A woman has been applauded for her response to her boyfriend’s son’s complaints about his mother.
The woman and original poster (OP), user Excellent-Second-643, shared her story on Reddit, explaining that her boyfriend has a 19-year-old son from a previous marriage.
“I’ll be honest, the kid rubs me the wrong way most of the time,” the OP wrote. “He comes across as selfish, entitled, and really ungrateful, especially when it comes to his mom.”
According to her post, the teenager has complained about his mother every time they have seen him, and the issue came to a head at a recent dinner.
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“In just over a month, she lost her mother, lost her husband, and had to undergo a hysterectomy,” the OP wrote. “It’s been a brutal time for her.
“Despite this, every time we see the son, he’s complaining about her about how she’s not cleaning enough, how depressed she seems, how he and his girlfriend have had to help clean her house (three times, mind you), and how he ‘doesn’t want to deal with it anymore’.
“At dinner a month ago, I finally snapped and told him flat-out that he was being incredibly ungrateful.
“I reminded him that this woman raised him, took care of him when he was sick, and took him on vacations. I told him that now he needs to be there for her and help lift her back up.
“It got kind of tense, but nothing too dramatic.”
Ahead of another family dinner, the OP told her boyfriend to “step up” and talk to his son about his behavior.
His response—that he didn’t want to risk upsetting the teen—left her seething.
The OP wrote, “I told him he needed to man the f*** up and be a father. I said, ‘You have no problem confronting me when you think I’m out of line, but you won’t say anything to your kid? Be a damn parent already.’
“Later that night, my boyfriend told me he felt anxious and asked me for a hug. I did hug him, and yeah, I felt bad. Maybe I came in too hot, but I still don’t think I was wrong in what I said.”
Reddit Reacts
There were more than 500 responses to the post, with many applauding the OP for making a stand.
One wrote, “Were you harsh? Sure. But it was fully warranted. Crazy how you care about this woman you have no real connection to, meanwhile she carried this man’s child, and raised the child and neither of them are in her corner.”
“It is actually heartwarming to see how you care about this woman,” another pointed out.
“As much as it is heartbreaking how neither your boyfriend, who let her do all the heavy lifting of parenting, nor their ungrateful son gives a flying f about her.”
‘He cannot change the past’
In a message to Newsweek, the OP clarified that her boyfriend was not an absent father as some Redditors speculated.
“He was the secondary parent in the custody agreement, and [it was] due to personal reasons as well as per the custody agreement,” she explained.
“He did not have access to his son as much as he would have liked. Time is the only thing that we never get back, no matter what.
“He cannot change the past, but he can be present in the present and hopefully make things better in the future.”
Parenting Older Teens
The situation touches on common friction points in parenting older teens.
As Focus on the Family explains, disrespect from teens often arises when they feel their independence is under threat.
Developmental psychologist Dr. Diana Divecha is quoted as saying, “When teens feel over-controlled or coerced, or even when adults do too much for them, it can trigger ‘autonomy threat’, which shuts down teens’ willingness to collaborate or engage.”
Newsweek has contacted Excellent-Second-643 for comment via Reddit.
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