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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/InitialCombination12 on 2023-07-31 01:19:34.

My family just got back from a weeklong cruise, and there is still some tension about this. My wife and I took our 20yo son, 16yo daughter, 13yo son and 7yo son. Our oldest spent most of his time on vacation doing his own thing, having breakfast and dinner with the family but being seldom seen otherwise. My wife and I enjoyed spending time with out kids, but we also did some couple’s activities.

There are clubs on the boat for kids, and our 13yo really enjoyed them, but our 7yo didn’t and kept wanting to spend the day with his sister, who we’d given carte blanche to do her own thing as long as she ate with us and answered when we messaged her. She was a good sport and took her little brother on most of her adventures, swimming with him, taking him to trivia and doing the animation classes with him. I felt like this was very sweet of her and showed a great deal of maturity. The second to last day of the cruise I took her to the gift shop and told her to pick out whatever she wanted as thanks for looking after her brother.

She was very excited and ended up picking out a dress. The dress was $80. She wore it to dinner that night, and when she told her mom I bought it for her my wife gave me a weird look. After dinner she asked me why the hell I did that. I explained that it was a reward for looking after her brother. She said we can’t buy an $80 dress for our daughter and nothing for our sons. I said we didn’t get them nothing; we took them on a cruise.

My wife said I’m an idiot. I don’t think so. We got some trinkets for the younger boys, about $20 worth of stuff. My wife thinks I fucked up and said I should apologize to the boys. I refuse. We took our adult son on a vacation that cost thousands of dollars, he has no reason to resent his sister being rewarded for being thoughtful. If we got our 7yo and 13yo a really expensive souvenir, it would probably be lost or broken. She still thinks I was an asshole though.

Clarification: A lot of commentors seem to think we asked our daughter to babysit her brother. That’s not really the case. What kept happening was that she would tell us her plans for the day and 7yo would say he’d rather do that than go to the kid’s club, and she would agree to let him come with her. So it was more just her being a nice sister than actual babysitting. She always had the ability to drop him off at the club. That’s why I wanted to reward her, because I thought it was so sweet of her not to do that and to make her brother feel good about his cool older sister wanting to hang out with him.