A mom on Reddit is in a battle with her mother-in-law after she decided to buy her daughter a new pack of underwear. Well, not underwear exactly. A pack of thongs. Sure, some people might scoff at the idea of a 12-year-old wearing a thong to school, but the mom sees it as a purely logical way to help her daughter fix her VPL (visible panty lines). However, her MIL caught wind of it and thinks it’s “immoral." Now the two are at odds over the tween's panties. “Is allowing a 12 year old to wear thongs really that bad?” she wondered.
As the mom explained, her daughter recently came to her for help.
Of course, her underwear only became a problem when someone at school said something that made her feel bad.
“My daughter recently mentioned to me that she didn’t like that her panty line showed through her leggings, and that a boy at school mentioned that he could see it,” the mom explained in a since-deleted post on the Am I the A–hole forum.
“It made her uncomfortable so she asked if there was a way to hide the panty line,” she added.
The mom had two ideas: buy her daughter some longer tops or take the plunge and buy her some thongs.
To the mom, it was no big deal. Her mom bought her thongs when she was her daughter’s age, and her husband didn’t seem to care when she talked to him about it. So the mom went to Walmart and “bought her a pack of basic cotton thongs; no designs, lace, or anything that may seem too mature for her age,” she explained.
Recently, she dropped her daughter off for a three-day weekend with Grandma.
That opened up a whole can of worms. When she went to pick up her daughter from her MIL’s house, grandma pulled the mom aside and told her that “she had washed a few of my daughters clothes and saw that she had a thong.”
“She thought maybe my daughter got ahold of it somehow from a friend without me knowing,” she recalled.
The mom had to fess up to her MIL — she was the one who bought her daughter the thongs.
Even though the mom explained why she did it, her MIL was scandalized.
“She went on how a child should not be wearing thongs or sexy underwear, it’s immoral, and that I am only setting her up to become an issue,” she wrote.
“I wasn’t sure what she meant by issue so I asked her to explain and she said she didn’t want her granddaughter to become promiscuous, drop out of school, and become a teen mom,” she continued.
“She mentioned that her sister was very promiscuous and would wear sexy and revealing clothing and got knocked up at 15 (as she put it), and she won’t allow that to happen to her granddaughter.”
The mom understood why her MIL might be concerned, but she wore thongs at 12 and she turned out just fine.
In fact, none of the things that her MIL worried about happened to her.
“She still does not agree with it, and now says I’m encouraging promiscuous behavior in her granddaughter,” the mom continued. But the mom knows from her own experience that her MIL has nothing to worry about.
The eye-rolling in the comment section was off the charts.
“Thongs aren't sexy unless she's deliberately choosing sexy ones and actually showing them off to people. Otherwise it's just practical underwear,” one person commented.
“Yeah, underwear has no effect on your life besides … comfort and a possible visible panty line?” another commenter wrote in. “OP's MIL is being super weird about this.”
A third person put it this way: “NTA, but it really sucks that some boy who wasn't able to keep his thoughts to himself has made this much mess for you guys. Maybe there is a way to address that, after all, it's not wrong to wear underwear or have the lines show.”
A few people saw her MIL’s point.
"Huh?! 12 is way too young! Who cares what that boy says about her pantie line! You should have told her to tell that boy to stop looking at her butt," one commenter wrote.
"I don't think kids should be wearing leggings as reg clothing too many pervs out there even if you don't like it draws attention," someone else commented.
Later in the thread, the mom clarified that she did have a conversation with her daughter about what her classmate told her.
“I’ve always encouraged my daughter to be comfortable in her own skin and I’ve told her to ignore the boy who would tease her about it,” she explained. “Unfortunately, as a teen/preteen the words of others can still have an impact despite others telling you it shouldn’t.”
No matter how much the parents tried to tell their daughter to ignore the boy in her class “and that there was nothing wrong with her panty line showing,” the mom could see she was “uncomfortable.”
“I want her to understand there’s nothing wrong with having a panty line, but that if she’s still uncomfortable, I also understood that too,” she added.
All she really wanted was to help her daughter as she navigates high school. “That is why I gave her options,” she shared.
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