Aunt met with indignation for taking her 11-year-old niece on 10 day vacation when her parents take 4 brothers on vacation to Mexico, leaving her behind: ‘We spent a day in Disney World, went to 2 Broadway shows, spent most of our time […] on the beach’ – FAIL Blog

As a parent, you’re never going to make all of the right decisions. And that, frankly, is what family is for and why having family around is so important. After all, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and having others around broadens the scope of what your child is exposed to. There might be things that you’re not so good at teaching or setting an example of. There might be things you don’t think of altogether. 

Whether you have good intentions or not, there will be certain things that your kids just refuse to listen to you, and some other mentor is going to be the one they need to learn that lesson from. Having aunts and uncles around is great for this; they do, of course, know your parents as only a sibling could, and they’re going to be willing to be a little more critical of them and offer some guidance on situations, offering some guidance and pragmatism in a way that only an aunt or uncle can.

Still, completely siding against or overruling a parent is always going to be dangerous territory. One should never seek to do so unless absolutely necessary, and when the parent has made the wrong call that is going to harm the child in some way. With certainty here, deciding to take 4 of your 5 children on vacation and leave one behind is definitely the wrong decision. It would be one thing if it were like a sporting event or something in some mundane place that you wouldn’t really want to visit, like Ohio or Tennessee. But to take 4 children on a destination vacation to Mexico, leaving one behind just seems cruel. Especially when you factor in that she had also requested to go on a girls’ trip with her mother for her birthday and had been declined.