Reply to How did you deal with your DS or DD during parental alienation?

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[quote=Anonymous]OP, I sympathize.  My stepdaughter pulled the same thing any time my now-DH tried to create structure or enforce consequences for his daughter.  (Note, we didn't meet or
start dating until 3 years post divorce, and we did t get married until the summer after she graduated HS.) they had 50/50 custody through HS but when my DH would take away her iPhone at night (because she was up texting and sexting all night) or check on homework or hold a curfew, she would go back to her mom's and say she wanted to live full time with mom, who had no rules or expectations for behavior except she wanted her DD to be her best friend.  But after a few weeks, SD would boomerang back to her dad's because she would be fed up that her mom never cooked and spent all her time with her boyfriend...and honestly I believe my SD really did crave the structure and limits, though she chafed against them as all teenagers do.  The problem was not that she resisted the structure...teenagers both need it and hate it.  The problem that her mother enabled her avoidance of consequences in every way because she thought it made her a good mom to "defend" her daughter against her strict father (who, frankly, wasn't even remotely strict by any reasonable measure.)

The pattern continued all through HS and a couple of years beyond.  She'd get fed up with her mom or want something (monetary) from her dad and come back, but as soon as he would try to engage with her about her grades or her boyfriends or her behavior, she'd have a tantrum and go back to her mom.  Who never questioned anything or denied anything or parented in any way.

I wish I had some kind of "this is how we solved it" advice to offer you.  My SD has gone further and further off the rails for years and her mom keeps enabling her.  She is now a heroin addict, and her mom keeps giving her money.  She came home to us last year and we got her into a rehab and paid some legal bills and all her medical costs, but she went back to her unsafe environment and to the drugs pretty much immediately afterward and her mom refused to hold the bottom line on not providing financial support for anything but recovery.  We are the bad guys.  And her mom will probably "love" her into an overdose.

If you have any way to influence her into family therapy with you, make that a top priority.  And if you have another relationship that could be put on a back burner for some years, DO IT.  If a girlfriend or new spouse is part of what makes your house hard for your daughter, prioritize your kid!!! We thought we were covering thins by eating to marry until after she graduated but I was too much in his life when she was a teen; frankly, I was too much a competition for his attention.  I tried not to be but that was the reality.  Relationships can wait.  Your child cannot.  Too much can go wrong when a teen girl is alienated from her dad.  Fight with all youbhave got in you.[/quote]

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