Are all children the same, or are they ranked differently?
It’s never easy when a child’s parents get a divorce, and later on go to get remarried to another person. At that point, a child then needs to navigate how this new parental figure will fit into their life.
This can be a difficult adjustment for some kids, and they may rebel against the new stepparent in their family. Regardless of the understandable difficulty for the child, it is a stepparent’s role to love their stepchildren equally and not favor one over the other.
These realities were highlighted in a recent online post in which a stepmother clearly favors one stepchild over the other, to the outrage of her new husband.
Are all children the same, or are they ranked differently?
An online post published on October 1st, reported on by Taylor McCloud from Newsweek, has gone viral with 9,100 upvotes and 1,200 comments.
The author begins his post by stating that he is the father of two daughters, and he is separated from his children’s mother. While his 12-year-old daughter, Chloe, is biologically his, he also has a 14-year-old daughter, Hope, who was adopted. Regardless, the girls are equally his children, and he doesn’t see them any differently.
With that said, the author has since remarried, and his new wife, Jenna, was meant to take her stepdaughters to the mall to buy new clothes. He even provided his credit card for the trip. However, when the three returned from the mall, the author noticed that Hope had far less clothing than his younger sister.
He also noticed that Hope seemed to be upset, and so he went out of his way to find out what had happened. But the answers that he got weren’t what he was expecting.
What is the role of a stepparent?
First off, the author asked if the 14-year-old just didn’t like the mall that they went to, but she wouldn’t give a direct answer. He kept pushing to try and get to the truth. That was when his daughter produced a 37-minute long recording of the drive to the mall, in which her stepmother was saying some very shocking things.
In the recording, the 14-year-old expressed that she wanted a backpack, but her stepmom snapped back saying that there ‘wasn’t enough money’ to purchase that. When Hope pressed more, her stepmom replied, ‘Why don’t you go look for your bio dad and ask him to buy it for you if you want it so badly?’.
The author was immediately furious after hearing this. He berated his new wife, shaming her for treating his daughter in such a horrible way. That was exactly when the author also revoked his new wife’s access to all of his credit cards. When she found out he’d cut her off, she ‘blew up’ at the author, saying it was ‘unfair’ after ‘all she’d done to help him out’.
What do you think? Did the author go too far by cutting his wife off from accessing his credit cards, even though she said horrible things to his daughter? Or should the author take it one step further and divorce her, as she has likely been treating his adopted daughter horribly for some time now, and it probably won’t change?
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