Parents force 15-year-old to attend twin sister's birthday party after banning her from celebrating her own birthday due to bad grades: 'My parents told me my absence was noticed by relatives and they were embarrassed'

Accountability and responsibility are crucial, and understanding the concepts of dependability and culpability is essential for maturity and development. When you fail to do the thing that you were supposed to and willfully flout responsibility, you'd probably expect some sort of reprimand or intervention from your parents to remind you and teach you the importance of the responsibility you haven't upheld. With repeated offenses, this reprimand may escalate to punishment in the form of the rescinding of privileges. You know, getting grounded, or being put in time-out, or confiscating your Game Boy and putting it on top of the fridge for a week (which you could reach from a chair when they weren't watching, as long as you carefully put it back before they noticed).

But still, punishments should not be too extreme for a given situation. To consider depriving a teen of their own birthday party, you'd think they'd have to have done something far worse than simply poor or lackluster performance at school. This is an especially difficult situation to navigate, as she has a twin sister who will still be celebrating their shared birthday. Forcing her to attend that party, with her excluded from the celebration, is really rubbing her face in the whole thing and is definitely overstepping.