I could use some parenting advice

In My Humble Opinion
1

Here’s the background;
I have parental controls enabled on Vaderling’s phone. I can turn on and off his data, games, apps, control his contact list, both who is on it and who he can contact and when. I can track his location unless he turns the phone off. I use this control, along with xbox privileges, to make sure he goes where he’s supposed to go when I’m not there and as a tool for encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad behavior, which at this point is really about school work and grades. Generally speaking he’s a pretty good kid.

This past week, he’s been with his mom. We have 50/50 custody so he alternates weeks. I have his phone locked down. No internet, games, music. He can voice call and text select contacts only. The reason is that he has (or had) two d’s previously and a c slipped to a third d grade in school.

I talked to him. I told him his teachers were making extra time available after school to catch up missing work, redo work to improve the grade on etc for kids that needed to get their grades up. I told him that he needed to take advantage of that, and because of that new third d, I was restricting his phone until those grades came back up.

His mom bought him a phone to use over there at her house this weekend because Vaderling told me he got that third d back up but it won’t show on this weeks report card. I told him I would email his teacher to confirm what he said and if she agreed I’d turn everything back on.

My dilemma is this;
Vaderling is old enough to understand that what he and his mom did was wrong. That having a phone with games and music and internet access is, for him at this stage of his life, a privilige. That by going around my restrictions he is undercutting my ability to take care of my responsibilities as his dad and that his mom is trying to drive a wedge between us, and will use anything she can to do so. That by doing this he makes it harder to trust him with bigger responsibilities and greater priviliges.

He’s going to be 18 in six short years. At that point its too late to tell him not to be a dick, be kind and generous, keep your promises as best you can, don’t make promises if you’re not 100% certain you can or will fulfill them, don’t bite the hand that feeds you most or best because that’s probably going to be the person who would be most willing to help you out when you, inevitably, need the help as you get started in life, that this is a lesson that applies to all people in your life going forward.

Ok, how do I say all of that to a 12 year old boy in his circumstances? I fear he’s learning a really terrible lesson here that I don’t want him learning. I don’t want him thinking he can go out into the world playing the ends against the middle for the rest of his life.

That’s what I want to say, just not sure what the best way to say it is.

2

Unfortunately, unless you and mom are on the same page and regularly communicate, he’ll quickly learn how to undermine one parent’s rules by going to the other. I think that’s pretty common for kids with divorced parents. I know my daughter has done it plenty of times. And her mom isn’t bad, but my kid has learned she can ask me about going to a friend’s house without telling me her mom already said no.

One thing I have learned is that kids can be a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Your kid, if he hasn’t already learned, will figure out eventually all the games mom is playing and someday may understand that you were doing what was best for him and that’s why his grades were all over the place.

In the mean time, the only advice I can offer is that when he’s with you, you make sure he gets ALL his homework taken care of (and even work ahead if possible). Even if it’s done under the guise of ‘if you can get all this done, that you’ll have your phone privileges at mom’s without having to worry about falling behind’. Of course, that specific tactic may not work here since he’s got an extra phone over there, if I’m reading the OP right.

3

You don’t get to control what happens at Mom’s house. It’s 50/50, and that’s her 50. The restriction can be re-imposed when he reaches your place again. You can add the days to the end of the punishment. But you don’t get to decide what she does anymore. Stop trying.

4

Yes, this. Please don’t tell him that what his mom did was wrong either. Unless you and his mom have an agreement that consequences carry over from house to house, and you equally enforce consequences she lays out, undermining her that way will be damaging to their relationship. And can damage your relationship with your son as well.

Spoken as the step mom- my husband had 50-50 custody of my stepson so I got to see what worked and what didn’t, up close.

5

Agree with all the above. It sucks, but you’ll have to work with what you can control when he is with you. He will figure it out but perhaps not til after those 6 years are up and then he will lose some respect for his mom and gain some for you.

My house mate has a 13 yo daughter who lives with us 50% of the time and her dad does much the same kind of crap and it is hard to ameliorate the damage in the short amount of time she is here. The daughter, who is still in deep wishful thinking that her parents will get back together, does everything she can to milk the situation too, which makes it even harder because of course superficially we look like the bad guys, the meanies.

Stick to your guns when he is with you. It will be worth it but you probably will have to wait quite awhile to find that out.

6

I wonder if there’s a different consequence you can come up with for him that wouldn’t be circumvented by his going to his mother’s.

