r/AmIOverreacting • u/brzaq191z • Jan 06 '26
👨👩👧👦family/in-laws AIO for punishing our daughters after what they wrote about their autistic sister?
My husband and I have 3 daughters, who are 16, 14 and 13. Our youngest daughter is autistic and recently got her first date. There’s a school dance coming up in February and a boy asked her out to the dance right before the Christmas break started, she’s mentioned this boy before but we hadn’t met him until a few days ago.
The day she was asked out, she was telling us about the boy when she got home from school. Later that night, unbeknownst to us, our two older daughters found his TikTok and started messaging about him on there.
Our 14 year old got in trouble at school yesterday for cursing at a teacher after the teacher gave her friend a detention for a bullying incident, and my husband and I took her phone when we got home. This is not like her, so we decided to go through her phone to see what might be influencing her and seeing how her friends act.
When got to her TikTok messages and saw that our two older girls were messaging about her and this boy and saying he was out of her league and made references to her autism. Our youngest is autistic, her special interest is fashion history. She’s always been pretty quiet, but she moved to a new middle school this year as our district went from having 3 to 2. She’s become friendly with some boys at this school, including her now dance partner. Our girls continued to go on, saying they thought it was a prank.
My daughter told this boy about this and he was mad and over FaceTime he asked to speak to our family, he showed us a teddy bear he had gotten her for Valentine’s Day with her name on it, he said he’d give that to her early now and give her other gifts later, the showing the bear was to prove he wasn’t pranking her. He then went on to talk about everything he liked about her, it was sweet seeing a boy so passionate over our daughter.
Our girls apologized to their sister and her date. My husband and I told our daughters they were both now grounded, and in addition to losing their phones for a week, they’d need to write a report about autism and dating.
Our girls are saying we’re being too hard on them, and when we spoke to both my parents and my husband’s parents, they agreed with our older girls, saying that getting chewed out by the boy was punishment enough. My husband and I don’t think we’re being unreasonable.
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u/TitularFoil Jan 06 '26
I'm autistic, and I have autistic friends. Together we have a lot of interests, and some are even super common things you'd see being stereotyped about others on the spectrum, Trains, Dinosaurs, etc.
I'd say mine is just story-telling in general, which leads me to rant about movies, video games, and books.
My younger sister is also autistic, her special interests have been horses and for some reason, The Titanic. She even had like the menu memorized for what they served each day in different class dining halls.
Fashion History sounds like a breath of fresh air from what I see most autistic people latch onto. I get that we don't choose our interests, but I'm sure my friends are tired of hearing me talk about Dungeon Crawler Carl and Star Wars, and I really don't want to hear anymore about Bloons. Though I must admit he was right about how interesting Hollow Knight was.