I Asked My Ex to Tell His Girlfriend to Stop Calling My Kids ‘Our Girls’ — He Said I Was Being Controlling

It wasn’t the breakup that set her off. It was the captions.

A 33-year-old mom says she kept seeing her children splashed across someone else’s social media—dozens of photos at a time, posted frequently, and framed with language that made her and her relatives cringe. The woman says she’s tried repeatedly to get it to stop, but every time she brings it up, her ex tells her she’s being controlling.

In a post shared to an advice forum, she laid out the timeline: she and her ex-husband, 32, were together for 11 years and married for six. They share two kids, and he also helps raise her oldest. They separated around last Halloween, and the divorce was finalized in May.

A new relationship moved fast, and the kids were pulled right in

According to the mom, her ex started dating his current girlfriend in February. The girlfriend met the kids about 10 days after she met him, and she’s been present ever since. The couple now lives together, and the mom says the girlfriend appears to genuinely love the children.

That’s part of what makes the dispute tricky. The mom doesn’t paint the girlfriend as cruel or neglectful. She describes her as involved and affectionate—just also intensely online, and increasingly comfortable presenting the children as part of her own identity.

The issue, in the mom’s telling, isn’t whether the girlfriend cares. It’s the way she publicly packages the relationship, and the fact that the children’s images are being broadcast at a volume the mom never agreed to.

The posts weren’t occasional snapshots—they were photo dumps with loaded captions

The mom says she rarely posts her kids, and when she does, it’s limited and private—small updates meant for long-distance family. By contrast, she says the girlfriend posts “60–70 pictures at a time” and does it frequently.

What really gets under her skin are the captions. She says the girlfriend uses phrases like “our girls,” a framing that makes the mom and her relatives “extremely uncomfortable.” To her, it reads as claiming a role the girlfriend hasn’t earned—or at least hasn’t earned publicly, on the internet, in a way that erases the kids’ actual mother.

It also changes the emotional temperature for the extended family. Even if the girlfriend is kind in person, the posts land differently when grandparents, cousins, and friends see someone new broadcasting the kids as if the household is already fully rebranded.

Trying to set a boundary turned into a fight about control

She says she has asked multiple times for her ex-husband to tell his girlfriend to stop posting the kids and to remove the posts that are already up. Each request, she claims, has spiraled into conflict and arguing.

Her ex’s go-to accusation, she says, is that she’s “being controlling.” In other words: he treats the request like an attempt to manage his new relationship, rather than a parent trying to set limits around minors’ online presence.

That framing matters, because it turns a practical safety-and-privacy question into a power struggle. If he sees it as control, he has no reason to compromise. If she sees it as protection, she feels dismissed every time he refuses.

And the refusal, in her view, isn’t passive. She says he “refuses to do anything about it,” leaving her stuck watching a boundary get ignored with no clear path to enforce it inside their co-parenting arrangement.

She wasn’t even seeing the posts directly—family and friends were

An added layer: the mom says the girlfriend has blocked her on Facebook. Not because of the kids’ pictures, but because the girlfriend doesn’t like that the mom posts about “the things my ex husband did to me through our relationship.”

That means the mother often isn’t encountering the posts herself. Instead, she says close family and friends are the ones seeing the photo dumps and bringing them to her—because they’re uncomfortable, too.

In real life, that can create a constant drip of stress. Instead of one direct confrontation and a clear resolution, it becomes an ongoing relay: someone else spots a post, sends a screenshot, and the mother has to decide whether to bring it up again and risk another blowup.

It also leaves her feeling boxed out. The girlfriend can share images and captions to a wide audience while the children’s mother is blocked from seeing what’s being said, when it’s being said, and how far it spreads.

The mom’s full account appears in the original post, where she asks whether she’s wrong for pushing to have the posts removed and for insisting the girlfriend stop posting the kids entirely.

People zeroed in on consent, privacy, and what co-parents can actually enforce

In the version of the post circulated with a judgment label, the mom is marked “Not the A-hole,” reflecting how readers interpreted the basic boundary. The most practical thread running through responses was less about feelings and more about permission: who gets to put minors online, and what happens when parents disagree.

Even without diving into legal specifics, the common-sense concern is easy to understand. Posting dozens of pictures of children repeatedly can expose identifying details—school logos, sports uniforms, neighborhood landmarks, routines. And once images are out, they can be downloaded, shared, or republished beyond the original audience.

Another point people tend to focus on in these disputes is the imbalance of access. When one adult blocks another adult, it’s not just social drama—it can limit a parent’s ability to monitor what’s being shared about their children. If a boundary is being crossed, documentation becomes harder, and the parent relying on secondhand screenshots is always playing catch-up.

Readers also typically pick up on the “our girls” language as a separate issue from the photos themselves. Even if the girlfriend is a significant figure in the kids’ daily life, labeling them as “ours” so soon after the divorce can feel like rewriting the family story in public, with the kids as props.

The tension now is whether this gets handled privately—or turns into a formal co-parenting fight

The mom’s immediate goal is straightforward: she wants the posting to stop and the existing posts taken down. But her ex’s stance suggests she may not get cooperation just by asking.

That leaves a handful of messy, real-world possibilities. She can continue to raise it and risk constant arguments. She can try to speak directly to the girlfriend, though that could escalate fast given the blocking and the existing friction. Or she can start treating it like a co-parenting boundary that needs to be spelled out more formally—something discussed alongside custody schedules, expectations, and what each household can and can’t publish about the kids.

For now, the dispute is stuck in that uncomfortable in-between phase: the girlfriend is acting like an enthusiastic bonus parent online, the father is backing her up, and the mother is left trying to draw a line without being labeled the villain.

And every new batch of photos—another 60-picture dump, another “our girls” caption—restarts the clock.