Parent Thread

TheRage_sl said:

About the chores don't give her money, ever for anything fun unless she does her chores. Don't let your wife either.

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Hahaha, good luck with that. No matter what you do your wife will always care more about her little girl than anything new hubby says. Get used to it. She will undermine shit for any and every female rationalization the two of them can come up with while you aren't looking, and woe be to you if you think you can lay down the law about it after the fact.

Cathan_sl said:

The kid likes to draw. I've wanted to take her down to the French Quarter by Jackson Square on the weekends so she could see all the independent artists. The kid would rather sleep in though... She loves Tim Burton but if Tim Burton was on our front doorstep at 9am on a Saturday she'd lay in bed a couple more hours...
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Perfectly normal teenage behaviour. I just turned 31 and I would love to be able to lie in on a Saturday morning like I did when I was a teenager, can't sleep past 8am anymore unfortunately, it's just impossible

Cathan_sl said:

Famm: You're being a douche. The spirit of the forum is nondouchery.

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I'm not being a douche, I'm telling you the truth but you don't want to hear it and can't accept it yet.

Cathan_sl said:

I'm frustrated and so is the wife

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You ever heard of programs like Anasazi? If you're dishing out dicktons of money for the private schooling, I can't imagine this is something that you'd be unwilling to consider based on price range. I know there are other programs out there, but I bring up Anasazi because I know them, and because I know that they've got some things pretty darn straight that I don't think other teenage "rehabilitation" camp programs are doing well with.

If you drop your kid off at the Anasazi camp, they don't just work with your kid, they train you. They don't just teach your kid how to stop defying authority, they teach them how to cooperate.

http://www.anasazi.org/

Check it out, and I have some friends who work with the program who would be interested in talking to you if you have questions, and I've got a book I think you'd be interested in, if you shot me a PM.

My ex (the crazy one you might have read about...) has two kids. They were 12 and 10 years old when we started dating, 17 and 15 when I finally wisened up.

The older one, the girl, was basically just an obnoxious little bitch, at school and at home. But she brought home the grades to make it work. (She had to repeat 6th grade of higher education school which must have been some sort of wake up call).
Still she was a royal bitch towards her mother but what are you going to do, "it's my kid, I'm a pro" (she actually has a degree in social education or whatever you call it). Girl eventually got around people where alcohol played a role and it got even nastier from then on. Only when she got her first boyfriend did things get better. That kid was alright.

The boy... was not only an asshole, but also quite dense. He barely got through school without having to repeat a year until he hit 8th grade or so.
Started hanging around the wrong people, and gaming.
Yeah I said it. The little shit literally played on his PC until whatever time he liked, and - his mother did nothing. Sure she'd turn off the power in his room sometimes, but that only worked until he had a Nintendo DS or Advance or whatever it was. Fully charged, it could run forever.

Every morning, the little assling was unable to get out of bed. We left house at 7 am, kids were supposed to be in the car with their mother so she could drop them off at school (boy) or train station (girl). Every morning he got up at 7, dressed, and left the house withouth even brushing his teeth. This was going on waaaay before he started gaming too...

His homework was a wreck, he couldn't write worth a damn, his handwriting looked like that of a 4yo. Every attempt to step in and help was useless. I am fairly good at English, which is a foreign language for us (obviously). Tried to help him a few times but in the end he was so resistant to everything... he didn't even want to get better. Same with math and anything else.

She never got hold of the situation and eventually gave up.

With all the other problems our relationship had, this shit surely didn't help.

The father of both kids ran off to switzerland to rake in the $$$, and bought his way out of responsibility. That monthly payment sure made them into good little persons.

Moral of the story: not your own kid = always a shitty position.

Cathan, the kid sounds seriously depressed I suggest you get her some medication and therapy. If it is an chemical imbalance that makes her feel depressed she will have a hard time getting out of that spiral without any professional help and/or medication. I hope you figure something out!

Hrm, that sounds ridiculously like how I grew up, to an extent.

