Struggling to manage feelings and role with SD14 going off the rails
Last weekend my SD14 was caught out for the second time lying and sneaking off to a friends house to get drunk with a group of similarly misguided friends. The friends mother apparantly permits this in order to prevent her daughter, my SD and friends from drinking and camping in the park. SD was removed from the house and grounded for a week when her BM found out she was there the first time, but 2 weeks later foolishly did the same things again while her BM was away and thought SD was with us for a family birthday. A number of other worrying revelations about SD's behaviour have come out as a result, she seems to have been quietly going off the rails for many months, but because she mostly observes the obvious boundaries at home (chores, grades, bedtimes) has managed to do it undetected. She appears to have got into a very intense relationship with some other disfunctional friends and that combined with a sense of entitlement to all the freedoms enjoyed by her 3 older sisters (SD19,20 and 23) is a recipe for disaster. A grilling took place at her BM's house involving BM, BM's BF and my DH. There were tears and she has been grounded more severely and is not allowed to sleep away from home for the forseeable future.
I am churning with frustration and anxiety, although my DH and the BM are trying to take the situation in hand. Why do I feel so bad? Here's my thoughts:
1. I wasn't involved in the original confrontation, so now I have all these feelings of disappointment and concern and anger about her behaviour that I have not had an opportunity to express. She is now staying with us for a week but I feel it would be unproductive for me to take her on one side and repeat what has already been said by 3 other people. She is aware I know what has gone on, but without speaking with her directly about it, I suppose I feel disempowered, although I fear anything I said would make little difference anyway. I now feel incredibly uncomfortable having her here and can barely bring myself to talk to her. I just feel like saying 'please don't try to chat with me, I am too upset about what you have done' but my DH thinks it's not reasonable to expect her to mope around the house being permanently penitent for the week.
2. At times like this it's really hard to know what my role should be. I am a pretty confident step-parent on a day to day basis but when a big problem or something unexpected emerges it can still throw me into a vortex of step-parenting neurosis. Generally speaking I feel it's for my DH to deal with major matters of discipline like this, because he and the BM are the one's with the legitimate authority in the children's eyes, although obviously DH takes my views on board. I have no hesitation in managing day to day behaviour and enforcing boundaries but somehow I feel the big stuff is for the parents to deal with. But at the same time I feel like I must be failing as a step-mother for her to have gone down this path. Should I be trying to turn her around? I feel this responsibility despite the fact she has active and concerned BM and BF in her life, because she was just 7 when her father and I got together and I have had much more of a motherly role for her than for her 3 older sisters.
3. I am very frustrated because I became concerned about her behaviour last December and tried to pursuade my DH to monitor her online activity to check she wasn't getting herself into trouble. But we have different views about the relative importance of respecting children's privacy vs keeping an eye on what they are doing and he did not do so. My view is that children have too much privacy now and mobile phones and the internet enable them to live a life which is alost completely invisible to their parents, and this really endangers your ability as a parent to supervise and guide your children. I don't advocate spying on everything a child does, but occasionally doing a sanity check of their Facebook or blog to make sure they're OK and not doing anything dangerous or illegal seems like responsible parenting to me. His view is that it is an invasion of privacy. So I am in an 'I told you so' situation about her going off the rails, but am still unable to pursuade him to take steps to monitor her effectively in an ongoing way.
So this is a very long first post, and basically an attempt to crystallise in my own mind why I am in such turmoil. At times like this step-parenting can be very stressful!
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My kids have always known and
My kids have always known and I'm the same with the skids, if I ask to see their accounts or ask for a password then they better do it. I don't put computers in their rooms and the one they are allowed on is in the livingroom so they have no perceived privacy. If they try to hide something from me, I will find out what it is and they won't be allowed on the computer again. Sd14 I guess only uses email at her bm's since I never see her in it here and bd12 has an email address but it is only access from my laptop and only for emailing her brother who's in the navy and her grandmother. I have several domains so created her email with one of them and she has no clue how to access it other then through my outlook on my laptop which stays in my bedroom. Ss11 only is allowed to play games on the computer and only a couple that is online like toontown. I am very strict when it comes to things like that and especially from my bd will hear things like "but mom everyone in my class has a facebook account" and I just reply with not everyone because you don't. I won't budge on it and tell her there is a reason they set age limits on things like that. If the bm wants to let the skids do what ever they want on the computers that's her business but when in my house it's by my rules which are stricter then dh when it comes to the pc.
