When you invite people over to your house for dinner, you don’t usually have any special rules in mind, do you? You prepare a little extra food to make sure there’s enough and let everyone eat what they want and as much as they want. This is pretty normal when you invite people over!
Unless you’re the sister of a woman on Reddit. She’s become a villain on social media after having a total meltdown over how much her niece was eating, and the whole thing has turned into a huge conflict between her and her sister.
The aunt shamed her teenage niece for eating three portions at dinner.
The Reddit story was written by the teen’s mother, who is so baffled by the way the incident escalated that she wonders if she may have unknowingly done something wrong by allowing her 16-year-old daughter to eat as much as she wanted.
In her post, she wrote that her sister recently hosted a family dinner at her house. “It was one of those ‘just because’ dinners, no special occasion,” she said. Her sister, an avid cook, cooked “tons” of food for her family.
Her daughter had already eaten two portions of everything, but she asked for a third plate. The mother told her that was fine, but it was immediately clear that the aunt did not agree. “My sister (her aunt) looked at her with a shocked expression and said, ‘Another plate?'” the mother wrote. From there, the situation only escalated.
The 16-year-old was at work and had not eaten anything all day, but his aunt did not understand.
The mother wrote that her daughter is in a situation that too many American children are forced into. At just 16 years old, she has TWO different part-time jobs to save up for college.
That day, she hadn’t eaten anything all day. Of course, she’s also a teenager, and teenagers’ appetites are often much larger than those of older or younger people because of the impact of their growth on their metabolism.
The mother “didn’t even bat an eyelid” when her daughter asked for a third plate of food. “I turned to my sister and said she had worked all day and hadn’t eaten; you had cooked tons of food; it wouldn’t hurt her to have another plate,” the mother wrote. Suffice it to say, her sister did not agree.
The aunt became angry and humiliated the teenager, accusing her of having “bad manners” and her sister of not raising her properly.
The aunt had already made the teenager visibly uncomfortable, but the situation got even more out of control. “My sister started screaming,” she wrote, “and said something about how it wasn’t my place to determine whether my daughter could have more of the food she had prepared.”
The teenager ended up not being given anything to eat and since “the atmosphere was unpleasant,” they decided to leave. On the way out the door, the aunt scolded the mother, saying, “I should have taught my daughter manners and that it’s not right to take more than one plate from someone else.”
Then the grandmother chimed in, agreeing with the aunt that the mother had “not taught her good manners.” Even after she and her daughter left, they continued to harass her via text message, “saying it was rude to walk away in the middle of our conversation.”
People online were horrified by this conflict, with many feeling that the aunt was just trying to embarrass the teenager for her obesity.
Whichever way you look at it, this story is bizarre, no pun intended. Who invites people over and then controls how much they eat, especially a child who has worked all day without eating? This is absolutely bizarre.
And many online were sure there was something else going on—namely, that the aunt was trying to call the teenager out for being obese, but was couching it in language about “manners” to beat around the bush.
“I bet $10 that daughter is NOT skinny either,” wrote one Redditor. “People always look at fat people’s plates like they get everything.” Another echoed that suspicion, writing that “families are often the first place where children are judged… and not made to feel safe.”
Others pointed out that there was probably a double standard at play here: had the 16-year-old been a boy, she probably would have been allowed to eat five or six plates if she wanted to, without any consequences.
Regardless, the really sad part is how the young girl probably felt. And the data on the impact of food and weight shame on children and adolescents is clear.
A 2017 study found that even positive Comments about children and adolescents’ bodies and eating habits correlate with negative body image and problems with eating later in life, including a higher incidence of eating disorders and other mental health problems.
This highlights one of the most obvious problems: it is pretty cheeky to scold someone for their “manners” when you have just humiliated someone you invited to your home for eating the food you prepared for them.
Hopefully Auntie can shut up, learn a few etiquette lessons herself, and leave her niece alone.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer covering pop culture, social justice and human issues.
