And this is the letter the dadwrote the daughter when *she *asked to come home. It sounds like a letter from a very concerned but loving dad, thinking not only of his daughter but also his wife and other daughters in the house. He’s not letting the out-of-control 18yr old daughter that said she wants to shit on his wife’s face destroy the whole family. She’s welcome back home, but here are the ground rules.
And people want to side with the daughter…why, exactly? She made her bed, now she gets to sleep in it.
I can only see part of the letter. It cuts off mid-way through the first paragraph and doesn’t mention any of the stuff you’re talking about. Is it my phone or your link that’s the problem?
It just seems like both parents and daughter have put themselves into a situation where somebody has to “win.” That simply never works.
And, still, they have to pay their daughter’s final high school year tuition. What could possibly be the positive outcomes of not doing that? The daughter would still have to graduate on the school’s terms wrt attendance, grades, etc. Otherwise she’ll have to find a public school that will let her graduate at this late stage, and assume that her scholarship and college acceptance won’t be affected, or just drop out for a while. If she’s really so feckless, then her finding a public school doesn’t sound likely - not as likely as managing to graduate at her current school. It seems more likely than not to lead to the outcomes her parents surely want not to happen.
Publishing private emails is also pretty petty, actually. You don’t do that when you want to repair a relationship. That would be shitty behaviour from the daughter, but from fully responsible adults like her parents it’s even worse.
There are two links - ‘dad’ is linked to the first part of the paragraph, ‘wrote’ is the second part of the letter.
Bullshit. The daughter has put everyone in a situation where ‘I get what I want, or else’, to which the parents rightly said, ‘when you’re an adult, there are consequences for your actions’.
I’m torn on this. In general, yes - I agree that the parents should and likely would willingly pay the last year’s tuition. I can’t find the article, now, but I think one of the issues was that *the daughter was skipping class. *Clearly the message here is, 'we’re not paying tuition if you’re not attending school.
Yes, you’re absolutely right, the parents shouldn’t have sued the daughter and aired the dirty laundry…oh, wait, no you’re completely *fucking *wrong. The *daughter *sued the parents. She’s the one forcing all this. If she’s going to sue the parents, then guess what? All this is coming out whether the parents want it or not. If my wife and I are being sued by an out-of-control daughter, I’m defending myself, my wife, and my other daughters, even if it means that the oldest daughter is forced to sleep in the bed she made. If the daughter doesn’t want her emails made public, maybe don’t sue her parents after writing an email saying she wanted to shit in her mom’s face? Jesus, is that the kind of email you expect from an honors student? Who the hell would ever say *anything *like that to their mother?
The parents want her back, but want her back on terms that are acceptable for the entire family. Daughter wants them to pay tuition, give her a car & phone to use etc? Great - move back in and follow the house rules, which are ridiculously standard. Be home at a reasonable time. Attend school. Don’t tell your mother you want to shit in her face. It’s not rocket science, it’s not hard, and it’s not unreasonable. Seems to me Miss Princess has decided that rules simply don’t apply to her.
Sometimes the best thing a loving parent can do is make your children see that there are consequences for their actions. My family had to do this with my younger brother, and while it was horrible and awful for everyone and he hated all of us for it at the time, 15 years later he willingly acknowledges that he was trying to get everyone else to accept responsibility for his mistakes. Even he admits that our mom was probably a bit too lenient, giving him too many chances, before finally drawing the line in the sand, as it were.
Bullshit. I’ll support my daughters for the rest of my life. But I will have tons of questions. I’m not a fucking ATM.
Just an anecdote. I have a good friend from high school. She graduated nursing school, got her masters, got married, had a family, great kids, wonderful 20 year marriage going strong, runs a medical clinic on a military base. Her sister is a heroin addict and literally a crack whore. She got her now adult son hooked on heroin. Her baby was taken away from her by the state. I know because we’ve arrest her multiple times. And it was not the drugs that turned her bad, she was trouble from the time she was a kid. Good parents, stable home. As someone who works with juvenile offenders on a daily basis I can say for sure that sometimes shitty kids come from good families.
I agree with you on both counts. Daughter is looking more like a petulant ass as more details come out. However, if the parents want her to come around, they’re going about it the wrong way.
And it is necessary to make sure they can live independently of you.
My parents have three daughters and we’ve all been pretty independent - my baby sister needed financial help a few years ago - she’s a recovering alcoholic and they didn’t help her when she was drinking. But we all helped when she was drying out. And my sister and her new husband have paid them back But after a lifetime of working - they have now retired, and they need the money they’ve saved for their retirement - there isn’t a lot extra. And that is WITHOUT financially supporting us beyond college tuition from the time we were legal adults (maybe a few hundred here or there to get us through a tough time).
My friend has a brother in his 40s that has never held a real job and lives in his parents basement - their parents are in their mid-70s. Someday - someday soon - they will die. Their assets will be split between two kids - and they aren’t much, the social security checks will stop coming, and - what is a guy in his 40s going to do? Everyone sees the train wreck coming…
Yes, independence is a process - it starts when they are infants and you don’t run to comfort their every wimper, continues through school when you let them fail a class because they didn’t turn in their homework - and hopefully - when they are 18, they are capable of independence. And if you have to help for a few years - you are, as a parent, entitled to set some rules up. But you don’t want to help for too long because you won’t be working forever, and you won’t live forever.
One member of the family doesn’t think the terms are acceptable. Since she’s the one who has to follow the rules, they are at somewhat of an impasse.
I’m not even saying the rules are bad, but there doesn’t appear to be a dialog about the rules, it’s the parents setting rules that are acceptable to them.
