This Mom Has Been Picketing Her Own House Since Friday Because Her Kids Are Being Jerks
Teenagers can be little jerks sometimes. They can also be wonderful, but I think an occasional bout of jerkdom is generally to be expected when one becomes a parent. A teenager will almost certainly make you want to go on strike at some point, and that’s exactly what one North Carolina mother is doing.
Naasira Muhammad told ABC News that her teenagers are “out of control.” One of her daughters even keyed her brand-new minivan recently.
“My children have everything that they could possibly want and need, but yet still, they are disrespectful,” Muhammad said. “They are rude. They think that I’m the meanest mom in the world. They think they can survive without me, so I said, you know what? That’s fine. This mom is going on strike.”
When Muhammad says she is on strike, she is not kidding. Muhammad isn’t just not making dinner or picking up after her kids, she is actually marching up and down in front of her own house with a sign that says, “Mom On Strike.”
“I walk up and down the sidewalk until my knees hurt, and then I sit down,” she said.
That sounds like a lot of work to me, and I’m not sure how it is intended to motivate her children to stop being jerks. Is the sight of mom with a picket sign supposed to embarrass them into behaving? This seems more like the type of thing an unruly teenager would just ignore or dismiss as “lame mom antics.”
Whatever the one-woman picket line is supposed to accomplish, it does not sound like it is working, because Muhammad has reportedly been at it since Friday. She said she turned to the strike because she found herself at the breaking point.
“I’m to the point where I’m just so frustrated, so to keep my hands off my kids or to keep me from doing something crazy, I just decided to go on strike,” she said.
Well, it doesn’t sound effective, but I can sympathize with a woman who has just flat-out run out of ideas and needs to do something. But if I ever go on strike, I will not be marching a picket line. I will be sitting on my butt watching TV and if any of my kids bothers me I will say, “I am on break.”
Photo: Shutterstock
