Wouldn’t the school be required to report as mandated reporters if the girl made an accusation against her parents to a teacher?
And many years from now this little idiot is going to cry into her whiskey at the memory of how she sued her parents because they imposed a curfew and didn’t like her boyfriend.
At some point, no matter what happens next, she is going to regret this for the rest of her life.
Heh… The parents remind me of my in-laws.
I met my now wife when we were both 27. She had just moved to Denver and they had loaned her $40k to use as a down payment on a condo. We met, started dating, and about 4 months in I went and met the parents. They hated me though neither my wife or I are sure why. I wan’t a loser; I was from a poor family and had made some minor missteps in life, but at the time I had just finished putting myself through an undergrad program in physics while working full time. I was working part time as a drafter, living in a crappy little apartment with a real beater of a car, and was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in EE.
There is a long story that I am skipping, but finally, to discourage our relationship, her parents called the loan if she would not stop seeing me (actually they sent a letter from their lawyer). This backfired; my future wife took out a second loan, paid them back, and asked me to move in as she could not afford to pay both loans at the same time. We had been dating a year at this point and we were married 3 years later.
Over those years we reached out to them multiple times and tried to bring them back into our lives but they just could not come to terms that their daughter was going to do what she wanted. They actually went so far as to threaten her siblings with disinheritance if they attended our wedding. After 6 years of not talking to them, they finally relented and very sincerely apologized to us after the birth of our first child.
Among the 5 children they had, only 2 are on good terms with them (my wife is one - we have very good boundaries and take no shit, or support for that matter, from them) and 2 won’t even speak with them. They are really torn up about the kids and grand kids that they do not get to see but they still just cannot grasp that they get no say in their adult children’s lives. They have routinely adopted scorched earth policies in attempts to get their way. These, obviously, have not succeeded. Not even once.
My wife is an amazing woman in the fact that she was able to forgive them or even tried. For myself, I was never really angry at them. Mostly I just didn’t care about them or think about them except on how they affected my wife. If my family had treated me that way I would have kicked them to the curb as some of her other siblings did. Life it too short to be treated that way.
TLDR synopsis: these parents can do whatever they want, but most likely they are going to lose their daughter over it and the damage they will do to her by withholding tuition or other financial support will be substantial, but most likely fleeting. Hardly worth the cost in my book.
Maybe, or maybe she’ll have a happy and full life freed from the weight of toxic parents. I don’t know and neither do you.
I could never sue my parents. But my parents would never do the things to me that her parents have apparently done to her.
There’s a big difference between blackmailing someone with a loan you’ve made and withholding financial support in the first place.
There are filial support laws in 29 states (see the chart at the bottom of “Filial Support Laws in the Modern Era: Domestic and International Comparison of Enforcement Practices for Laws Requiring Adult Children to Support Indigent Parents” by Katherine C. Pearson, Penn State Law, January 23, 2013, 20 Elder Law Journal 269 (2013), Penn State Law Research Paper). New Jersey’s poor lawincludes filial support: “TITLE 44 POOR 44:4-100 (and following) Ascertaining and obtaining or compelling assistance of relatives.”
My best guess is that with the previous century’s growth of the economy and the growth of government funded social support ,the need for adult children to support parents lessened, so it has been a very quiet corner of the law, whereas with the growth of higher education for the masses during that period, the need for support of adult children grew, and has become a very active corner of the law. I expect that with the boomers ageing, government social funding flattening out, and adult children not having attained the same level of prosperity of their parents, the law on filial support will get a lot more active in the next few decades.
Okay, I feel compelled to ask. Your in-laws have obviously not learned that it’s their (mis)behavior that has caused the alienation from their children. Why would y’all let someone that toxic back into your lives and even let them around your child?
Now, if I misunderstood what you posted, I apologize.
I like the way you think! Other than it should be an attorney mother, rather than father. Perhaps the ex of the first attorney parent.
It’s a good example of why a lot of jurisdictions try to reduce he-said / she-said support litigation by being quite broad on entitlement and by using quantum tables.
As I posted before, my mother did exactly that. She took away the car, she packed my bags and put them on the stoop and said you are on your own. She refused anymore financial support. And I was 17.
And she was right to do it. It was the only rational choice I had left her.
No way, NO WAY would I ever sue Momma.
Yes, in Spain and under a late-19th-century law, adult children are responsible for covering their parents’ basic needs inasmuch as the child is able to (a child who’s indigent or dependent himself wouldn’t have this duty): housing, food, clothing, medical care. The children are not responsible to provide those needs in person, they can pay another person to do it; the parent does not get to choose where is the need covered, it’s the children who decide whether the parents get to “do the rounds” (typically a month in each child’s house), the children visit, or the children pay for caretakers. UHC gets the children off the hook with respect to medical care.
How do I know this? Because when I consulted a lawyer about whether I did have any duties towards my mother, he gave me copies of three decisions from suits, as he reckoned it would be more clear than a copy of the law. In all three cases the parents were trying to boss the children around and the children won; in one case, several of the children were estranged from the parent, all were willing to pay for caretakers but none were willing to do the caretaking themselves and the judge said he wouldn’t have been willing to, either, “given the disposition made evident by the first party” (apparently she’d tried to boss him around).
