Back story, my partners sister has been on and off drugs
Note- family was not aware of severity of drug use -all kids are okay.
Situation: family came together and asked if we could take temporary care of the kids.
The grandmother felt each adult family should take one of the kids to help spread the weight, the kids were okay with this.
Grandmother specifically asks us to take the 13yo female. That’s fine with us.
We are three months in having the 13yo I’ll call Josie. Josie is doing okay at our house and my partner and I are struggling on what kind of rules – boundaries we need to set. One of which is her time to be home. We were playing this by ear but had run into her coming home past curfew on school nights and not telling us about staying somewhere
We had a conversation with Josie and set the rules and said we would work on them as needed. Curfew is 7.
Fast forward we have her missing curfew and bringing home bad grades
This results in her being grounded no phone and home all day after school for a week
This just so happens to land on the county fair
Two days into her grounding we go soft and let her go with her aunt and uncle/ I’ll call Beth and Jason. Beth and Jason have her older sister so they are a part of this child sharing.
They take her to the fair and spend all night out not even hanging out with her, they let her run around with her boyfriend Two days later they want to take her back to the fair & we let her go. It’s hard to say no to visiting family
She gets ungrounded and about two weeks go by and she is late again, waits around 30 minutes past curfew to get with us & turning her location off. Her excuse was that her ride back to us bailed on them so it took longer walking back
The next day she is late again, I (aunt) call her five minutes after curfew and she hangs up on me and sends a text saying she is with Jason and Beth. I let her know that I didn’t care where she was & I was coming to get her because she was late again. She understood and I was on my way to pick her up Jason text me and said she was at their house and they would bring her home after a movie I let him know that it was the second day in a row she was late so I was coming to get her. He said that they had it planned for a while and he would bring her home after, again I said no she broke the rules we were nice twice when she was grounded last time and let you guys have her but now she isn’t taking her rules seriously.
I drive to his house and call Josie to let her know I was there. Jason takes her phone and hangs up on me & sends a text saying she wasn’t coming out so I go up and knock on the door they do not let me in and tell me to leave, I do. This caused a big family fight and I am being accused of going on a power trip. Was that a power trip?
If Jason and Beth had the movie night planned for awhile, then they 100% should have let you know about it already, or at the very least called you when it got close to curfew and talked to you about it. You don’t just plans a late movie night with a child and don’t tell their guardian?
Josie is 13, not 17. YOU are responsible for her safety and health, not Jason, and you need to know where she is and when at all times. She is old enough to make sure you know where she is, and young enough to not have free reign over he whereabouts.
When I was 13 I wasn’t anywhere my parents didn’t know about, ever. And if an adult had changed plans without making sure my mom knew, I wouldn’t be allowed there again.
Josie has lived a life where she wasn’t properly cared for by her parents. She is probably used to having more freedom than most kids, and it will take time for her to adjust to the new changes in routine. But that isn’t going to be easy if other family members are actively working against you.
Agreed! I let them know it was disrespectful to not let us know about their plans & they think she is old enough to make her own plans. She was actually 12 and recently turned 13.
I don’t understand why they feel this way they are overly strict on a 17yo girl & turn off her WiFi at 8pm every night.., but think it’s okay for Josie to make her own plans on being out at night.
Josie is actually doing great now and we have a great relationship. It’s Beth and Jason that are causing issues and they think we are blocking their contact with her and we have not (although I think we should have)
She just doesn’t want to go there anymore because of how he acted that night.
NTA.
Sounds like it’s time to consult with the family to determine if Beth and Jason should take her, too. It sounds like they want her, so why did she get placed with you? If it’s “no space, no money for a second kid so you need to feed and house her while we act like the Disney Dad” then you need to tell them to either take her too or back the hell off.
Unfortunately we did have this conversation with the mother & grandparents. Josie doesn’t want to stay with them and expressed that to us, she had actually lived with them before and things didn’t go well. The Disney call out is amazing we actually referred to it the same way.
***”Josie doesn’t want to stay with them and expressed that to us”***
\—Then she needs to stop using them to help defy you. You can’t let her have it both ways. She either behaves or she stays with them.
I agree, she has chosen to stop seeing them as often and feels like Jason and Beth took it too far. Jason didn’t let her leave and it scared her.
To clarify; Jason is a male not blood related to her keeping her late at night and not allowing her to leave his house?
That could be a lot of things, and some are significantly worse than the others
Clarity-
Jason is blood related I am not, I have been with my partner, Jason’s brother for 14 years
When I came to the house to pick her up he took her phone away and told her to sit down and she was not leaving. Josie had got up and got ready knowing I was on the way to get her.
1. 13 is too young to have a boyfriend. They should be going out in groups.
2. 13 is too young to be out on her own after school. What is she doing? Where is she? If she’s at a friend’s house you should be in contact with the parents and have rides arranged. If she’s not at a friend’s house, where is she?
3. If Jason and Beth aren’t going to support your rules and parenting, they should take custody of her. They have experience with teens, they’re ignoring your rules anyway, so move Josie to their house and maybe you can be respite care for the families.
Part of taking custody like this is a responsibility to effectively raise the child in the absence of a responsible parent. By doing this split, I feel the family has mentally reduced their sense of individual responsibility, their parental authority over the child actually in their custody and failed in creating a home for each individual child. Instead, you are all acting like the kids using your home as a place to crash. I think you need to either step up and act as parents/guardians as is intended so she has a stable home with clear authority figures – none of this power struggle with the other adults – or you need to drop this idea of splitting the kids up. Let her move into the home where her sister is as they clearly want to be together. I doubt they understood what they were agreeing to when asked initially if they were ok to be split up or may not have felt comfortable saying they wanted to be together. Because you are all related and there is a kid in each household, people are feeling as entitled to make decisions for the kids in their home as the ones in other homes. That’s not how this is supposed to work.
ESH
How is a 13 yr old girl allowed to have a boyfriend and be out alone??? My same age kid has none of this. She’s not old enough for it.
NTA. She is a prime candidate for turning up pregnant. You need to get a handle on this, like yesterday. I’d block any further visits with Beth and Jason, period. You aren’t doing this to be Josie’s friend. You are doing this to teach her and parent her while her unfit mother is going through a crisis of her own. And she isn’t going to like you very much once you start really enforcing the rules. She is WAY too young to have the kind of freedom you are giving her. Have you considered getting her into counseling?
NTA. Just pass her off to the fun aunt and uncle and be done with her.
You want to raise her in an environment that will pull her out of a generational loop. They want to enable her to stay in it and have the same issues as her mother when she grows up. You are NTA.