Resident in neighbourhood row after throwing water on kid who ‘ding dong ditched’ – and Reddit is divided

A Redditor is embroiled in a neighbourhood row after soaking a child who “ding dong ditched” their door with a bucket of water.

After a local child kept knocking on their door and running away, they tried to speak to the child’s parents. When their concerns were apparently laughed off by the parents, they then decided to douse the kid with water.

Taking to the Am I The A**hole subreddit, the Redditor sought outsider opinions on whether or not their course of action was too extreme.

They explained that they recently moved to the neighbourhood, and the local children have been welcoming them by playing “ding dong ditch” at their front door.

Annoyed after a couple of weeks of the game, they put up a sign asking them to stop “doing these silly pranks”. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.

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After asking neighbours about the prank, they told them it’s “some sort of tradition” for kids to do it to new people in the area.

The Redditor got so annoyed that they ended up setting up a camera at the front door to try and catch the culprit.

After identifying the “brat”, they went to speak to his parents but they “laughing it off saying kids will be kids”.

“So I decided that I’d myself do something about it,” they explained.

“After three days the kid came back, but I was hiding behind an unlocked door with a large water bucket. As soon as he knocked and turned I opened the door and splashed him with water.”

However, ten minutes later the parents came by asking why they soaked the child with water.

“I tried to justify my reasoning but to no avail. I’m conflicted/feel like an a**hole as I myself used a petty way of getting that kid to stop annoying us,” they concluded.

The comment section was divided, but above all else people seemed to find it amusing.

The top comment with 34,000 upvotes reads: “Lmao NTA [not the a**hole], and it’s interesting that NOW the parents suddenly care about misconduct. They had a chance to address it and didn’t.”

Another said it was “a prank for a prank”, and instead said the parents were in the wrong “for allowing their brat to be a nuisance.”

“LOL. My parents would have laughed in my face and told me I got what was coming to me,” another wrote.

Another said that although the original poster is the “a**hole” in this situation, “this is great”. They continued: “You tried to resolve it peacefully and they chose to brush it off. You threw water on the kid which, in my opinion, is harmless. Technically you also warned them you’d handle it so they have no room to complain.”

However some were not so enthused with the Redditor’s way of solving the conflict.

“You are a f***ing adult with, in theory, the ability to react like an adult,” one person wrote. “The best thing to do was to not respond or show they were bothering you. Instead, you responded like a child, not an adult.” They said the parents and kid were also in the wrong, but warned the original poster to “be ready for many eggings of your house”.

This isn’t the first neighbourly dispute we’ve seen recently. Last month, we wrote about how a young woman’s new neighbour called the cops on her because she looked “too young” to own her own property.