'AITA for telling my sister if she can’t handle our parents she should skip my wedding?' UPDATED

Nothing quite like family estrangement to make a wedding guest list complicated.

In a popular post on the AITA, the OP asked if they were wrong for telling their sister she shouldn't come to wedding if she's gonna be upset seeing their parents. They wrote:

"AITA for telling my sister if she can’t handle seeing our parents at my wedding she shouldn’t show up?"

My sister (29) was a nightmare growing up. That is a fact and my parents did not handle her well. She was 16 when they gave up and sent her to a camp, it was horrible for her. The moment she was 18 she left and was on her own. She hasn’t been in contact with them since. A few years ago we got back into contact and she is much better. In a much better place and we have been slowly reconnecting.

I am engaged and my wedding is this year. I sent her an invite and she gave me a call. She asked if our parents will be there and I told her yes. This is where we got in an argument, she wants me to not invite them or she won’t show. That they were horrible to her and how dare I invite them. My argument was they have treated me well and it’s not my fault they sent her away.

Also she was pretty feral as a kid but I don’t hold that against her. We went on for a while but in the end I told her if she can’t handle seeing our parents to not come. She hung up and thinks I am being a jerk.

People had a lot of questions and comments to add.

Reevadare1990 wrote:

No judgment yet. INFO: was your sister ever evaluated for mental health conditions? Ever asked WHY she was lashing out so much? Have you ever asked her about the story from her side? I ask because children can have RADICALLY different experiences with their parents. It happened in my family. I was the “trouble” kid, courts got involved.

My parents to this day maintain I was troubled and difficult to control (I never did anything as extreme as your sister though, just tried to run away a couple times).

The story from my side was that my parents were severely emotionally, psychologically and verbally and even occasionally physically abusive and neglectful behind closed doors and I was the child who took it hardest and couldn’t mask it as well. There may be more to this story OP.

OP responded:

She was, she was never diagnosed as a child and she has never mentioned anything know that she is an adult.

Certain-Thing5082 wrote:

Not enough information.

But unless you have lived in a home with a child with real challenges - you just cannot understand the difficulty of day to day life. For the parents, for any pets in the home, for siblings. You just don't know.

It's easy to say "oh those camps for teens are horrible, any parent who sent a kid there was horrible". Of course NOW that we know what happened at those camps. But you can't take what we know now and say that any parent who made a decision then was clearly an abuser. Especially if you don't know what it is to have exhaustively tried every resource possible but nothing works.

To know that if someone ever knocked on your door because your child did something terrible to another, that you truly wouldn't be surprised. To worry about what lashing out at you might look like once the child outweighs you.

To know that your child isn't safe to be around others. If you haven't lived with these things, you just really truly can't know what it can be like day to day for someone like OP, her brother, or their parents.

There's not enough here to know what was going on with OP's sister or parents. But all of these immediate Y-T-A comments, those camps are terrible, it was clearly abuse comments are much easier to make if you haven't actually lived in a home with a troubled child and don't understand the decisions the parents were making (especially given that we didn't know THEN what we know now about the camps).

CoffeeOatmilkBubble wrote:

NAH. It sounds like your sister had untreated mental health issues, which your parents made many solid efforts to help her with. Eventually they tried to send her to treatment/“camp,” I’m sure as a desperate effort to get her help and protect their other kids.

People who haven’t lived this dynamic can’t understand it, but kids/teens with severe mental health issues can be very abusive and genuinely unsafe towards their siblings sometimes. The whole mental health problem with society is incredibly under-resourced.

She is being manipulative by saying that you cannot invite your own parents to your own wedding. It’s understandable that she wouldn’t want to attend with them, but that means she needs to choose to not attend.

Imaginary_Being1949 wrote:

NTA. It’s your wedding, not hers. It’s understandable if she doesn’t want them at her own wedding.

After receiving a lot of different feedback, OP jumped on with an update.

Edit: Since this has been asked multiple times, yeah my parents tried therapy. My brother is no contact with her due with the extreme b*llying she put him through as kids. The camp was a minor reform camp. Also another point, when she was sent away obviously my parent don’t know these camps were awful. They were advertised to helping kid, a safe place to help kids when parents can’t figure it out.

Good chance your question has been answered in one of my comments. Also please answer the AITA question.

Clearly, the people of the internet are undecided about this.