memory of getting asked on a date in this piece for Medium.
“’Do you want to go out for real, though?’ Jack asked. My heart soared. I could only nod. For that moment, I was on top of the world,” Jackson wrote. “Then Jack spoke again. ‘Oh, just kidding!’ He started laughing like crazy.”
Not only did Jackson spend the entire winter fighting heartache, he could barely look at Jack. “I’m not sure how long it took to get over what had happened,” Jackson wrote, adding that the main point of the piece is to tell people not to ask people out as a joke.
The author explained: “Especially not teenage girls, whose self-esteem is already at a massively critical stage. One wrong move and she could suffer from self-esteem problems for the remainder of her life.”
Many people expressed their support for the dad in the comments
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