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

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To 16:01 and 19:02 - 
I could have been your stepdaughter. After my mom died in middle school, my father remarried quickly. My stepmom, while a great person in many ways, believed that my siblings and I had been spoiled by previous parenting and decided she was going to lay down the law. My dad basically acquiesced. I cannot describe how lonely and misunderstood I felt. How ashamed I became whenever I'd screw up, and how angry and betrayed I felt too. It really was hell. I know my stepmother's intentions were good, but it wasn't her place to discipline us and my father allowing her to be so harsh just sent the message that I was an unacceptable human being. It took many years of positive adult life experiences and therapy to undue this damage.

I say this realizing your situation is different than mine was. I guess I want to make a plea for love first, discipline second. Tough love is important, but the love needs to be there first.[/quote]

I'm sorry you went through that hell.  To be clear, I have not been involved in disciplining my stepdaughter in any way.  I wish I had had a chance to develop a relationship with her that might have allowed for that, if we had had time to develop love and trust, but I didn't even start dating her dad until she was 14, and I knew well that even after 3 years together, I wasn't going to step in and assert any attempt at authority over her.  Her dad and I very deliberately waited until she had turned 18 and graduated from high school to get married, and we included her in our plans and made sure she knew that everything would be consistent for her until HS ended. (In contrast, her mom met a guy, had him move in, married him, and divorced him all within 18 months of the poor kid's soph-junior years.) We wanted her to know she was her dad's first priority, and I know well that as a teenager, if my dad fell in love with some woman when I was 14, wen if my parents had been divorced for years (as hers were), I would have been threatened an angry, no matter who she was.

So what I'm focusing on is just welcoming her into the home we have together now, offering her support, asking about her life, and giving her time alone with her dad as much as she's up for hanging out with him.  I don't know if/when we'll ever be close, but I try to just communicate care and welcome without being pushy.

I'm not sure if I can ever explain my perspective well enough, but my feeling that she needed real consequences isn't punitive. She's not a brat who needs to be punished.  She's just a kid who has never had real consequences for small missteps, so she has never built the skills to recover from them herself.  I just think that puts her at a huge disadvantage, the biggest of which is that she doesn't have a strong self-concept.  She's so used to her parents bailing her our that I fear she'll never feel confident out in the world unless she has a guy to rescue her or folks to support her.

The last thing I want to do is further damage her self-concept, so I REALLY appreciate your perspective.  I'm going to be thinking a lot about what you wrote.  Thanks.  (And I think you are very fair to your stepmother in what you wrote.  I hope you've been able to develop a better relationship with her since then.)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics