DH is continuing his Disney Daddy week entertaining his kids - SD15 (she lives with her aunt & uncle), SS7 and SS9 while his grandmother is visiting. SS7 has been refusing to come for visitation and SS9 wants his dad to come visit him.

So, of course DH is going overboard trying to impress his kids and make them want to spend time with him. This is freaking nuts but honestly, there’s a reason men revert to being Disney Daddies. DH’s boys have sports and scouting that keep them busy on weekends. Soon it will be friends and girls. They’re going to want to stop EoWE visitation eventually. There’s no way DH will tell his sons they can’t play football because they have to drive out to the boondocks to visit him every other weekend. So he goes above and beyond to make them want to visit.

But kids aren’t suppose to have the option to choose where they want to live. All the authority parents have is gone. Children are suppose to rely on their parents to provide everything for them. With separated parents, kids know that that there’s always a back-up plan or if they aren’t getting what they want, they can go to the other parent.

The same is true with SD15, even though her BM is out of the picture. When SD(then 14) came to live with us, you’d think she would have been grateful for a place to stay. But she was pissed off she didn’t get to choose where she lived and she didn’t get what she wanted. She made our lives a living hell, refused to do anything we said. No punishment worked. She completely refused to believe that “you have to live here and follow our rules” applied to her. What she wanted more than anything was to not live with us and going back to her home state. That was all she cared about.

It’s not like SD15 wanted to go live with her BM - she wanted her dad to appoint her half-sister her legal guardian. She even printed all the forms he needed to file from the internet.

When I was talking to admissions counselors for boarding schools for troubled teens last year trying to find somewhere to put SD, something came up that made it nearly impossible for those programs to work. They were urging me to make sure to get the whole family on-board. The programs want parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc to all be in agreement so if the kid calls any of them begging to go home, the kids get the same message - you can only come home if you complete the program.

That was one of the ways they get these programs to work - telling the kids they will be homeless and on the streets unless they complete the program and convince their family to take them back. Of course, with most stepfamilies, getting a crazy BM or BF to agree is impossible. They’ll take them back no matter what.

If DH and I sent SD15 to one of those programs for troubled teens, her half-brother would be there immediately to help her run away and tell her how awful DH is for sending her there.

(Last year we had a recurring problem with SD15‘s 17 year old half-brother driving down to where we live, picking her up after school and going places without permission. I still wish we had called the police and had them pick them up.)

SD15 doesn’t rely on her dad for anything. She told him last year that she didn’t know why she has to do what he says just because he slept with her mom. She doesn’t see him as her father, just her sperm donor. The fact he’s paid nearly $50k in child support is meaningless. To her, the money could come from somewhere else. She doesn’t care. It might as well have been welfare. It's just a check from someone.

Even when separated parents are relatively on the same page (BM of the two boys is relatively sane and has remarried) there are problems. The only role that DH really has in his boys’ lives is the fun guy who does stuff with them. He only sees them 4 days a month, what else can he do? I know he hopes that some day, the boys might want to come live with him so he continues to be a Disney Daddy.

This isn’t the way a family should work. Teens should think that if their mother and father kicked them out, that there is no place else to go - not that they could go running to the other parent. And father need to have a role other entertaining his kids and giving them things. No wonder as a society we’re so screwed up.