Fox News
Published March 9, 2023 5:28pm EST
Reddit user removes teenager's door after girl won't stop slamming it, is labeled 'emotionally abusive'
Teen came home from school to find a surprise in her room
By Christine Rousselle
Reddit users supported a mom's decision to remove her teenage daughter's bedroom door after the girl kept slamming it.
"AITA for removing my daughter’s bedroom door because she won’t stop slamming it?" asked a Reddit user who goes by the name "The-Compliment-Fairy" in a March 6 post on Reddit's "Am I the A-----e" (AITA) subreddit.
The woman said she's a 40-year-old mother of three children; she said she has a 14-year-old daughter and two pre-teen sons.
The boys share a bedroom, wrote the mom, but the teen daughter has her own bedroom, as she is "the oldest and also [the] only girl."
She wrote that her daughter "is a great kid. She does her homework, helps with chores without too much complaint, doesn’t bug her little brothers (too) much."
She continued, "The issue is that she will not stop slamming her bedroom door."
She added, "When she gets up to use the bathroom at night, she slams her bedroom door on her way out, and back in. When she gets up in the morning or goes to bed at night, she slams it. Pretty much any time she enters or exits her room, the door gets slammed."
The teen apparently did this only with her own bedroom door, not with other doors in the house, the poster said.
The slamming door "shakes the walls and frequently wakes up everyone in the house," the mom wrote. She said the boys' bedroom shares a wall with her daughter's, while the parents sleep directly above the teenager's room.
There are no malfunctions or drafts that would cause this particular door to slam more easily, she also noted.
"We’ve talked to her about it and asked her very politely to please be more mindful about it because it is disturbing the rest of us, but it’s in one ear and out the other," said The-Compliment-Fairy.
She also told her daughter that "there will start to be consequences" if the door slamming continued.
"It all came to a head the other night when she got up to use the bathroom and all four of us were woken up by the slamming," said the frazzled mom, who explained that she must wake up at 5 a.m. each day for her job, and that she "had enough of the broken sleep."
When she confronted the teen about slamming the door, the daughter said, "‘WHAT?!’ with such attitude it took a lot of self control not to start yelling," the mom continued.
"I told her as calmly as I could that if she slammed that door one more time she was going to come home and find it gone. She proceeded to yell at me to leave her alone and then slammed it five times as hard as she could," she said.
The next day, when the teenager went to school, her parents removed her bedroom door and "installed a curtain rod with a nice heavy curtain over the door instead."
The curtain was completely opaque and sound-blocking, said the Redditor. She said she and her husband "even put little Velcro pieces on the walls and curtain sides so it stays in place."
The curtain's appearance apparently did not go over well.
"She said we’re being emotionally abusive and taking away her right to privacy. She sulked all weekend and won’t talk to us now," the mom said.
The Redditor defended her actions, saying her daughter still has physical privacy "but can't slam a piece of fabric."
"We also have never and still don’t just go into her room unannounced and still knock on the wall to ask permission to enter," she noted.
"We’ve told her we’ll happily put her door back on once she agrees to respect the no slamming rule," she also said.
The mom turned to Reddit for advice after her own mother said that she was wrong for removing the teen's door, and that she "overreacted."
"She doesn't have to deal with the house shaking," she wrote of her mother's reaction. "So, AITA?"
On the AITA subreddit, people on Reddit can reply to posts and indicate the poster is "NTA" ("Not the A-----e"), "YTA" ("You're the A-----e"), "NAH" ("No A-----e Here") or "ESH" ("Everyone Sucks Here").
Users can "upvote" responses they think are helpful and "downvote" ones that are not.
The vast majority of nearly 6,000 responses to The-Compliment-Fairy's post were supportive of the parents' action regarding the door.
The daughter "should know that loud, disruptive sounds and sleep deprivation can be actual forms of abuse."
Many people wrote that their initial reaction was that the frustrated mom and her husband were in the wrong — but that they changed their mind after reading her story.
"NTA. Interrupting everyone's sleep is unacceptable. You gave her plenty of opportunities to change her door slamming behavior and she didn't do it," said Reddit user "Express-Afternoon724" in the top-upvoted reply.
That same user suggested that the parents let the teen "sulk it out for a set amount of time" before replacing the door "conditionally for a trial."
"If she can refrain from slamming it, she can keep it. If not, the door gets taken off again for even more time. Rinse and repeat until she no longer slams," the commenter added.
Reddit user "Humble_Nobody2884" wrote, "I was expecting an a-----e story, but she’s disrespecting the ENTIRE household and doubled down with that 5x slamming rebuttal."
The daughter "should know that loud, disruptive sounds and sleep deprivation can be actual forms of abuse," the commenter added.
"NTA — That's what I call ‘checkmate,' said Reddit user DragonFireLettuce. "You're teaching your kid a valuable lesson — actions have consequences."
"The curtain was a great touch," this person added.
Christine Rousselle is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.
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