You need to let them handle
You need to let them handle this child. There are more problems coming. It does sound like they (the parents) are trying to do the right thing. Hopefully they will. I do log on my son's facebook as him so I can see things. I do it every couple of days. He knows I do it. He is 15 and I will do it until he is out of my house. We have a responsibility to raise them with boundaries and guidance. Unfortunately most don't. As for feeling out of the loop, you are. You can mention stuff to your husband and hope he takes it under advisement, but he probably won't. Not sure why the BM SO was there. Honestly, if you weren't he shouldn't have been.
Stay out of the punishment and keep your distance from the SD. Anything you say or do will be misinterpreted by her. If she wants to talk she will, but also know that most of the SK's play on our need for them to like us. My SD14 used to cry and whine to me in the hopes that DH would take her off punishment. Sometimes, it worked and I always felt stupid later when she got mouthy with me again. After a few times of that, I stopped getting involved. Good luck. Welcome to the Rock and A Hard Place.
Thankyou all for your
Thankyou all for your comments.
naturalmom425 Thanks so much for your compliment on my blog. I do really identify with the point you make about monitoring attempts looking critical and domineering. And of course as a step mum you're hyperconscious of not wanting to come across as the evil stepmother. Somehow the more I try to explain reasonably to my DH why I think online monitoring is really important the more I feel myself coming across as an Orwellian '1984' style dictator. And I'm a pretty articulate person. My DH doesn't really think I'm a dictator and appreciates I have the best intentions, but whereas I think the end justifies the means in this situation, he doesn't seem to agree. Having said that, on the previous occasion when SD14 went AWOL from BM's home and was later found drunk at her friends house, he did check her room, and when he found her PC on he went through her F*cebook to try to find clues as to where she had gone. That was actually how he found her because one of her friends had posted about the party going on at her house. So he'll resort to that in a crisis situation but doesn't want to do it as a matter of course.
We are in the same pickle of having given too much phone and computing freedom. My DH recognises that this is a problem. I might create a forum topic about this. The trouble is that he works in IT, as did I before I had children, so having this stuff in the home seemed really natural. Sometimes it's hard to anticipate the effect on your children and family dynamic of introducing different technologies into the home. The other issue is that when there's 2 homes involved and the BM/F relationship is not great it's hard to achieve consistency in terms of boundaries on computer access. And computer access is so important to children now that if one home clamps down hard and the other continues to provide open access there's then the risk that your SK's start avoiding coming to your home, or, that the damage is done anyway and limiting access in your home is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
stepinsanity, it sounds like you were much more prepared to set boundaries about IT from the start. I wish we had done that, because it becomes a much more difficult challenge to revoke those priveleges once they are in place. I have 2 young children of my own and DH and I agreed a while ago that as they grew up we would be much more careful about managing use of phones and computers, with a PC in a public area of the house and time limits on usage. Until now we have not retrospectively reviewed the access available to SS12 and SD14 but we had a discussion about this yesterday and are now considering removing PCs from their bedrooms and having one shared PC in the dining room instead. BM and DH have also agreed to change SDs phone tariff to reduce her usage. I think you've done very well if your children are respecting your rules on this. It's a hard thing to clamp down on, because as soon as SD knew we were aware of her previous blog she simply switched to another service and made herself more difficult to find. If she was forced to give her login to her FB it's fairly certainly that she would just set up another profile. This is why I think it's more effective to monitor in the background and use it to inform how much freedom is given, and whether you introduce certain topics into conversation with them.
stepaside and jsmom it sounds like you have had some really bad experiences of trying to discipline your SKs. I have to say that in this case the fact I was not involved in the showdown with SD was really due to logistics rather than any intentional exclusion. SD was at BM's house already. BM's boyfriend was involved whether he liked it or not because he had to help remove an incapable SD from the friends house. I couldn't go over because my DH and I have two young children of our own (3 and 18months) and one of us had to stay home to look after them. We also didn't want to have a separate showdown at our house because it was clear that BM and DH presenting a united front was going to be important in terms of showing SD that there was going to be no playing one off against the other, or getting away with stuff by telling a different story to each parent. SD is also well aware that her father respects me and my views and I am a disciplinary force in our home. I may not have managed to pursuade him to monitor her FB yet but most of the time he listens carefully to my advice. I'm sure BM was happy not have me there though - you are right that she doesn't like me one bit!
SD has been under close supervision this week and told DH she felt she was handcuffed to him. "Whose fault is that?" he said. I had a welcome night off worrying about this last night and went out with a friend. Not long to go till SD goes away for 10 days with BM!
There is software you can get
There is software you can get that will show you every page she is on. My bellsouth sends me a link when they go to the site for me to look at. She has already proved she can't be trusted. Her parents need to do something now. For us, we just print all the pages that SD14 does and send them over to the lawyer to use against the BM in court.