Every parent knows that school runs can be stressful. And one California teen learned the hard way that you don’t mess with mom first thing in the morning.
Mother-of-three Nicole Poppic, 34, wasn’t impressed when her 14-year-old daughter Cara overslept, making Poppic late for drop-offs.
“I started doing the ‘mom’ thing,” Poppic told TODAY Parents. “My lecture went something along the lines of, ‘You need to start thinking about other people, Cara. You are not the only person in this family, and you made your brother and sister late, too’.”
The frustrated mother was less-than-impressed when the teen decided to tune out her mom by putting her headphones on and drowning out the noise with music from her favorite band.
Poppic says she unplugged the headphones and chucked her daughter’s phone out the window to teach her a lesson. But after dropping off her two younger children, she marched in to her daughter’s school office with a note explaining the reason for her lateness.
“When I handed it to Cara, she said, ‘I am not taking this in there.’ I responded with, ‘Ok, then WE will take it in there’,” Poppic wrote on her blog.
Here’s why:
”Cara is tardy this morning as a result of a condition known as teenage-ism,” the note reads. Poppic added that their is “no known cure” for the condition and that Cara “suffered from an inability to remove herself from her bed” that morning.
Poppic said she went home to retrieve the phone from her neighbor’s yard and shared the note with her Facebook friends to make light of the otherwise stressful situation.
Cara told TODAY that she was initially embarrassed by the note. “I guess I was ashamed of acting that way... but after it was all said and done, I laughed about it,” she said.
Poppic says she’s received some criticism from people on Facebook for her parenting method, but insists the incident hasn’t hurt her relationship with her daughter. The post has received over 7,000 likes and more than 32,000 shares in the last three weeks.
“While Cara and I have our moments of frustration (just like any other parent/teen combo), we are really very close,” Poppic wrote in a follow-up Facebook post. “She understands my sense of humor and she even laughed about the note herself a couple days later.”
Other parents have also taken an unusual stand when it came to disciplining their teens, like the New Mexico family who banished their son to the backyard for stealing or the tough mom who asked her son to pay his share of the bills to teach him a lesson in respect.
Parenting teens ain’t easy.
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