wibta-snitching-throwaway

[wibta-snitching-throwaway]

hey guys this is op here on a throwaway

for starters just wanted to say thanks for everyone's responses. i really apreciate it, and i will not be narcing on my brother. it would be an asshole move for sure. i didnt fully plan to do it in the first place and i most definetly will not be now 🙏. i really love my brother, we have a pretty good relationship right now, and i absolutely do not want to fuck up our relationship so i will not do that. and yeah, she probably wouldnt take the deal anyway

just going to address a few things

for everyone saying that i should use my brothers workarounds, i cant! i have tried before and his is just a weird glitch/settings that my mother doesnt know are enabled and that wouldnt work for me

i dont think my mother is abusive. a bit controlling, probably. but not flat out abusive. she's supportive in other aspects of my life this is just something she has Very Big Opinions On.

to the few people who asked why i was on tumblr if she didnt allow social media and stuff, she doesnt know im here lmao. i'm on my chromebook that my father bought for me (parents are divorced) and there are no time limits on it. i may try to bring it with me to school sometimes as i can contact my friends on discord on it, but i think discord is blocked on the school wifi

once i see my therapist again i will definetly talk to her about this and see if we can work up some sort of a better compromise. it really hurts when i dont know if my friends are safe. realistically, i know that it's not solely my responsibility to make sure everyone is ok. im just a kid too. but i cant just stand by, you know?

@am-i-the-asshole-official

WIBTA For Snitching On My Brother?

tl;dr at the end, the submissions a bit long. sorry if this sounds like stupid teen drama, but i needed outside opinions. (tw for mentions of attempted suicide)

so for a bit of context here, me (14nb) and my brother (14m) both have Parental RestrictionsTM on our phones. In my opinion they are way more severe than they need to be. i am not allowed to have any social media at all, my mother barely tolerates discord. I cannot text anyone who is not my direct sibling or parent from 9pm at night to noon the next day and i cant use any "nonessential" apps during that time frame too. my brother has the same restrictions on his phone, but he has safari removed because my mother said he was playing "random internet games". however, he has found ways around this and ways around the app restrictions. i know how he does it. i really dont have any intention of telling our mother, its none of my business and i honestly dont care that much.

I recently moved to a new school. My brother and i were homeschooled prior to this during covid. And it was fine. We went to a homeschool co-op twice a week. A year ago we were both enrolled in Local Community College as dual enrollment students. A semester into that i was Not Vibing Well and ended up having a breakdown and getting a therapist. I would talk to her directly about this but i havent been able to see her in weeks due to scheduling conflicts. The workload seemed too much to me, there was no longer a distinction between School and Home. i felt like i was constantly on the clock, and i barely saw my friends. In addition to other factors at my co-op, I got very lonely. At that time the limits on my phone were 9pm-3pm (it was later edited to 9am to noon) . I cant remember exactly what happened, but i asked my mother to at least change the communication limits so that i could talk to my friends during the day. She said no, stating that I Do Not Need to Communicate With Friends During The School Day. i do not have a real “school day” i am at home basically 5/7 days of the week. And normal kids see their friends every day at school. The argument got dropped then.

Fast forward half a year, i felt increasingly lonely, out of place, bothersome, etc, at my co-op and have decided to try going to Local Public Highschool. This meant leaving my best friend (14f)  whom i love dearly (for the purposes of this post i will call her Z). Z is one of my favorite people in the whole world, we got platonically married, I lovingly refer to her as “my wife”, and i would genuinely die for her. She got a phone over the summer which means we have a better way to communicate, replacing discord as the primary communication system. Also at that time one of my best online friends fucked up their discord account somehow and the whole online group moved to text. there's about four of them? J, Other J, B, and L (ages vary from 12-16). I believe only B is directly relevant to this story but the others are worth mentioning. Additional context (tw for mentions of suicide from now on), all of those four are varyingly suicidal. B has attempted before, at least twice I believe. out of the group i am probably the most mentally stable.

School starts! I am already feeling a bit lonely due to leaving Z but we stay positive. I wake up for school at like 530 and check my phone at like 6:45. Woohoo a message from B! It was sent at 4 am. This is concerning. There is a glitch that i can use in order to view texts for between half a second and four seconds, it depends, and i use it. B’s message reads “Bye”. theres no fucking reason that they would be texting me goodbye at 4am in the morning unless they were going to kill themselves. I cannot properly view or respond to that text until noon, so eight hours. I wait to know if my friend is ok for eight hours, and at noon i check my phone again. In that time i’ve received messages from the groupchat. J, Other J, and L all received “bye” texts from B at around the same time period. After a few messages, we know B is ok, i dmed them privately and they responded both in ims and the gc. So they are ok. But i had to wait for eight hours to know that. Later that day i asked my mom if she had considered my proposal (i asked her a day or two before if she would at least turn off communication limits because it is also rather embarrassing to be honest to have to tell other people that oh i cant respond to your message right now, sorry my mom has limits on my phone :D. In addition i get anxious when i send a message that im nervous abt and it doesnt get responded to for hours so i hate leaving messages for longer than two hours). Once again, she said no. it goes against her Views As A Parent for me to have “unrestricted access” to my phone. She offered to add only Z to the list of people i can contact during the limits. This is better than nothing but Z texts more in the groupchat than she does in private messages so it wouldn’t work that well. We argued, it didnt work out, i got pissed off and we both went to bed. i very strongly feel that for like my mental health i need to be able to communicate with my friends better than i can at the moment. And i dont want to wake up to a message from a friend, have it be the last one they ever send, and not be able to respond for hours. 

Heres where the part where i could be an asshole comes in. (so sorry that that was really long i didnt know what parts would be needed as context and what were not so i just typed everything i think might be relevant). This isnt something that i am very strongly considering, as i truly dont want to fuck up my relationship with my brother and i love him a lot. I just want opinions on whether it would like be going too far i guess. I am considering offering a trade. I tell my mother how my brother has found ways around his limits, and she turns off the communication limits on my phone. WIBTA if i did that?

TL;DR: would i be the asshole if i snitched on how my brother got around some restrictions in exchange for me being able to communicate with my friends?

What are these acronyms?