AIO for telling my mom she’s manipulating my little sister to have no independence as she grows up?
My (24F) little sister (10F) has a neurological disorder that has significantly delayed her learning and childhood development. She’s in the 5th grade and currently reads and writes about 2 or 3 years below grade level. We live in a town with a very well-funded school district, and she has amazing occupational and speech therapists at school who have been working to improve her reading, writing, and speech.
At home, however, she is a straight up “iPad Kid.” She does her homework in about 15-20 minutes when she gets home, and then proceeds to spend the next 4 hours each night and all of her weekends glued to her iPad, watching brain rot videos and Roblox let’s plays.
My mom (51F) doesn’t care that my sister spends this much time on her iPad. She usually tells my sister to “go play” on her iPad when she’s tired of talking to/interacting with her, and if her iPad is dead, my mom will hand over her phone to my sister to watch YouTube on instead. My mom also does everything else for my sister in the meantime; heats up her food, bathes her, brushes her teeth, wipes her after doing a #2, etc.
Because of this, my sister has no sense of independence when she’s at home, to the point where she will literally ask my mom if she can use the bathroom in our own house! She doesn’t know how to bathe herself, and only just started dressing herself and brushing her own teeth a few months ago (though my mom still picks out her outfits). While she does have some delays in motor skills, I have no doubt that if she had been given the time and opportunity to practice these skills for herself over the last few years, she would have already been able to do these tasks independently.
Now, she’s turning 11 soon, and my mom still bathes her and wipes her butt. Because I live at home and come home from work in the early evenings, my mom has put it on me to get her ready for bed each night. With this, I’ve been letting my sister do her own nightly showers, standing outside the shower while giving her verbal instructions and minimal intervention so that she can practice bathing herself, and so that she can own a sense of autonomy over what happens to her body in this small way.
This evening, while I was coaching her through her shower, my mom came in and said “[my name], just shower her yourself, we don’t have time to let her do it by herself.” I told her that letting her do it on her own takes maybe 5 extra minutes, and that I don’t want to be in charge of bathing her or wiping her butt when she’s in middle school.
My mom got absolutely heated at this comment, telling me that I was questioning her parenting, that I just wanted an excuse to get out of helping her around the house, and that I think she’s a bad mom for just wanting my sister to go to bed on time. I told her she has no patience with my sister, and she’s manipulating her to have no independence by the time she’s an adult. My mom started yelling some random nonsense over me and dismissing me to deflect from the conversation and walked into her room. I let my sister finish showering, explained to her that I love her and want her to grow up knowing how to do as much as she can by herself, and tucked her into bed after she put on her pajamas.
Personally, I don’t think that anything I said was particularly wrong (though I do feel REALLY bad that this blew up in front of my sister), but the way my mom blew up over me wanting my sister to know how to bathe herself has left me reeling. So, AIO for telling my mom the way she treats my sister is manipulative?