You seem to think these are somehow mutually exclusive factors.
Oh, well then - how relieved I am to know you’re applying your parental experience on a five year old to tell this family how they should be disciplining their adult-age daughter.
:rolleyes:
Sheesh. Come back in 13 years, ok?
As a parent of a teen, you need to be really careful about negotiating a middle ground.
Curfew is at 10:00. The kid comes in at 10:15 and says “everyone else gets to stay out until 11:00” - well, you think, 10:30 is reasonable - and then the kid comes in at 10:45 and starts renegotiating.
Its also fairly likely that she could have done a mid-year transfer to a public high school and graduated - She’s an honors student and I’m assuming her private high school meets state graduation standards. I know (because I’m homeschooling one of mine right now for disciplinary reasons) that our high school will work with me to get him to graduate from there on time - even if the coursework isn’t a one to one match - as long as I meet MINNESOTA graduation requirements. (I’m working with them to make sure he can transfer in with THEIR requirements). They have kids transfer in from out of state in the middle of their Senior year - and they simply work it out.
My parents had the BEST curfew rule. Say we were supposed to be home at 11. If we phoned at about 10:30 and asked to stay out later (usually an hour or two) they would always say yes. They got to look like good guys and they knew that we were safe and okay. Granted, this was before cell phones so, YMMV.
Anyway, I think the thing that strikes me the most here is that she is not an only child. If you have a child who is behaving outside the rules and you bend the rules significantly for them, the next kid in line will likely pull the same stuff to get the same rules. I wouldn’t do it. Rules are rules.
Even if they are legally obligated to pay the school fees*, they are not obligated to pay the fee to the daughter, except perhaps if she already paid and is suing for reimbursement. The school has to sue them - yet apparently it has not. I wonder if they are not legally obligated to pay - perhaps because they notified the school in advance that they would not be responsible for tuition/ are withdrawing her for the second semester- which started after her 18th birthday.
I’m sure they are related. But she is in lurve with only one of them, it’s the only thing she mentioned in her email reply, and is the only thing that is not, inherently, bad behavior.
You can’t come home unless you dump him is clearly not an effective strategy. If this dude is a worthless tool, she’s going to have to learn that herself, not have him turned into Romeo by her parents who refuse to let their young love blossom.
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Oh, well then - how relieved I am to know you’re applying your parental experience on a five year old to tell this family how they should be disciplining their adult-age daughter.
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Should have thrown in a wink there, I meant that she’s acting like a stubborn kindergartner, so the same theories apply.
Just a minor nitpick but that was a phone message she left her mother.
My mom had two fairly simple rules when I wanted to go out to parties. Possibly because she had me when she was pretty young, she knew it could be hard to leave when the party is just getting fun etc. So she basically said I could stay out as late as I wanted if I called every hour or so. If more than two hours without a call went by, she’s be sending out the search party, and I could expect some repercussions at home.
Second, if I was -ever- in a situation where the only way to get home was drive after drinking or be driven by someone that had been drinking, I could call her at any time, to any place, and she’d come pick me up, no questions asked, no yelling/screaming.
I only took her up on that once, calling her at like 3am to say me and some friends really needed a ride home 'cause our driver was piss-ass drunk. She drove 35 minutes to us, drove us all back to my house and had everyone call their parents letting 'em know they were safe and sound. In the morning she made pancakes. And then she sat us down and started talking, and I’m sure we were all expecting The Lecture.
Instead, she started talking about what it was like to be a parent - ‘basically, we worry non-stop about our kids. It’s not so much that we don’t want you drinking just ‘because’, it’s that we don’t want a phone call at 3 in the morning saying our son’s been killed in a car accident’.
I had a pretty cool Mom, and that conversation really made a lasting impression on me and my group of friends. Even though I never really understood that ‘worry 24/7 about your kids’ bit until I had children of my own.
I’ve one of each, 18 and 5, and some older and in between. It’s never that simple. Aside from some laundry issues I can’t think of any rules we had for my now college freshman; she was never any trouble and hardly required them to be spelled out.
Now she lives out-of-state, on campus. I can say “don’t drink” and expect obedience and ignore the facts of college living; I can say “that boy is trouble, don’t see him” and think somehow this is within my rights, but I can’t do that and treat my kid as an adult at the same time, there or here. I expect her to make good choices and that is an acknowledgment that she has choices to make.
While this topic provides great tabloid fodder, one thing that stands out for me is the daughter, in the email, asking if she can come home. So whatever else happened, she was clearly told to leave and all financial support has been withheld. I have some sympathy for that position, being young and seemingly having nothing left to lose.
Huh? She asked to come home, and was told yes, by all means, but you’re going to have to change your ways. Based on the email it looks like her sisters were being affected by the oldest daughters’ behaviour as well.
Seems extremely reasonable to me. The universe doesn’t revolve around the oldest daughter, the parents have the entire family to think about.
No, responsible parents teach their kids to be able to be independent, something you guys go on and on about in every thread on parenting. Rules set from on high are the opposite of independence. A responsible parent will negotiate with the kid while still winding up getting what they actually wanted.