I’d really try hard to get mom onboard with you on the phone first, though. And if she doesn’t agree with withholding phone privileges, what does she think would be a good consequence you two can both work with?

7

One of the very few times I called out my ex was to tell her that if she has a problem with me, she needs to tell me (or keep her mouth shut about it), but complaining to our then very young child, was wrong didn’t do anything other than to turn her into a pawn. Plus, as a very young child, I/we had to be careful to make sure she never thought either of us had a problem with her or that any of this was her fault.

One of the nicer things about her getting older (15 now) is that’s she’s, more or less, her own person with her own opinions and she’s old enough to understand that either of us might complain about the other parent to her, but it’s in no way directed at her nor is she expected to relay that information to the other party.

8

Piling on …

The biggest issue here is that the parenting issue is relatively minor; the CO-parenting issue is huge.

You are not THE parent. You are not in charge with his mother subservient to the rules and parenting decision you make in isolation.

A major problem when parents divorce is that co-parenting well requires good communication and couples who divorce have a selection bias to not communicating with each other well.

Have you and she sat down and agreed on this controlling phone privileges approach with you the decider and exclusive gatekeeper of the privileges?

If not then you need to respect her making her on the fly parenting decision to trust him and not undermine HER.

As to the parenting decision … at this point in time cutting a 12 year old off from their on line social connectivity is a very heavy hammer with potential for significant negative psychological consequences. Kids have had much less real world social interaction with friends and classmates; imposing further isolation? Maybe reconsider that as his reward/punishment. And grades are a lagging and imperfect indicator for effort and actions that he is in control over.

She may be more in tune with how much psychological trauma he is going through than you are. Be open to that as a possibility at least.

9

I’ve told this before, but mizPullin and I had similar problems when our son was in middle-school. Although we cooperated on the problem, our method might work for one parent.

We made arrangements with his teacher to sit beside him all day long at school. We arranged our work schedules to split shift this, so I had mornings and my wife had afternoons. Leading up to the event, we acted as the complete parental dorks he feared. Gushing about meeting all his friends, eating lunch with them, talking to that girl he liked (we were going to help “get them together”), and making sure he believed the most embarrassing period of his life was imminent – just to help him get his assignments done on time. IIRC, we hinted the teacher only agreed to let us join him because grades and assignments were not being handled and most parents didn’t get to do this fun thing.

It worked like a charm. Assignments began getting done, and grades were heading up as the class-with-mom-and-dad approached. We informed him that, sadly, we couldn’t join him anymore as the grades were now better.

I don’t know how well this would work for you, but offer it as an idea.

10

You have to realize his mother is not wrong, her decisions are as valid as yours. You would be wrong telling your son his mother is wrong. I do sympathize with you but you can’t change this situation by fiat.

11

To this.

You don’t tell him the first bits, you model it.

In terms of the rest, is that really what you want to tell him?

Because it comes off like you are wanting to make sure he knows and acknowledges YOU are the one who feeds him most or best (more than mom), and that your support maybe even love in the future is conditional.

His adolescent growth is better served by making sure he knows that no matter what your other differences you and mom are united in caring for him, in loving and supporting him unconditionally.

My guess is that such is what you really want to say.

12

This is wise. We went through real struggles with both my kids in their teen years, including academic issues. If I could change one thing, it would be to have lightened the hell up. That doesn’t mean no consequences, but each misbehavior or issue didn’t have to be about their future, their character, or who they were going to be as an adult. So much pressure on normal teen issues! Implanting the idea that they were screwing up their life and future rather than just making a mistake was a huge mistake on our part.

We changed course as the oldest hit college, and just guided, supported, and loved them. When we had to enact consequences they were gentler and less dramatic. Made a huge difference in their stress level, and yes, they value us, appreciate us, and are doing just fine.

13

Long and short of it:

  1. Set expectations.
  2. Abide by them yourself. Are you telling your kid he can’t play a game while you’re staring at your Android? Please don’t do this.
  3. Talk to the ex (if possible), see if she’s amenable. Or if you are.
  4. Understand your child is now being given two different ‘models’ on how to live their lives. Depending upon your son, he will likely choose one or the other when grown, or reject both and try to find his own path.
  5. Love him no matter what he chooses, even if he ‘makes the same mistakes his mother makes’.

JT

14

(Oh, and my position is that support is always conditional, even if love isn’t. You don’t get to make bad choice after bad choice on my dime.)

