Mom Tricks Teen Into Admitting He’s Sexually Active & Then Punishes Him for It

Teenagers are notoriously hard to read, and some parents find that getting them to open up is harder than trying to crack a safe. But one mom is getting flack for how she reacted to learning a secret that her teen son shared with her — all because she “tricked” him into telling her about his personal life.

The mom is admittedly very strict with her son.

The high school senior has a 9 p.m. curfew, and he’s not allowed to go to any girl’s house, although a girl can come to their house “where we can keep an eye out,” she wrote on a since-deleted Reddit post shared on Twitter. “We also have him on Life360” — a tracking service.

She recently started to suspect that he wasn’t following the rules.

He came home with some marks on his shoulder, which he claimed were from a “very hot shower.” Her husband bought the story, but the mom wasn’t so sure.

“Few days ago I told my son to watch a movie with me,” she wrote. “It’s from the 90s and it’s called ‘Kids.’ It’s about a boy with HIV sleeping around.”

She asked her son if he knew about the movie and “if he knew anything about STDs.”

Her son seemed to be responsible and opened up to his mom that not only did he understand the risks of having sex, but he told her that he was currently sexually active and used condoms, spermicide, and prescription with his girl that he recently broke up with.

Unfortunately, mom wasn’t entirely impressed with her son's precautions.

She flipped out on him and accused him of breaking their rules. And then she did him really dirty and told her husband everything he admitted.

“His dad took away his car and I was gonna take his phone, but he pays for it so I decided to let him keep it,” she recalled. “He is grounded and he’s very upset with me. He told me he trusted me.”

The mom told him that he can trust her, “but a punishment has to be given as he’s been moving around sneakily.”

Her son reminded her that he’s being safe.

She was happy to hear that he was being safe — ”but it’s not a parent’s job to praise a kid for promiscuity.”

“This is one of those ‘good job but I have to punish you’ things,” she told him.

Her son wasn’t as understanding. He told her he would never open up to her again and has been refusing to speak to her for days. When she did get him to talk to her, he was “very disrespectful.” Now things are so heated between the two that the OP isn’t speaking to her son either.

“Was I in the wrong for what I did to find out the truth?” she wondered. “Rules are rules.”

Pretty much everyone agreed — the mom messed up.

via GIPHY

"Ok, real talk. When you tell your child 'You can talk to me, I want to make sure you're being safe' and then you use it as an excuse to punish the kid. You don't deserve to be trusted," wrote one person on Twitter. "Trying to get your kid to open up to you is not and should not be a trap to spring."

"YES [You're the A–hole]. You completely deserve for him to be freezing you out," another person commented. "You LIED TO HIM all so you could find out the truth. That’s not a way to engender trust, ma’am."

A third person agreed, putting it this way: "[G]ood luck ever getting him to trust you again. He's 17, and he was always going to learn about sex sooner or later. he and his girlfriend are being safe, that's all that matters. Some people need to get it through their heads that children don't exist for you to control."

Sure, most parents don't want to think about their teenager starting to have sex, but as the commenters pointed out, this is the exact wrong way react when a teen confides in you.

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