You didn’t allow anything to happen. You just got advice that you need that you desperately don’t want to hear. You know what to do, but you don’t want to do it. I’m not calling you a terrible person or a terrible parent or anything. We all have flaws. But you *need *to make a change, and it’s much MUCH bigger than your daughter’s failure to make timely insurance payments.
If you don’t wanna see that, I guess nobody can force you to remove your head from the sand…
Sorry that you didn’t get the answer that you wanted, but that would pretty much make it pointless asking the question in the first place.
The fact that as a parent you even had to ask somebody else advice on it says much about your parenting skills.
You owe it to her to get out of yor comfort zone and do whats best for HER, not whats easiest for you.
If you find that upsetting then maybe you should have got upset a long time ago, it doesn’t help her you lashing out at a complete stranger whos told you what those closest to you should have said many years past.
Getting angry with me won’t take one iota of the culpability off of you and your wifes shoulders.
Good luck, and I actually mean that, and am not being snarky, but you’ve probably left it far too late even if you started now.
Which I suspect you won’t.
Ok. Based on the new information, we now see that the car used to be in your name, and used to be covered by your insurance. Now it is no longer in your name, but is still parked at your address, and owned by a close family member who lives there. I think that may make you more likely to be held responsible if she were to cause damage. I’d be talking to my insurance company if I were you.
To the OP, if you stop replying, the thread will die a natural death and migrate off the page.
Maybe he wasn’t sitting here waiting with baited breath for our advice. Maybe he went to work. Hung with friends. Made love to his wife. Went out for dinner. Slept.
Really? Asking advice about a tough choice is the sign of bad parenting? That’s absurd. That level of hyperbole is what makes parents who struggle with kids going through tough times feel like utter failures, even when theyre actually trying to do something.
This is incredibly tough stuff, dealing with kids who spiral downward. Every decision feels like failure because truth be told, no one knows exactly what will end up working. Unconditional support sometimes works and extreme tough love might as well. It’s so easy to sit back and say they must be a failure if they haven’t followed some script, but life is way messier.
Do I think the OP could have responded less defensively? Sure. But he shouldn’t be vilified for asking. And from his later post it sure seems like he knows how to be tough. But his kid is spiraling down and it’s horrible to watch and sometimes we struggle wat to do.
Before you kick her out get her into counseling. She needs someone to help her reflect on her choices and be objective and help her figure out what what the hell is going on.
This thread is similar one I started recently and that came up as a possibility. Probably would not succeed, but you’d have legal costs to get out of it.
Tough choice ? Don’t make me laugh, its not even a difficult one .
And the fact that he had, as an adult, and as a parent, had to ask a simple no brainer about something that he should have been doing for his daughters entire life speaks volumes.
It’s amazing how kids are always led astray by other kids who are bad company.
Who led the bad company astray in the first place ?
Its always somebody else, never the persons own kid, and its never the fault of the parents who over a period of nineteen years couldn’t motivate their child into having any self discipline at all, making rational choices or having any independance whatsoever from peer pressure.
We’ve heard it all before about how strict the parents were, demanding that their child did this that and the other with dire penalties if they didn’t.
What we don’t hear is how they choose to believe the most facile of lies from their offspring rather then doing the uncomfortable thing of calling them on it.
Of grounding them, or otherwise penalising them, and then rescinding the penalty after a very short time because the child has made a tearful insincere apology.
Or of one parent cancelling their allowance, while the other without their spouses knowledge secretly gives the kid money with strict instructions not to tell dad.
Or turning a blind eye to suspect activities like staying out all night on flimsy pretexts (Theres a sleepover at christines, yeah honest !) and saying “WEll we were all young once”.
All these things happening and more, and then the shocked surprise when as the kid gets older it starts going off of the rails.
Quick blame the other kids, its not OUR lack of parenting at fault.
Parenting isn’t difficult if you remember that you are the adults and they are the children.
And which of all those things did the OP do?
I’m closing this at the request of the OP, to whom I also remind that statements such as this:
are unacceptable. Do not do it again (in other threads, obviously). Those kind of insults are permissible only in the Pit.
Ellen Cherry