My mother had me when she was very young; so end result is that we did not get along. She was immensely overbearing - I can't even begin to tell you. For long periods after I graduated high school, when I was dating a guy and spending the night at his house, or later when I was living with a guy, a sudden small sound when I was sleeping would have me jolt awake, hyperventilating. Why? Because my mother is a certified psycho, and used to run into mine and my sister's room at 2 in the morning on a school night bitching about something so asinine. Like, we accidentally put a white sock in the colored basket or some bullshit. A total accident, but she went nuts. My sister and I were both truly good kids - I was a good kid, straight A's, all the advanced classes, even went and took the college entrance SATs in 5th grade (And scored a 1360) while also working a part time job, playing on the school volleyball team, writing for the newspaper, and paying for my own ballet and karate classes. My sister was similar. Yet my mother very rarely let us out of the house, never let us go to friends parties often (and when we did it generally required 4 weeks of begging + promises to do extra chores) would rant endlessly about stupid shit. I could write pages about how crazy my mother is and what a shit job she did raising us, but we turned out alright IN SPITE OF HER.

What I guess I am saying is, I was depressed in middle school, and then in high school I sort of perked up knowing that I'd be away from my mother when I graduated. (And in fact, I moved out the day after graduation.) My mother and I yelled at each other constantly, the only difference being I jumped when she said jump, because she was terrifying. My mother started dating a guy when I was in junior high who had a similar effect you seem to have on the kid; things settled down some what, and he became a stable parent for us.

My advice to you is probably see if your kid is depressed, and if you aren't sure of how things were done before you showed up, maybe find out. Her situation sounds similar to mine, with the difference that she seems not to fear her mother. Don't be the "good" parent she can go to when her mother tells her no, but help to balance some of the shit out. My step dad counter-balanced my crazy ass mother; when we were old enough to drive she wouldn't let us take our driver's tests, despite the fact that we had proven many times over we were responsible, so he took us. She wouldn't let us go to shit like prom and homecoming, so he went and bought our dresses and made sure we had money for the tickets.

Both of you essentially being the one who is constantly only punishing is just going to drag her down. Even if she deserves it - it doesn't sound like she's doing anything crazy, like parties, or under aged sex, or drugs, but your punishments seem to reflect that. Right now, she has no urge to do anything because she is literally missing nothing. Give her something to miss, something she wants - like a better picture of home life, a vacation or something, and make sure she sees the connection that things like that can happen more often if she gives a little.

Also, I cannot stress enough how much of a guilt trip it lays on the kid to tell them "You are responsible for making our home life shitty." You can tell her she has a part to play in the family, but telling her if she fucks up the home life is ruined is sort of hardcore. My mother said shit like that, and that fucked my sister and I up forever. To this day we legitimately hate the woman who gave birth to us.

Edit: I should also mention however, that my family was heavily military, so we tended to know exactly what was expected of us. The only ones who were not some branch were my mother and great grandmother, but that had a lot to do with being good kids. It didn't work so well for my mother, who still ended up batshit insane. I think also we always thought that if we were just super amazing kids, she might snap the fuck out of it. FALSE HOPES.

Iannis_sl said:

Spanking a teenage girl won't do anything good...

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Let's not rule this out. I think there is some good to be found here...

Parents never get teenaged girls, but they should really try to. Lack of motivation is a serious problem in our modern first world societies, and the causes aren't always clear. You can't really blame her too much though, these days every teenager is a nihilist and it's really hard to care about things when other people are telling you over and over how important they are. What's her social life like? Who are her friends, and are they a good or a bad influence on your her?

I think if I had a former marine for a stepfather growing up, and he tried to raise me, I'd be defiant kind of just for the sake of it. Parents constantly harping just made me want to stop working entirely, too. Really I think she has to find her own motivation, because what OP and wife are doing is really not working. So you're sending her to a nice school, and that's really great, but is there maybe a reason that it's not particularly interesting or engaging for her?

Growing up I had a friend, and she hated most of school but loved orchestra and playing the violin. She failed tons of classes and had to do a lot of summer school, even in jr. high. She begged her parents to pay for her to attend a fine arts school, and there she ended up graduating with really good grades, even in math. I think she was just happier there because she could express the best of herself more often, and associate with more kids that experienced the world in ways she could understand well.

idk.

I don't think OP's "blunt force" approach is working, and I feel that most problems like this come about mostly from a lack of open and honest communication. She probably understands where her parents are coming from, because they tell her so often and she's not stupid, but during those speeches she's probably thinking to herself, "Idoagree with what's being said, but they don't understand that blah blah blah..."

Talking is hard, especially with a moody teenager that believes you can't possibly understand her, but it's something that kind of needs to happen. And it can't be forced, heh.

