A father on Reddit asked the community for advice recently regarding his stepson.
The man explains that he and his stepson, Levi, have a mutually respectful relationship generally but the 16 year old can be “a hothead” at times and “he can act quite mean and selfish towards me and his sisters.”
The father told Reddit that the teen would “throw away stuff that belongs to us over small arguments and teases Susan for spending a lot of time to read calling her grandma.”
After a squabble between the two kids in which Susan refused to lend Levi her camera, Levi took her collection of vintage children’s books and threw them into the family pool.
Many of the books were ruined, and those salvaged were damaged by the water, and pages torn.
“It was horrific because some of those books are hard to get and meant a lot to Susan as a part of her life,” the man wrote.
Before the man could get home from work and discuss punishment with his wife the boy had packed up and left to stay at his biological father’s house, avoiding the situation completely. Unfortunately the boy’s father attempted to justify the teen’s behaviour with “acting out” and even threatened to call the child services if the stepfather tried to punish his for trying to destroy the books because he is “not his dad”.
In the Reddit post the man explains this isn’t the first time he has been asked to ‘let it go’, and allow the boy to just apologise and go without real punishment.
What would you do in this situation?
Would you ever forgive someone who destroyed your books?
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If this out-of-control, vindictive boy gets off scott-free, he’ll learn there are no consequences for having encroached on other people’s boundaries, and he will do it again, and again, until he does something far worse than toss his sister’s books into the family pool (although I would have been hard-pressed myself not to surrender him to a state home / orphanage after that stunt). It sounds as if there are some seriously dysfunctional dynamics in the family relationships, and unless they all get some counseling, nothing’s likely to improve. The punishment ought to fit the crime. He needs to replace every one of the books he ruined, until her collection is restored. Even the hard-to-find ones. It’s a good way to teach him boundaries, and the value of what his cruel action destroyed.
It’s also highly unlikely that even with counseling, if the books were important to his step-sister, that by the time they are both adults she will ever have anything to do with him again.
Anytime a child gets away with no consequences it just encourages him to do worse down the road. He’s actively seeking the boundary, pushing until he finds it. And then he’s scared of what consequences he’ll get and runs to his dad. If the mother doesn’t back the step dad on this one I’d frankly end the marriage. Fights over unequal treatment of children are one of the prime causes of step family discord, and refusing to deal with the problem doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it worse. From the dad’s behavior we can see why the boy is this way (and the mom’s giving in as well) but that doesn’t change the fact that this boy is headed for serious troube in his future if he doesn’t have limits set on him – by his parents, not just by his step dad.