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Originally Posted by Talthybius
I saw in the position your stepdaughter is in, kind of, for 7 or 9 years. I don't even know how many years it was. I stopped going to a low level education, and didn't want to work.
Now I maybe went 'out' maybe 16 times in 9 years and didn't spend a lot of money on luxurities. But I sure cost my parents, and myself, a lot of money. As well as overall stress and regret.
But I cannot say what should have gone differently for me to get out of where I was.
I always thought I was lazy and stupid and avoiding all responsibilities, but there was nothing else inside of me. It didn't help that I felt zero appriation or encouragement from others (mainly because I felt none, though what was there was marginal as well) and had zero incentive for beign rich, succesful, getting status.
I am inclined to project myself on this case, and say it is not simple laziness with anxiety as an excuse. But unlike me, she is having fun with friends. I avoided both the hard work and the fun activities.
The usual argument is tht pampering is bad and the safety wheels should be removed. She should be allowed to fall and fail so she learns this attitude won't get her through life. If I project that on myself, I don't see how it would have 'helped' me. All my parents could offer me was financial support and patience.
Hopefully in your stepdaughter's case she has at least one parent that is able to talk to her about her difficulties. My father used to yell at me "You don't work, you don't go to school. I am mad!" and that obviously didn't help. He should have tried to somehow get me to talk to him about what I thought. About if I really preferred the life I had. And about how he could help me make babysteps. Talk some confidence into me. I didn't see any open paths I could take. Only barriers. Only failures. I remember thinking that I only want to work if I get a really good job. If that's not guaranteed, I won't even try. If I never tried, I never failed. Same with romance.
So it depends on what your stepdaughter wants. Is she moving there against her will? Does your husband have the fatherly abilities to handle this? Or will this just bring conflict and create more anxiety for her?
It does seem that her mother allows her to be comfortable doing the thing she is doing now, which will not be a good situation for change.
By the way, I am not a physics student. In this place I used to add 'top 50' but I am afraid my university had dropped in this year's ranking. But it is still a place where almost everyone is either very smart or every ambitious, or a milder mix of the two. And I am on track to graduate with honours. And that considering I was almost blocked access to normal education after primary school because I was either mildly retarded or had learning disabilities. It seemed in my case a mental health disorder was ruled out.
So education is a strange thing. Becoming an adult is a strange thing. What does your stepdaughter think she can realistically achieve in life? She must have ideas about this. I mean, has she actually given up on the idea of ever being financially independent? I know I have in the past. Maybe very hard to figure out, as it cannot be asked. But do not rule out the case that instead of a lazy teen leeching off parents, she is actually fighting an internal battle. In fact, the two can happen at the same time.
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I have to admit, her father hasn’t been in her life a whole lot. A lot of that is due to her mother trying her best to keep her away from him (of course now that she’s 18 her mother doesn’t care anymore). But a lot of it is also that her and her father have had a lot of screaming matches and a lot of time where they didn’t speak to each other for months. There was a really bad fight 2 years ago where someone called the cops. She didn’t speak to him for nearly a year after that. That whole phase seems to have ended last year, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested in her life until he finds out something is going wrong and then feels he has to fix it. He doesn't ask about her classes, if she's seeing anyone, if she has a job. Conversations on Facebook are pretty much kept to "We should go see this movie" or you should check out this video game". She hasn't ever even visited for more than 3 weeks since I've known her but he thinks at 19 she should move in?? I mean he hasn’t seen her since late May. Keeps telling her he’ll come down and visit but then never goes. Has only talked to her on the phone once since that and that’s when she called him on Father’s Day. There’s a bit of back and forth on Facebook, but that’s it. There’s no fatherly effort on his part until things go badly on her end when she says she’s not working or going to school and then he thinks he has to intervene and get her away from her mother and say how wonderful it would be if she moved up here and worked and she could “find herself” and paints this great picture, but in the end, it will be the same old thing. He’ll sit and play video games all night while I go nuts sitting on the couch with her while she plays on her phone for hours on end. Just like every visit. He will have a 5 minute talk with her about how she needs to get her life together and she will promise she will, but will do nothing about it and he won’t push her. The only thing that will change is now we have another person in the house to provide for.
And she isn't asking to move up here, never has, so it's like he's trying to ply her with whatever he can to get her up here. I almost think it's more about showing the mother that he should have been in her life all along and she would have turned out differently so now he wants to stick it to her and go "see how much better she's doing with me in her life?".
I also don’t want my house to turn into a war zone. I don’t want to have to wonder who’s going to explode at who. I like the calmness that is there now. Plus I would insist that she pay us some rent. I mean our bills total nearly $2500 a month and there's no reason she shouldn't pay about $200. She won't be paying for cable or internet or utilities or food so that's a steal. Even if she decides school over work, I still insist she pays that amount. If she can't then she can't live there. If she can afford makeup and hair color at the salon and getting a tattoo, she can afford to pay us something.