I agree with those who say it sounds like the mom was just very naive.
Maybe the kids are just starting to become bratty teenagers and before this they were well behaved enough that the mom believed they were the innocent ones in this!
Unless the lady was rude about it, I don’t think anyone in the situation was wrong, except the kids.
If the mom had chatted with the OP in private, the regular wouldn’t have been able to speak up for her, so it all worked out fine.
Disaster all around. But you don’t sound too good at estimating ages, I think the Kardashians are a little older than that.
My parents would have done nothing. I tried the “He just yelled at me for no reason!” on them a couple of times looking for sympathy as a child and they never believed it and always wanted to know the rest of the story. Or they thought I was exaggerating.
I remember my mom giving someone what-for on my behalf exactly once. Sophomore year of high school, my assigned locker was broken and I was hauling 30 lbs. of textbooks around for a week at the beginning of the year. I complained to her and she called the school office during the day and yelled at them. Security came and pulled me out of 6th period to give me another locker.
Ditto.
If that would have been my children, I would have made them go back and apologize to you, no matter how old they were. I didn’t ever feel it was my job as a parent to keep my children from being unfairly treated. I felt it was my responsibility to teach them to differentiate between deserved and undeserved reactions and to deal with each situation accordingly.
Actually a happy ending all round.
You did well for picking them up on littering. Your regular backed you up, the mother backed down and she is now more likely to be sceptical of the the daughter’s innocence.
Most importantly, the girls may realise that they can’t just behave how the hell they like without consequences.
If only the problem was limited to kids!
I recently observed an older lady in downtown DC telling twoyoung ladies (maybe in their early twenties) to put their fast-food wrappers and trash in a trash can, and when one of them was about to throw her soda can in, the older lady told her “Don’t throw that in there, pour it out and put it in the recycling” can which was right next to the trash can.
Applaud with both hands!! We always talk about correcting children… or the terrible things we see. I heartily appreciate you actually walking the walk with firmness and a clear explanation of what those girls needed to do to correct it…
BTW… shocked the mother is an idiot?? LOL… Well done!
I suspect she never believed her daughter’s innocence. That this is more about “you don’t have a right to discipline MY children even if they are being brats” than about “you yelled at my children for no reason.”
When I was around that age, I was egged on to break a glass pop bottle onto our new neighbors’ property. A little ‘Let’s fuck with the White people’ vibe was going on. So I threw the bottle in the air and we all ran.
A few moments later, as we’re all laughing about the aforementioned hijiinks, the homeowner approached me with a broom and dustpan and asked, ever so politely, if I would mind cleaning up the mess I made… I did so.
She asked if my friends put me up to it. I lied She offered me cookies or lemonade or something; I don’t remember what it was. I declined because, well, she was still a stranger. And that was that.
I remember being surprised that she wasn’t going to tell my mother. The last thing I was gonna do was tell her myself.
Haha, you have no idea. I see that regular all the time. She’s a very old, sweet Israeli lady who gives off a “don’t fuck with me” vibe. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if she’d been like Dr. Ruth and had been a sniper when she was young. 
Based on what I see every day, where ever I go, they didn’t learn a damned thing. Well, maybe they learned not to litter when someone’s actually watching.
Good for you, OP. I was sitting at a stoplight one day, and a young woman in the car next to me just dumped her bag of fast food garbage onto the road. I was sooooooo tempted to grab it and follow her to where she lived and return it to her - “Hey, you lost this at the stoplight back there.” Who does that - just tosses a bag of garbage out a car window?
I want to know what happened when the mom went home.
If it was my mom when I was a kid, she would have asked me what I did, and then told me I deserved it. Even if I said I did nothing she would have told me I probably deserved it anyways, and nine times out of ten she was right.
The other day I was waiting in line to pay for my groceries. Ahead of me was a father with three daughters. One of the girls was begging for candy, starting out with asking if she could have some, then graduating to how this one, the York Peppermint Patty she had firmly clutched in both hands, was her very favourite, could she please have it, please? The dad is responding with variations of “No, I said I wasn’t buying you any candy,” and “Put it back. I said no.”
Eventually the girl puts it back and then says, “Could I have gum, instead? That’s not candy. Could I have gum, please.”
The dad, by now pretty irritated, said, “This is not a matter for negotiation. I said no. You can’t get around me like you do with Poppop.”
Warmed the cockles of my heart, it did. They left, sans candy or gum, and I told the dad “Good job” as he left.
You know, I’ve never understood that. Probably because I was raised in a townhouse community where pretty much everyone knew who the kids were that belonged to everyone else. If you littered, broke a bottle, climbed a tree and broke it, scribbled on a wall or the sidewalk - SOMEONE saw you and knew who you were. My parents were totally ok with the neighbors coming out to tell me to knock it off of clean up a mess I’d just made. And in fact, most of them would come to our house once my parents were home and tell on me too, so I could get a round from my dad as well 
And I’m only in my 30s, so this is not the bygone days of yore, but my parents, while they DID ask me what happened on every occasion, never ONCE berated any neighbor for hollering at me, or even for grabbing my arm and dragging me away from shit I shouldn’t be doing.
I wouldn’t DARE say anything or touch a kid these days. I hollered at a load of kids who were running up on MY PORCH and jumping off it into snowdrifts, and their mothers yelled at ME for disciplining their kids. What the fuck, lady, why don’t YOU do it then?
‘If you ask again, you get no candy for a week. That also goes for trying to quibble about what ‘candy’ means.’
One of my few parenting tips that I think is worth passing on. As long as you’re willing to follow through with it, pestering disappears.
I guess one of the downsides of having kids who aren’t afraid of you is that they will irritate the hell out of you. That’s why I could never be good parent. I’d probably be either really scary or really lax. I don’t know how I would strike a good balance.
There’s no way I would have told my mother about getting yelled at by another adult. I would have felt ashamed and then relieved that my mother was not witness to what happened. So the girls were stupid to escalate things by whining to Mama. I hope she laid into them, but I have a feeling she didn’t.
Count me in with the crowd who, if I ever went to mum complaining that an adult had told me off/yelled at me, would get the response of “So what were you doing to deserve that?” first and foremost.
Yup, that’s where the discussion would have started, then went on to how she thought she had taught me better than that, with strong overtones of disappointment in my behaviour. The stranger “yelling” at me wouldn’t get any play at all - I shouldn’t have been doing something to make someone yell at me.