‘Am I a Karen for stepping in when a child yelled at my toddler?’

Anna Martin

At this point, we’ve all heard the term ‘Karen.’

It’s a slang name given to someone who might ask for the manager the minute something is even slightly wrong.

Yet one Reddit user wanted to know if she was one after telling some older children off for yelling at her toddler.

The incident occurred when she took her three-year-old twins to the park which she described as “pretty empty” with only a few children around.

Things were going okay until she heard the other kids shouting around the slide she knew her twins were playing 9n.

“I hear someone yelling “Move kid! Kid, move it!” I get into view and tell them, “Don’t yell at him, he’s a toddler.” They apologize but their little ringleader of the group talks over and says “he’s in the way,”‘ she explained.

The mother tried to stay calm telling the older children to just give her child a chance and that he might be sacred but things only escalated.

“The ringleader kid jumps down, in a mocking voice goes ‘don’t yell at him.’ Then he turns to the rest of the kids and announces that I’m a Karen.

“My twins keep playing, the bigger kids keep playing. They start swearing. The grandmother asks them to stop swearing. I wasn’t paying attention to how they responded to her,” she wrote.

After the leader of the group continued to intimate her twins, she decided to take them home but not before the ring leader yelled “Karen is leaving. Ugly Karen is leaving,” she claimed.

She concluded by asking her fellow Reddit users if she was “naive” for trying to stand up for her twins.

They quickly flooded the comments with messages of support telling her she did the right thing.

“You can parent that 10-year-old if you want to. Tell them they are being disrespectful and bullying both to the toddlers and to you. Ask them if they believe that is how they should treat other people,” wrote one.

Someone else said they would have done the commenting, “I am the type of person/mom who has ZERO issues correcting the bad behaviour of other kids, especially if there are no parents around or the parents aren’t paying attention.”

While a third added, “So rude… It makes me wonder how the parents are if the kids are acting like this and comfortable being rude to random people.”