So they say “We miss you and want you to come back. Here’s our list of demands.” It’s kind of silly.
A question I think is unanswered… is she still engaging in the bad behavior that got her sanctioned at school? I would be surprised to find out is that she is treating her host family with disrespect, staying out until all hours, doing poorly in school, and still has them agreeing to fund her lawsuit. If she’s acting right with them, what would it take to have her act the same way with her family?
[QUOTE=Cheesesteak]
I’m not even saying the rules are bad, but there doesn’t appear to be a dialog about the rules, it’s the parents setting rules that are acceptable to them.
[/QUOTE]
No shit. News flash: Responsible parents set rules acceptable to them, not acceptable to the children. Do you think the daughter should be able to negotiate how often she skips school? How often she writes nasty letters to her mother? How often she gets drunk or uses drugs? Are you really being this obtuse?
Then by all means, bestow upon us your parenting wisdom.
Nobody would. Most parents who work to produce good kids end up succeeding. But a few don’t despite their very best efforts. That’s just life. The forces of adolescence and the outside world sometimes just can’t be overcome.
That’s only true until the child becomes an adult. And their daughter is, in the normal legal sense at least, an adult.
And a level of financial, and especially emotional, support for an adult is conditional on her behavior. No parents are obligated to support an adult daughter who treats them like shit and disobeys reasonable conditions for their support.
This girl wants the benefits of adulthood without the responsibilities. That’s typical of her age. Most people work through it, but this case went to extremes, unfortunately (mainly because of the douchebag who funded her lawsuit - if he cares so much, he should just pay for her education himself and let her move into his basement so she can tell him she wants to shit in his face instead).
There is no legal privilege associated with those e-mails. They are discoverable. They are evidence. The lawsuit is a matter of public record.
If this were simply a family dispute gone viral, I can see your point. But this is an actual court proceeding in which the e-mails are admissible, relevant evidence.
In what world do they NOT get made part of the record?
Yes, not only is it legitimate for the parents to submit them as evidence, which then becomes public, it’s possible the emails were submitted by the daughter, or even subpeonaed as part of the abuse investigation and then somehow made public in this trial, or whatever. The parents can’t be blamed.
Apparently, it would take more commitment and more energy than she is willing to expend.
Rules for an almost-adult (I think I’m safe in assuming this all began before her 18th birthday) inevitably involve some negotiation. You want to stay out until dawn, I want you in at some hour that doesn’t wake the rest of the family. I know that with my daughters, their mother or I would stay awake until they came home. It wasn’t to check on them, or to catch them out. It was to assure ourselves that they were safe. So since my own bedtime would perhaps be around 11 PM, if this were totally for my convenience, that would be your curfew. However, I recognize that parties, dances and other activities may last until a later hour, and I’m willing to accept that. I’m just not going along with your desire to come and go literally as you please. For a high school girl, IMHO a 1:30 AM curfew is liberal enough. So yes, in that sense it is my rule, and isn’t subject to further negotiation. But there was certainly an element of negotiation, or flexibility, in setting the rule.
Things like skipping school though are not a legitimate subject for negotiation.
I’m not the one who claimed they set rules for “the entire family”, that was you.
She already ran away from home, went to live with another family, and sued her parents rather than live under these rules. I’m just being practical, if you want her back, offering her the exact living conditions she ran away from is unlikely to work all that well. Anyway, I think the sticking point is the BF, not the drinking, nasty letters or skipping school.
I only know what works on a stubborn 5 year old, so it’s very applicable here:
I know you’re simplifying, but if you only do that, the stick will cease to ever work, and also the carrot will have to get bigger and bigger, and pretty soon you’re just bribing the kid.
Best to have rules, with flexibility, and let the child choose within them. That gives the child some power over her own choices. So you say “you can have either this or that - which do you want?” or “this behavior isn’t allowed, but here are some things you CAN do”.
But I’m sure you already know that. I’m just elaborating.
In this case, the emails indicate the parents did that kind of thing to some degree. They said abusive language was not allowed and not negotiable, but gave the kid some choices in other ways.
So the parents submitted them to the court, who then made them publicly available? Well, in that case the parents aren’t shitty in that respect at least, so I take that back. I’m still too used to the UK, where such details are rarely available for public consumption and never until after the verdict. Which I think is better in most cases. We might be interested, but we don’t actually need to know.
I have to admit, I’m somewhat changing my mind, except for the school fees. Like I said from the start, I still think they should be paid and no argument on here has been halfway persuasive.
And the parents still don’t seem to be proposing a middle ground. That’s what you do when you care less about winning than about getting the right outcome; in a situation like this, having one side be the “winner” simply never works. Maybe they’ll come up with a compromise later in some way.
Perhaps I’ve also seen so many really extremely badly-behaved teens that this just not strike me as all that bad, even with the new details. As a parent, it would really piss me off, but to the extent of stopping her graduating high school or placing barriers in the way of that happening? Hell no. To the extent of withholding a college fund? Unlikely.
I’d pay the school fees; those are fees that I’d already agreed to pay anyway. Unless this school has very strange arrangements, the parents will have to pay eventually anyway even if their non-payment delays her graduation or participation in classes.
Hell, even if I somehow don’t have to pay the fees legally, it’d be really shitty, morally, not to. My daughter would still have to attend classes, get OK grades, etc, so it’s not like it’s a free ride. It’s a privileged ride that I, not she, chose to put her on.
You seem to think that this all happened after one fight between the kid and the parents for breaking curfew or something. Its far more likely that the situation developed over months and even years, and would suggest that the parents probably proposed quite a lot of middle ground before the little brat ever left the family home to shack up with a lawyer.