If a child is already drinking or doing drugs, having rules against such isn’t going to stop them. Skipping school while keeping up your honor-student grades just isn’t that big a deal, as long as it doesn’t go overboard. (A day or two per semester max, probably.) Kids do it in college all the time. And you wouldn’t negotiate how many nasty letters but how nasty she could be.
My parents never set these hard rules. We never even had a curfew. I still was never out past midnight. I still never did drugs or alcohol. I still always treated my parents with respect. The idea that all these hard and fast rules are necessary in order to raise a child is just not true. Harder rules just inspire harder breaking. That’s why the kids with the strictest parents go the wildest in college.
Lawsuits are usually a last resort when other methods of negotiation are impossible. If nothing else, they are expensive. I can’t help but assume that the child thought there was no other way to get a reasonable negotiation. And she was able to convince her host family of this, and they are adults. So you can’t blame it on her faulty reasoning from being a teenager.
I’m not saying the parents are completely or even mostly at fault here, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon of just blaming the kid. True, normal kids don’t sue their parents. But normal parents don’t get sued by their kids, either.
Even you admit that your parents were willing to negotiate, and you cite this as a reason they were good at their job. You point out that she had conversations with you about the stresses of being a good parent–the exact opposite of declaring rules from on high. She tried to instill in you a sense of empathy, explaining things to you rather than lecturing you.
I have a cousin who is into drugs, and I and my mother had to counsel his mother on this same exact issue. She was making hard line rules, which would inspire him to run away and live with his friends. We had to discuss whether she more valued having him at home where she could look after him and try to help him, or having him follow her rules.
Treating parenting like a power struggle inevitably means that one side is going to lose. With adult kids especially, the loser can very often be the parents. (And since the parents do usually know best, the kid ultimately loses, too.)
How can one be independent while still living under the parent’s roof and having them provide for one’s needs? Independence means providing for one’s self.
Yeah, but she wasn’t skipping a day or two a semester–one source reported she was suspended for truancy before the first semester was half-way over. I think reasonable people can generally agree that missing enough school to be suspended for truancy really is that big a deal.
While we’re getting all anecdotal, my parents did set hard rules, and I was never out past 11 (my curfew was midnight, but all of my friends had curfews of 10:30 or 11), did drugs or alcohol, or told my mother I wanted to shit on her face. I was a pretty easy kid, though, and probably would have turned out fine without rules. It sounds like you were probably also a pretty easy kid who would have turned out fine with the reasonable rules my parents imposed. I have friends and a brother, however, who weren’t easy kids and under your parents’ no-rule regime would have gotten themselves into some seriously deep shit as teenagers. Shit deep enough they might not have been able to recover from it as adults.
And I shudder to think what any sort of negotiation with my brother would have been like–he was and is the undisputed King of Well-I-Don’t-See-Why-I-Have-To-Do-That. Brushing his teeth, chewing with his mouth closed, doing his homework, going to bed, getting up, getting out of the shower while there was still hot water for the rest of the family, refraining from chasing the cat with the lawn mower or hitting me in the fontanel with his fist…it was all a huge, drawn-out argument that he never let up no matter how many perfectly valid, reasonable explanations he got. The only argument that ever shut him up was “You have to do it because I’m going to [insert punishment here] if you don’t.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the fact that he was permitted to reach adulthood is proof my mother is a far better person than I’ll ever be.
That’s the thing about raising children–you act as though there’s One True Way that will get good results with every single kid out there, and there’s just not.
You, of all people lecturing grown-ups on “independence” is like Paris Hilton lecturing people about money-saving tips and simple lifestyles.
Dude, you live in your mommy’s basement, she does your shopping and you berate her when she gets the wrong ingredients. Anything you tell us how your parents raised is a cautionary tale.
Okay, that was the funniest thing I’ve read in awhile. Thanks for the laugh.
Just because this worked for your family and situation doesn’t mean it’s the one and only approach for everyone.
Hurray anecdotes! My cousin had a pretty much no rules growing up situation. He ended up getting brought home by the cops a couple of times and got kicked out of high school for the shit he was pulling. He couldn’t wait to move out so he could pull that shit without getting in trouble at home. At 19 he moved out with some friends and their place got busted by the cops. He spent about 6 months in jail. Thankfully that turned him around and now he’s a stand-up member of society.
This is what annoys me about the teen. She wants her independence by not living with her parents yet she still demands they pay for her schooling and for them to pay her $650 a week for living expenses.
Fuck her.
Of course they are legally required to give her an education through high school. They are not required to give her a private education. She can finish through public education just like 99.99999999% of us did.
I can’t wait until the daughter of the scumbag lawyer sues him over something. Because fuck him, as a parent he should have known better.
Nitpick: It’s actually ~89% who attend public school, but carry on.
Of course - if he wins, he’s set a precedent that he will be very unhappy about.
No they are not. She is 18. If she wanted to sign herself out of school and not graduate even in a public school she could. And there is nothing the state or the parents could do about it. She’s an adult. If she wants to go to school the state is obligated to let her go to high school. I’d have to look it up but I think that’s up to 20 to account for those held back. But the parents have no obligation to give an adult an education. That is paid for by everyone’s property taxes.
One of the rare occurrences that I did literally laugh out loud.