TikTok Eviscerates This Mom Who Charged for ‘Couch Wear & Tear’ After a Playdate

Sydni Ellis
·4 min read
5

If sitting on your couch isn’t a crunchy, sticky, surprising experience, then you probably aren’t a mom. My couch has been christened with vomit, lollipops, an entire mug of hot cocoa — kids, am I right? So when a TikTok mom went viral for charging a child for “couch wear and tear,” my eyebrows practically hit the ceiling. Couch wear and tear? Has she met kids?! Pretty much everyone else felt the same way (duh!), and their funny reactions will make you laugh.

TikToker Jon Dawson (@thejondawson) made a reaction video to the mom’s original TikTok video, which asked: “Can we normalize sending other family money for playdates?” Dawson’s clip, which now has 2 million views, starts by letting the mom explain herself. She started by sharing that her daughter had a friend over recently (as kids do), but that things got awkward when she texted the friend’s mom to request money. And, luckily for us, she shared screenshots!

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The mom texted asking for her to send $15 via Venmo for “your share of the expenses,” causing Dawson to widen his eyes. Umm … expenses?  The friend’s mom had the same question, asking her what she meant, and she responded with a fully itemized list (!!) of everything the child had done or used.

She is charging $1 for chalk, $1 for applesauce, $1 for fruit, $1 for yogurt, $5 because she allegedly “broke an lol doll,” and $2 for three juice boxes. The other bills came from “sat on couch wear and tear” ($1) and “3 trips to the bathroom” ($3). Girl, what? You are charging this child to use your bathroom? To sit on your couch!? My kid’s friend could spill their three juice boxes on my couch, and I would never dream of charging their parents for that. It’s the price you pay for having kids. I feel bad for the poor daughter because she is not going to have any playdates after this.

Dawson gave his commentary at the end, joking that the mom should have let the friend’s mom know up front about the charges “so the parent knows what they’re getting into and they can say, ‘absolutely not, my kid’s actually not coming to play because you’re an absolute psychopath.’”

kid bouncing on the couch
Ksenia Chernaya/Pexels

I guess I could see the mom charging for a toy the friend broke (my kids have too many toys anyway, so I would never actually do this), but to charge for the couch wear and tear? C’mon. If you want a babysitting job, just say that. Don’t make it out to be a regular playdate thing.

Dawson said he would never let his kids go to this mom’s house, sarcastically adding, “Did you charge them for the oxygen they breathed? Did you charge for that? You probably should have put maybe, I don’t know, seventy-five cents … for that good, good air because your filter system had to filter that air.”

Commenters completely agreed that Dawson. “No way. If your kid is coming over to play, they’re my kid too and I’ve got it covered,” one person wrote. Another said, “’She used the bathroom’. Ma’am what?!”

“It’s the couch and bathroom expenses that really sent me. My kid would never go there again …” someone else said. Others pointed out that if they were going to a ticketed event, her reaction would make more sense. But just staying home? Definitely not.

“Girlllllllll I thought she meant a play date where they went somewhere,” someone said. Someone else wrote, “A day at the house NO COST. A day at Six Flags, then yeah I can understand!”

This TikTok mom is far from the only parent acting extra stingy on playdates, and we hope this trend dies out soon. Let kids be kids — feed them snacks, embrace the chaos and the broken toys, and most importantly, let them sit on the damn couch. And if you can’t do that without charging, then maybe you need a break from hosting playdates.

These celebrity moms make us all feel better when they share the highs and lows of parenting.

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