This Mom Bought Her Daughter A Stanley Cup After She Was Bullied For Her "Knock-Off”

Has the Stanley Cup madness gotten out of control? When people are pushing, shoving, and falling over in the aisles of Target while trying to score a hot pink Stanley Cup with the plan to resell on Facebook Marketplace for $200, don’t you think we’ve kind of gone off the deep end?

Whatever the reasoning behind the absolute frenzy for these cups, people young and old are hunting Stanley Cups down to feel “in” on the latest trend. This includes tween girls. Several parents of tweens shared on social media that their 9 and 10-year-old kids were asking for the infamous water cup for Christmas, and some parents came through with the ask.

One mom, Dayna Motycka, opted for a different cup. Unfortunately, this came back to bite her.

Motycka posted to her social media, sharing that when her 9-year-old daughter went to school on the second day back from winter break with her Walmart Stanley “dupe” in tow, she was made fun of by her classmates.

“So, she comes home. She's upset. She asks if she can have a real Stanley. Do I think that a nine-year-old needs a Stanley? No. Do I have one? Yes, I have one,” she explained before admitting that she and her husband went out and bought her a real Stanley after her daughter came home upset.

She didn’t think that her daughter “needed” the cup. However, like most parents, she wanted to do all she could to help ease the anxieties of her little girl. Totally fair. Motycka also noted that, at the end of the day, the bullying associated with having the latest “thing” doesn’t come from kids. It comes from the parents.

“This starts with us. This starts with parents — with moms. What are we teaching our kids? You better believe that if our nine-year-old daughter came home and somehow we found out that she made fun of another girl at school for not having something named brand, whether it's a Stanley, Lululemon, Uggs, etc. We would be calling the family. We would be making her write a note to apologize. We would make her apologize in person because that's not what we do in this household. And that's what we need to be teaching our kids,” she said.

She says that while she is fortunate enough to be able to provide the more expensive, trendier things for her kids, she also wants to enforce the idea that those kinds of materialistic things are not necessary to be happy or feel good about yourself. She wishes other parents would do the same.

“Things are earned. You have to work for things in your life. Not everything is just going to be handed to you. But do I also not wanna see my daughter being left out or made fun of because she doesn't have the name-brand things? That's how I grew up. No disrespect to my parents, but we didn't have those things. I was made fun of,” she recalled before mentioning scoring a Limited Too bathing suit from Goodwill as a child and feeling so good about owning something higher-end.

Motycka knows that she might be judged by other parents, but if she can purchase something for her daughter to make her feel like she fits in, she is going to do it despite the message it might send, noting it’s less about her daughter and more about the kids who are making her feel like crap.

“...we have got to teach our kids to not make other kids feel inferior for not having the things that they have. That's it. That's where it starts and it starts with us as parents,” she concluded.

After receiving more than 2.5 million views, several other parents resonated with Motycka’s dilemma.

"A kid checked my daughter's shoes for a Ugg tag to see if they were real. I couldn't believe it. She's in 4th grade," wrote another mom.

"The problem is...if it's not the Stanley Cup, it's something else," another user noted.

"Mom of 4 here. My motto is, if it's easy and I can fix it, I will. Time will come soon enough when I can't fix things this easily," wrote one mom.

One user wrote, “My boys have followed my example. So they respond with things like ‘Well at least I have the thing that I like instead of the thing everyone else likes.”

"My daughter tells her middle school classmates her value is not tied to that of her belongings and she hopes they figure that out someday too," one mom assured.

And while those kinds of secure kids are the ones the rest should be following, for example, that’s not the norm, unfortunately. This kind of peer pressure has been around forever. Should parents teach kids to feel confident in their decisions and what they prefer? Of course. However, bullying and teasing will make any parent want to jump into action to try and make their kid’s life a little bit easier.