u/Life_Improvement_825

Moved to our current city 10 years ago with my husband and kids. New area for all of us, hours from family. I made 3 friends early on, so was happy. Making friends as an adult is hard! Our kids are friends. We do large parties and game nights together, my kids consider the other families as extended family at times. So a nice little community we built.

Fast forward to present day, and one of these people, we’ll call her Samantha, got into it with my 16 year old. They spent a week together, away, at a church camp. (Annual thing) Samantha was a parent-chaperone. Without getting in to too many details, the biggest thing that came up was my child and friends were being chastised for not being holy women of God because they lifted their shirts as a joke while in sports bras. (They signed a code of conduct so they knew they shouldn’t have blah blah blah, and they acknowledged that and apologized)

My kid, being my kid, vehemently disagreed with the notion that they were not women of God because of one action. Then Samantha, along with some of the other adults in the room, proceeded to tell the girls it’s their job to ensure they don’t arouse the boys at camp and doing things like what they did was dangerous (my kid recorded the conversation). Again, my kid disagrees. Samantha tires to threaten my kid by saying, “do you want me to call your mom?” And my kid says, “go ahead. In fact, I’ll call her. You know and I know she agrees with me.” And she proceeds to say, “yes, well your mom and I don’t have the same beliefs on things like this and it’s because she doesn’t know the physiology of boys and men, so of course she agrees with you.”

The idea she is insisting I know nothing about is this: men and boys cannot control their attraction and being turned on by women and girls and it is a women’s job to make sure they don’t tempt them with clothing and behavior. … what in the actual backwards nonsense is this? I’m not shocked, but I am because … it’s 2026.

Anywho …. my children have been taught, by myself and my husband, that our values are respect, consent, and personal responsibility. Men, women, and people of all genders notice people they find attractive. That’s part of being human. The idea that women must dress or behave a certain way to prevent men from becoming aroused places the burden of men’s self-control on women. Our message in our house is: Your feelings are yours. Your actions are yours. If someone says no, you respect it. If someone dresses a certain way, that doesn’t give you permission to behave differently. But also understand, not everyone thinks this, so protect yourself.

That should be it. My kid said what they thought, knows that her parents back her up (we are SUPER proud of her for speaking her mind and standing up for what she believes in a tense and adult environment - that was hard!) and she admitted she broke the code of conduct, apologized, and understands.

Nope. Next day, Samantha calls the entire group of girls together because she has to call my kid out. She needs to reiterate the physiology of boys and how girls are responsible for it and how wrong my kid is. Samantha says she “has to do this” and it’s because my kid was “telling everyone what happened. I heard it all through the walls”. What really happened was Samantha could hear my teenager on the phone with me, her mom, so she could cry about a stressful situation with someone she considered a second mom and needed love and support.

Once Samantha found out she called me, she panicked (again my kid recorded this entire interaction) and started talking about how she didn’t need to call me and shouldn’t have because what happens here stays here and my kid said, “No. I disagree. I was upset, I needed support, I called my mom. That’s what she’s there for.”

What is going to ultimately end this friendship isn’t that we have different beliefs. Adults can disagree. What I can’t get past is an adult using her position of authority to shame my child, tell her that I don’t understand “the physiology of boys and men,” attempt to discourage her from calling her own mother when she was upset, and then publicly single her out the next day because she dared to seek comfort from me.

If my kid came home believing that boys can’t control themselves and that girls are responsible for preventing their behavior, I would have considered that a failure on my part as a parent. Instead, she respectfully stood her ground, admitted where she was wrong, accepted the consequences for breaking the camp rules, and refused to accept the idea that she is responsible for someone else’s self-control. I couldn’t be prouder of her.

So yes, I will end a friendship. Not because we disagreed, but because I will always choose protecting my kids over protecting an adult’s feelings. Anyone who believes they should come between my children and their ability to call me when they need me isn’t someone I can trust anymore.