blended family woes: bio hazard
October 23rd, 2009 -- Posted in family, people suck | 1 Comment »So this summer we really let Harmony have it easy… she had few responsibilities other than some unpacking and got to go out a lot to various fun activities. Her biological grand-parents (my ex’s parents) even took her on a trip to Niagara Falls!
When fall came around, we established a routine and asked her to help out more around the house. She seemed to be mostly “over” her anger at us for moving her across town, but her behaviour still wasn’t at all stable. Every time she came back from visiting her grand-parents, it would be worse.
Now, at not even 2 months into the school year, the situation is dire. She has been bucking her chores every week and staging larger and longer protests against her responsibilities. Her current chore strike has lasted almost the entire week and as a result, the kitchen is disgusting. Her only big chore is taking care of the dishes. We have a spiffy new dishwasher and she’s the one in charge of most of the loading and emptying. She has a few other chores but otherwise everything is done for her.
Unfortunately, her crazy new doctor and the bio-grand-parents are on her side and reinforce her complaints that she is overworked. They’re the generation who had a huge back-lash reaction to the overly-strictcparenting of the 1950s where spanking and smacking were the norm. However, many of them swung the pendulum much too far and started spoiling the next generation (like kids of the 80s) so that the kids ruled the roost and the mothers were these self-sacrificing martyrs without a life of their own.
Harmony’s new doctor literally told me that children should be allowed to get away with “almost murder”!!! And her bio-grand-parents are now arguing and pressuring us to let her have more dessert and less responsibilities.
Below the cut, there’s an e-mail I wrote to them yesterday explaining and correcting some of the incorrect assumptions they seem to have. But I suspect they’ll keep at it, and I think continued exposure to them just feeds Harmony’s twisted perception of herself as this “poor victim” and encourages the lies that she tells them.
For example: you know how siblings always blame it on the other kid? Well of course her side of the story is that her little brother starts the fights. So her grand-mother coached her to just start “hitting him back”!!!
Are we over-reacting here or do we need to limit the negative influence that these people are having on our daughter? The only person in this family they care about is her and they’ve made that clear lately, so how can we fight against that bias they’re pushing???
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