Cathan_sl said:

the kid

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Terrible parenting 101 in this post. I don't envy you for having to raise, help raise, or in this case "lord over" a teenager...but you sound like a prick.

Your wife sounds like she thought a daddy would fix the girl, and it sounds like you resent the ever living fuck out of her (I'm sorry, "the kid"). Which is truly sad, because I bet that's exactly how your step-daughter feels. "Oh, my step-dad resents me cause I go to private school." Which I'm sure is harder than her old school, not to mention losing her friends, if she was even able to make any with the lords of homework chaining her to a table.

"But it'll be okay cause they wake me up with a fucking air horn"

Jesus tap dancing christ.

Wait a minute, you're whining about her doing homework instead of chores?

This line: Then I explained to her that her job is school and when she doesn't do her work and try to at least make C's that she's screwing up home life for all 3 of us and all 3 of us will be unhappy because of her. I laid this out very nicely and encouraged her to please do her part and help make our home life happy.

I'd like to personally thank you, as a representative for your step-daughter, for giving her a complex. It's not her job to make you happy, it's YOUR job to grow a pair and mold her into a human being. Not say shitty things like this to her. You try to get your wife to eliminate yelling, then you turn right around and bitchslap your step-daughter with passive aggressive comments.

This just in: Teenagers sleep a lot and have a general apathy for everything in life during puberty that doesn't involve the other sex or games/shopping/being a kid. NEWS AT 11.

Also, this fucking private school sounds like total bullshit. Detentions for not doing homework? Get fucked. If that would been the policy when I was in school I'd have to stay late every fucking day.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe you should ask her if she NEEDS to do the homework? Until my senior year, I never did a single page of homework because I didn't need to. I was in general classes with all the other jackoffs, but I would roll in on a test day and get an A without studying or anything. It wasn't until one of my teachers came to me and said "I'm putting you in advanced classes next year, because it's obvious to me that you don't need busywork". Then I got straight A's.

Tuco_sl said:

hahahhaahhahaa

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I meant in the context of does she need to do it for the purpose of doing homework, which is to drill into your brain the stuff you don't learn from reading or in class.

Not just go to her and be like "Hey kid, do you need to do this homework?". More like "Does this homework actually help you or is it stuff you already understand?".

But that question would probably be better to ask her teachers.

Children are a product of their environment. If they spend all day in horrible public schools surrounded by idiots then come home and spend all night looking at depraved crap online and watching reality TV of course they are going to be pieces of shit.

Invest in surrounding your child by cultured people and concepts. Teenage girls are at this phase where they want to define their sexuality and image, and it affects all aspects of their behavior. You need to have her in an environment where she learns that sophisticated and competent is sexy and desirable.

Invest in your child. Get her the hell away from public schools, get her a cute male postdoc tutor that actually knows how to teach, enroll her in something like orchestra or debate, promise to teach her how to use a gun and drive when she has demonstrated she is a responsible person. You don't have to be a helicopter parent, but know that free public education/entertainment produces failures by design.

It is hard and costs money, but producing successful offspring hasn't been easy for billions of years.

BrutulTM_sl said:

Set consequences and enforce them. Don't argue with her. Tell your wife to stop yelling at her. Arguing and yelling is just giving her power.

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This would be the route I went with. You hold all the cards. She relies on her parents for the essentials. My kids are still little but I tell my 4 year old it's our job to prepare you to be an adult when he asks me why he has to do something. If I punish him or give him a time out I let him cool off and then explain why I did it then tell him how much I love him. Same principles apply. She might not think you're right but kids can appreciate a sincere effort.

Dashel_sl said:

This would be the route I went with. You hold all the cards. She relies on her parents for the essentials. My kids are still little but I tell my 4 year old it's our job to prepare you to be an adult when he asks me why he has to do something. If I punish him or give him a time out I let him cool off andthen explain why I did it then tell him how much I love him. Same principles apply. She might not think you're right but kids can appreciate a sincere effort.

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Probably the most overlooked and underused aspect of parenting. It's just amazing what you can accomplish sometimes with just civil, non-confrontational conversation where you reaffirm your feelings to your kids and try to explain why things are what they are. It doesn't have much of an effect though if you try it after using an air horn on her when shes sleeping. You had a change of heart and didn't really do that this morning, right?