Sounds like someone found a perfect enabler. This girl needs a reality check.
You know, there’s a lot of middle ground between an ultimatum and letting someone shit all over you.
Perhaps I have a very skewed view of reality, but where I come from making unemployed minors homeless is never an option. Even if she isn’t legally mine, until she and her mother peacefully reconcile or she turns eighteen she is my responsibility. Here, seventeen is legally a child and she has very few options without an adult to advocate on her behalf. When qualified and capable adults aren’t able to get jobs in this area, I cannot fathom tossing a child out, literally, into the cold.
This is a kid who attempted suicide several times before I brought her here, and now, thankfully, that’s a fairly distant memory. This is a kid who was barely literate before I brought her here, and now she’s graduating early and looking at colleges. I firmly believe that if my efforts have made a difference in these other areas, they can, eventually, make a difference on this one.
Ethilrist, I’ll try the fingerless gloves. I’m going to talk to her about making the garage more comfortable, too. Maybe if it’s nicer for her to go out to a warm and private spot than to stay inside and deal with me, she’ll more readily go outside.
Sure there is, until someone has repeatedly shit all over you.
For what it’s worth, I’m not suggesting that she should be put on the street. I’m suggesting that other, perhaps less comfortable arrangements should be made. She doesn’t want to live with Mom? Tough shit. She should have thought of that before repeatedly disobeying and disrespecting the person who’s been good enough to take her in.
You’re obviously a very kind person; I’m just a few years younger than you and would never contemplate taking on that kind of responsibility. I gather from what you said later that you chose to do so, knowing what it would involve. Just reading the first post, I assumed she was just living there as a tenant and parenting wouldn’t be something you would be expected to do. Still, can you get your mother as the landlord involved? I also like the idea of a smoke detector - not to present her with proof, just to make it uncomfortable to smoke in her room.
But by the OP’s account, overall her behavior has improved leaps and bounds, and the smoking the house is new. You don’t take a kid that has improved and improved and improved and when they start fucking up, lay down an ultimatum. It sends a message of “no matter how hard you try and how well you do, you are forever and always just one fuck up away from complete abandonment”.
I feel strongly about this because I know it’s hard enough raising a mentally ill child (esp. one with a personality disorder) without everyone implying you are the problem for “enabling” or being too weak to lay down the law.
I don’t know what the OP should do, because I don’t know the kid and so I don’t know her triggers. But the OP already knows she has the “ultimatum” option. Clearly, she doesn’t think this is the issue that deserves the nuclear option (you only get so many of those), so I don’t think she needs to be berated for that.
Then why would she ever listen to you?
Does your mom lives in the other half other building? Would she let your niece go smoke over there? I’m serious, I assume the whole living arrangement is by mutual family agreement, if you are seriously affected by smoke and your mom is not then maybe your mom should be the one to get the short end of the stick on this one. This is respecting what you say, that giving her the boot is just not an option.
I’m not asking this to be a smart ass or pretend to be dense. I am honestly asking from a place of ignorance: is this a normal parenting tactic? Do parents/guardians often threaten their minor children with being kicked out of the house? If I had an eighteen year old child who was disobeying house rules, kicking her out would be an option, but I cannot fathom it being one even a day before her eighteenth birthday.
My mother always spoke to me in a logical manner and I did what she wanted not out of fear of some horrific punishment, but simply because her disappointment was painful to me. Do most children and teenagers only listen to their parents out of fear?
Fine, don’t put her on the streets. Send her to military school/camp.
I think the ultimatum is too harsh as well. And military school? Kind of overkill for a very common teenage issue, IMHO!
It sounds like you’re doing a great job, and this is just one more hurdle in helping someone get their life on track. You can do it without knocking down everything your niece has built up since she’s moved in with you.
I am neither a parent nor a 17 year old, so take this for what it’s worth, but this is probably the tactic I’d try (which is similar to what a lot of other posters have said).
Stop going on about her health. She has heard the stories and school info sessions, seen the tv spots and the gory ads on the cig packages themselves… she knows smoking is bad for her. But she is 17. She is indestructible. She does not CARE about what it’s doing for her lungs, and your trying to use that to convince her to do anything will just annoy her.
Address the issue from your health standpoint; show her your eczema, let her see you wheezing and taking your asthma meds, and tell her that it really is a serious side effect of her smoking in the house. If it didn’t physically hurt you, it would be another matter, but since it does, you need to work out an arrangement where you are not being hurt by her actions. Suggest a toque and fingerless gloves, and ways to make the garage a reasonable place for her to go smoke. Perhaps offer a goal (buying a tv/dvd combo for the garage or something) if she sticks to smoking only in there or outside for X amount of time. Make her in charge of the situation somehow. By giving her some control, you make it her choice rather than yours to smoke outside the house.
Good luck!
Ditto.
Put it squarely on her and make it be the result of her action: if you smoke in this house again, you will have to find another place to live. Period. End of statement.
You might try relating to her as an adult. She’s a 17 year old who smokes. Accept that, acknowledge that smoking is not a habit she’s going to change right now. But hold the line on your health issues–even if she were your grandfather or the Queen of England instead of your niece, smoking around you wouldn’t be OK.
This might work better than a parent-child dynamic where she’d have a reason to deny to you that she was smoking.
If smoking were her first step down the road to trouble it might be more of a battle worth fighting, but considering the situation, it doesn’t sound like it’s her biggest problem.
Parents have a lot more options than you. I am assuming you can’t ground her or punish her in any real way since you said you don’t have a parent/child relationship. Kicking her out is your one and only option, if she refuses to obey you and keeps smoking indoors to the detriment of YOUR health and you have taken your one and only bargaining chip of the table what exactly do you plan on doing? If she had lied to me and kept insisting she only smoked outdoors i would have just told her “then you just need to quit smoking anywhere because my health comes before your bad habit, either that or find another place to stay”.
Since you’ve decided that kicking her out is not an option, I suggest you get used to having someone smoke in your house.
Make the garage her new bedroom. Move her bed and all her shit out there and buy a kerosene heater.
I would also add that you shouldn’t make any threats you’re not willing to carry out. For example, you threatened earlier that if you caught her smoking again, you’d toss all her cigarettes out in the snow. Did you do it? If not, next time, follow through.
I only have a toddler, but I’ve learned (so far, anyway), that:
- Follow-through in discipline is really important; and
- You need to set fair, do-able (for both of you) consequences for failure to follow house rules.
If there’s a consequence you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow through on, don’t make it.
It sounds like you’re truly one of the best things that she has in her life right now. Good luck, and I wish there were more people like you.
Maybe buy her the patch or the gum and a box of toothpicks or straws to chew on. Encourage her to quit smoking.
One obvious step would be to sit down with her as adult to adult and say “This smoke smell in the house is a HUGE problem for me, because of my body’s terrible reactions to it. What are your ideas to help us solve this problem?”
Why not enlist her in the Marine Corps and let them send her to Iraq? You need a ring and valve job about as badly as anyone I’ve ever encountered.