Replace "mom" with "school administration" and you described my high school.

Being literally the only person in town who possessed computer knowledge (i.e. enough to not refer to the actual computer as the "hard drive") meant that, since I liked having working computers at school, I was frequently (safely) tinkering with them to clear up much of the damage an unsupervised, untrained school population was inflicting on them. The administration, however, was happy to see the exact inverse: clearly, all computers were breaking because I was "tampering" with them.

It culminated in a semester where I was restricted to a single computer on campus, with the administration's reasoning being that, if that computer broke, I was clearly responsible. ("What happens if it's fine, the others break, and you're shown to have accused me out of inexcusable ignorance" was not addressed.) Naturally, however, that computer was not limited to only my use, since there were too few to restrict one to a single scoundrel. So there I am, effectively performing free IT on one of the school district's computers in an effort to not get suspended for the entire student and faculty body's utter lack of training.

I have to give my father credit for both taking the time to understand everything I could explain about the situation and for going to bat for me against the administration. He worked hard to try to find the truth of the situation and pick the battles, separating the times I just should work within an unjust system versus work to change it. It came in handy senior year when a teacher bribed me (tried to anyway) to hack the system to get the computer manager fired (he was eyeing the job) and I realized that, as bad as five years of BS had been, enduring it all just to get caught doing exactly what I'd been accused of all those years, all for a petty grudge, was absolutely unacceptable.