Yes, but we don’t know that happened. The article said that they investigated against charges of “emotional abuse”. We don’t have enough facts to know anything, and most of the people who have the facts can’t talk. Anything is possible. However, if the investigation was sincerely started by the school–not prompted by the girl’s own false accusation–that’s interesting. There’s a lot of room for “plausible deniability” in emotional abuse, and I think you’d have to be pretty worried that something was wrong to pick up the phone.
Yes.
The father is a retired police chief. There is probably a good chance he knows all about the boyfriend and the types of trouble he has been in.
Who says you can’t learn something in the Pit?
I deal with those calls on an almost weekly basis. Teachers in New Jersey are running scared about reporting. If they fail to report its a criminal charge. They are not always worried that something is wrong. If a student makes an accusation it gets reported.
and I would say a sudden change in behaviour (as noted above) for the honors student would trigger things as well - and its not unknown for a teenager to shift the blame to the parents/home when confronted by a teacher - since most of the time, the first question from the teacher/school is “everything ok at home?”
I got that news at age 17, start of my Sophomore year at university. My parents decided to make my college expenses an issue in their divorce. Dad got to keep his full retirement in exchange for paying my college expenses. Only he didn’t.
The university and FAFSA didn’t care. I still had to account for income of both parents in applying for financial aid.
I got a job and paid my way, but my studies suffered greatly.
Now dad wonders why I don’t speak to him.
No, you have not misunderstood.
If it was my parents, I would not have pursued a relationship with them. I have cut people out of my life for less. My wife, however, feels that family is very important and was unwilling to turn her back on them. I respect her feelings and support her in this as I support her in all her endeavors. They have, as I said, very sincerely apologized both to her and to me for their actions over the years and I have accepted this and forgiven them as has my wife.
Since the apology and the renewed presence in our life, we have kept very firm boundaries with them. We have never once accepted money from them or put ourselves in a situation where we were dependent on them in any way. We have made it clear to them that we could give a shit about any inheritance and don’t really want them contributing to our children’s college funds or anything like that. Their misbehavior is typically financial in nature, leveraging either support they have given for businesses, property, or future inheritance. They have also pulled stuff with in laws where they have left them high and dry when they had promised to do something but reneged at the last moment in a fit of pique. We never give them the opportunity. They are in our life only as long as they obey our rules which include civility and respect in every interaction and we have made it very clear that if they cannot live by these rules, they can get lost…
They have relationships with both of our children but they have never been alone with them. Not because we suspect they would harm the children physically, but because we don’t completely trust them. They have proven to be manipulative and I would not put it past them to play head games with my children so we don’t give them the chance. We have also explicitly put in our wills and other legal documents that under no circumstances can they get custody of our children or have any say in our estate, such as it is, on the off chance something happens to us.
They have been unfailing pleasant over the last 10 years with only a few exceptions that we nipped in the bud as soon as they occurred.
I can see it two ways.
A. Kid contracts “senior-itis” – skips school, fails to turn in assignments, gets bounced from athletic club, gets suspended. She also runs around with a boyfriend who does drugs, and comes home late, drunk or high, or doesn’t come home some nights at all. Parents take away phone, internet, car, impose restrictions, which she disobeys. Finally they tell her “We’re not paying for the private school you’re constantly truant from. And if you don’t stay away from that boy, and start coming home straight and at a reasonable hour, it’s like you’re already living elsewhere. So go on, make your own way and see how you like it!”
B. Kid has some common issues with controlling parents and “acts out” by being a bad girl in school. Also is seeing a boy the parents disapprove of for no reason clear to the girl, or for reasons all too visible – like an excess of melanin, in the parents’ opinion, or perhaps an objectionable surname. Parents react by taking away everything, impose an 8:00 PM curfew, and demand a full day’s worth of housekeeping chores every day after school. Girl begs to differ, claims “I’m actually really a good girl, I don’t understand!” Parents retort “Pack your shit and get out, you’re no daughter of ours!!”
A. & B. Kid moves in with friend whose dad is a lawyer, sues parents.
Case A - kid is an asshole.
Case B. - parents are assholes.
Right now, we don’t have enough facts to decide. My WAG inclines slightly toward A, and a lawyer/friend’s dad who has an interest in publicity. And may also be an asshole.
Although even in case B, the parents may be assholes - but they are under no legal obligation to let her continue to live with them once she turns 18 if she doesn’t follow their rules. Or pay her public school tuition. Or for her college.
I know a lot of people who sucked it up in college and didn’t move in with boyfriends and lived up to their parents standards because Mom and Dad would pull the financial support if they shacked up.
Or, indeed, the opposite: people who sucked it up in college and took on near full time jobs or took out loans in their own names or survived on scholarships because they wanted the sense of freedom that financial independence provides. I did this, to some extent, though my relationship with my parents was actually not at all toxic and indeed, benefitted from it.
I worked for a fellow who threatened to do that. That was the last day I worked for him.