15

Just tread carefully. Not all support is monitory, and support shouldn’t have that transactional a context. Children and teens don’t always understand or see the difference between love and support. That does not mean you have to enthusiastically embrace bad decisions and actions, but you need to be really, really clear as a parent that love and emotional support are not conditional. Sometimes it’s that unconditional support that allows them to come back from a bad decision.

16

I wish this was true, but she doesn’t.

She doesn’t care how much psychological trauma he is suffering. For her this whole thing has always been about her and nothing else.

Anyway, thanks everyone, for the good advice. I guess I just needed to clear my head a little about the situation.

17

I just want to pile on with this. He’s 12. He’s entering adolescence. He may have friends he’s embarrassed to tell you about. His friends may be communicating on a platform that uses data and doesn’t tell your exactly who he’s chatting with. Hell, I’ve lived my social life this post year on a combination of Google Hangouts, Discord, and Zoom. I would have gone nuts without them. I don’t know your kid, or know what would motivate him. But I’d urge you to come up with some other method of disciple, ideally one that gives him more autonomy.

My son had crappy grades for a while, and it turned out that what made a difference for him was having a challenging class he cared about. AP computer science, with a teacher who taught twice what was on the syllabus, saved his grades. He loved the course, did the homework (and then some) and got into the habit of doing homework, raising all his grades. It also helped that we begged the school to put him in honors science (even though his grades sucked, and suggested an easier course) because it didn’t bore him. He had gotten D’s in the regular science class, and got A’s and B’s in the honors class. But the computer science class was really what mattered.

Maybe some other carrot will work for your son. Maybe computer science will. I dunno.

Best wishes. Being a parent is hard.

18

Seriously the amount of mental illness we are seeing in this age group this year as result of social isolation more than anything else, is dramatic, from anxiety to depression to eating disorders. Grades dropping sometimes is a warning sign. On line connections, chats, gaming, so on, have been the lifeline. Even without the pandemic for these age groups social media connections are a large part of their world and this is the age when that world outside of family matters more and more (always something hard for us parents to deal with). And that’s for kids with parents who are a united force!

Be that as it may. Reality is that you and she are stuck with each other, connected by Vaderling, and are entering his adolescence, a tough time for most parents under the best partnered circumstances, as co-parents. You cannot share that assessment of her with him even by implication. Since you care about him you want him to be able to believe that both you and she believe in him, love him, and are united in that. Consistent expectations between households, when achievable, help, and like it or not, her thoughts on what those expectations should be are of equal power coming to the negotiating table as are yours.

He is not disrespecting you by following her rules in her house, he is not biting the hand that feeds him most or best by doing that either. Do not even imply that your future love and support hang in the balance. That what you have is a transactional relationship. The two of you adults being unable to negotiate consistent rules is not his character flaw, it is instead a burden and stress that the two of you are unfairly imposing upon him, a good way to break a good kid.

19

Here’s your choice.

  1. Get over whatever issues you have with your ex-wife’s parenting. You have joint custody. She can parent how she sees fit, whenever he’s with her.

  2. Sue her for full custody of your son. Is that the path you’re ready to do down? Hell, most judges will let kids 13 or over, pick the parent they want to live with. Are you prepared for that?

20

This is what we’re going through right now with my son, who is a freshman in high school. And it’s doubly bad because of this pandemic - he’s entirely virtual and they pile the work onto these kids when they’re at home. Both of us are incredibly burnt out on his schooling, thanks in large part to yours truly. What I’ve learned is, all the pushing, the crying, the harsh consequences won’t cram the material into his head any faster. It also won’t make school suddenly more important to him. What it will do is help him learn to avoid school work like it’s the plague.

I wish that high school didn’t feel as life or death important as it does today. We’re told as parents that if they don’t succeed now, they’ll wind up in a flophouse.

What your wife did was shitty and underhanded. However, you set that aside, and make it clear from your demeanor, what you say, what you do and how you say and do it that you love your son no matter what. Also, remember that he’s probably well aware that he messed up (I’m sure his teachers are more than happy to point out what he did wrong) and he may even feel like he’s at the bottom of a pit he can’t get out of, especially where you are concerned.

So approach him from a helping perspective, not a punitive perspective and remember that he needs to be able to trust you. He’s going to do way, way stupider things, and you want him to tell you proactively when he’s screwed up, not try to find a way to hide it.