Dad Played Awful Prank on Daughter to Punish Her for Sleeping Late

I don't know, in my humble opinion, you should be able to live your life without the fear that your own father will come running and screaming into your room when you've just fallen asleep to give you tragic news that's not actually real. 

In my world, if your dad pulls this "prank" on you, I believe you have the right to cut him out of your life for as long as it takes him to come to his senses and apologize. Sincerely.

In this story, the dad who pulled what he viewed as a "harmless prank" took to Reddit's "Am I the A-hole?" to procure a neutral judgment of his actions, clearly thinking people would take his side. Then, his daughter found his post, chimed in, and all hell broke loose.

In his post, dad explains that he has an 18-year-old daughter who's currently home from college for spring break. He says her sleeping schedule has always been bad. Like, her entire life. 

Instead of thinking that maybe there's something wrong and that he should help her, he just gets mad that she sleeps from about 7 a.m. to 1 or 2 p.m. every day. He writes, "She wastes the day completely, and I'm starting to get very tired of it."

It doesn't seem like he's mad because he wants to spend the morning hanging out with his daughter, catching up, etc. It really seems like he's just offended that she sleeps the first part of the day away. 

His wife has been telling him their daughter has been struggling with classes and has been on the verge of a "burnout," which would explain her fraught sleeping schedule. But he's not having it. "I argue she should sleep at night then instead of wasting a whole day," he writes. I know. He's already the worst.

Yesterday, he writes, he and his wife went to bed around 11 p.m. He woke up a few times to their daughter watching Netflix in the living room and estimates that she finally went to bed around 7 a.m. 

When he finally woke up at 9, he saw a sign on her door that said, "I fell asleep around 8:30. Please don't wake me unless someone has died!" His wife urged him not to wake her, to let her rest, but he was fed up that it had been four days and her sleeping schedule had not fixed itself. Four days! Not even a week!

So what did he do? "At 10," he writes, "I dramatically burst into her room, shaking her awake and calling her name repeatedly. Once she was awake I told her that our cat, Tailor, had died. She was immediately alert and jumped right out of bed even though she had 'just gone to sleep.'

"She ran into the living room crying, only to see our cat eating as usual. I couldn't help myself and started laughing at her confused face. I told her not to go back to bed since she was already up and her sleeping schedule needed fixing."

Obviously, this is cruel. And his daughter was rightfully "fuming." She locked herself in her room and won't come out. His wife thinks he acted horribly, and — newsflash — so does the rest of the world.

The comments were unanimous. This dad was needlessly cruel. So what if her sleep schedule is off? She's an 18-year-old college student. His wife had explained that she was having a rough go of it. He should have done everything in his power to help her and let her sleep as long as possible. 

Instead, he made her think her pet was dead. 

But it doesn't end here. His daughter found the post. And she commented. She writes that she debated commenting because she wanted to see him get his judgment, but she changed her mind because, even after all the comments, he was still walking around the house like she was wrong. 

"What you failed to mention in this post," she writes, "was the night I called mom bawling my eyes out at 2:30 in the morning because I was so stressed out from classes and work. You listened to me cry uncontrollably for an hour while mom comforted me. You heard her tell me that all I'd have to do when I come home is rest."

She continues, "You were so selfish in your thinking that you thought it would be better to tell me my cat, that I got for my 10th birthday, was DEAD. You didn't stop to think for a second that I was already struggling... Yes, I feel like you are a horrible father for how you acted."

According to her, her dad hasn't really asked how she's doing since she got back. He hasn't made any effort to talk to her or help her through what I assume is her freshman year of college, a huge and difficult transition. 

If commenters were fervent in their judgment before, this upped the ante. His daughter is in her late teens, in her first year of college. That is premium time for messed-up sleep schedules. Plus, he's known that she's been stressed and struggling for some time now. 

There are so many reasons that she shouldn't be punished for her wonky sleep schedule. He just wouldn't listen to any of them.