Theoretically, parents are supposed to be the people who raise the children in their care. Practically, it's not always the truth. Sometimes, people have children when they're too young themselves and can't give a child proper care. In this case, the child is lucky if there are other adults who can take care of them. And sometimes, these parents come back around later and expect their basically abandoned child to be grateful for them being a good parent to someone else. And yes, that's exactly what happened in today's story.
More info: Reddit
Sometimes, parents gain their parental instincts unacceptably late after the lack of these instincts leaves a negative impact on their child
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
A 17-year-old teen's parents had him when they were too young, so the boy grew up in his grandparents' care
Later, the parents had younger kids, whom they took care of more than they ever did for their first son
Image credits: Yaroslav Shuraev (not the actual photo)
To fix the issues brought on by their absence, they asked their firstborn to go to therapy with them
Image credits: Elina Fairytale (not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/More-Lettuce-8160
Turns out, the teen doesn't think that taking care of his younger siblings makes up for the way they treated him when he was little, which made them call the boy a jerk
When the OP was born, his parents were merely 21 years old. At the time, their parental instincts hadn't kicked in yet. So, during the majority of the boy's childhood, he was raised by his grandparents. They were the people who taught him basic life skills, encouraged him to find his passion, and all of that.
It also didn’t help that the parents basically resented their first child. There are many ways parents can show resentment towards their children. For instance, it can manifest as over-monitoring a child’s every move, imposing their own aspirations on their children, or invalidating a kid's feelings. In the case of the story’s parents, it showed up as complaining about giving signatures, not showing up for school events, not wanting to deal with a sick child, and so on.
Just as there are many ways resentment shows up, there are quite a few reasons why it shows up, too. If the resentment is short-timed and doesn’t happen day to day, it can show up simply because they’re tired, stressed, or anything similar.
But if the resentment seeps into daily life, there could be more serious underlying issues. For example, if a parent constantly feels that they would like to go back to a time before they had kids and had time to do things they love, it can surely feel icky for them. And it doesn’t feel good for the kid either, as, usually, the resentment manifests in poor behavior. The parents from the story are a good representation of such a case.
Image credits: Sébastien Mouilleau (not the actual photo)
Speaking of the parents, after some time, they decided to have more kids. Knowing the way they treated their first one, it seems like kind of a bad decision, doesn’t it? Well, apparently, it wasn’t, as now they’re better parents to these children than they ever were to the OP. Not only are they not showing any resentment towards them, but they’re also properly taking care of them.
The couple also decided to bring their first child to therapy so they could resolve everything between them. There, it was revealed that the parents hoped that having younger children and taking care of them properly would make up for not doing it all for their first son.
This sounded like complete nonsense to the post’s author. After all, while these parents are their biological ones, the teen views their grandparents as their real ones, as they were the ones who raised him. Also, for this reason, the boy doesn’t view his siblings as such, as, in his mind, they have different parents.
This revelation caused the original poster to be called a jerk for not taking joy in his siblings having better parents than he did, which prompted him to come on Reddit to ask whether people online also thought so.
And these people didn't think the same way teen's parents did. They saw nothing wrong in his words but saw plenty of wrongfulness in the parents'. Actually, they saw wrongfulness not only in their words but in their actions, too. Pawning your child to be raised by your parents and expecting that child to be happy you didn't do the same to other children didn't go over so well with the netizens' moral code. So, the verdict was that the OP wasn't the jerk.
People online disagreed with the sentiment of the teen being a jerk but fully agreed that the actual jerks here were the parents
