Reply to What age will you consider your kids "grown up" and no longer bail them out?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]16:01 Are you serious? This child had to grow up between two homes, and you call a parenting getting the ballet slippers she forgot at another's BAILING HER OUT?

Your other examples have merit. This girl could well have learning or attention issues. Was she tested?

Please come back in 20 years. 
[/quote]

I am serious.  The ballet slippers were just one example of all the things, big and small, that could have been her responsibility as a teenager but for which both parents accepted complete responsibility.  Her parents split up when she was 11, and I first started dating her dad when she was 14, a year of forgotten books, homework, ballet shoes, etc. I can't think of a single time when she was inconvenienced or faced a consequence.  I initially thought a huge part of DH and his ex's behavior was guilt that the divorce was hard on her, but my husband said they did the same when she was younger and they all lived together, too.  For the record, for most of this time she lived with each parent 50/50 and they lived just a mile apart.  But she was never even encouraged to walk from one house to another by herself in a very safe neighborhood.  Everything would be brought to her.

She was tested for learning disabilities in 7th grade but there were no major deficiencies or discrepancies between her tests and her academic achievement up to that point.  I'm a high school teacher, though, and I immediately suspected ADD.  Turns out her dad has ADD, too, and found great relief a couple of years ago with a mild stimulant and some new coping skills.  After her dad was diagnosed, he talked with her and had teachers fill out ADD screening questionnaires, and she clearly showed many of the typical behaviors.  Her mom refused to let her take Adderall, though, calling it a crutch.  I found it ironic because they both had been disabling crutches for her for so long...and here was a chance for a crutch that could ENable her!  Oh well.  Still working on that one.  :)

I'm not heartless; I love the kid.  But the ballet shoes were not an isolated incident.  Never once did the kid have to sit out or miss out or get a 0 if her parents could bail her out of all those little mistakes.  But now they can't fix everything for her, and she's completely unable to cope.  It's not fair.  Her parents honestly, and with love, just wanted to make life easier for her.  And get childhood WAS easy.  But now adulthood seems impossibly hard, and is way harder than it had to be because she has had so few experiences with successes that were truly her own.  She hasn't been given an opportunity to trust herself, to screw up and then fix it, to be imperfect and then get better at something.  I say this with no animosity toward her...she is a sweet girl; we get along well.  And I know her dad bailed her out all those times because he never wanted to see her suffer.  But now she's suffering SO much more than a few zeroes in high school or a missed ballet class or three.  And he can't fix it, and she doesn't believe she can either.

FWIW, it's easy to dismiss me as an evil stepmom or to say because my son is young, I'll feel differently.  But her dad feels even more strongly than me that he really hurt her by making life do easy for her, by insulating her from feeling any discomfort from her mistakes.  And I speak more from seeing the kids I have taught over the years whose parents have protected them from every scrape, defend them reflexively no matter how unacceptable the behavior.  It's doing them no favors in the long run.[/quote]

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