Care and Feeding: My Parents Are Spoiling My Little Sister

[cereta]

Dear Care and Feeding,

I am 17, and my little sister is 7. My parents are now totally different than the parents I remember having at her age. Her allowance is much larger than mine was, they say yes to basically everything (she can have food in the living room, which was strictly forbidden), and I can’t see how she’s not going to wind up spoiled. Can I talk to my parents about this?

—Shortchanged

Dear Shortchanged,

Your parents are just old and tired and wise enough 10 years on to know what things to let slide. The allowance? Let’s call it inflation. Food in the living room? They’ve given up on that carpet, which likely is a lot less pristine after 10 years of family use.

Let it go. You’re 17. I recommend doing any one of the thousand incredibly fun things you can do that your sister cannot, and counting your blessings.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/09/parents-spoiling-little-sister-care-and-feeding.html

Comments

[cereta]

Oh, LW. I've been there. I don't think anyone who has significantly younger siblings hasn't. I had to sit at the table for hours until I ate my lima beans or meatloaf. Younger siblings could just make themselves a PB&J. I had chores by the time I was six or seven; they didn't take over until I moved out. I spent chunks of my tween and teen years watching them; obviously, they had no such tasks. OTOH, I got eleven years with our father, and they barely remember him.

You got your parents when they were younger, and you had their undivided focus for ten years. It may not feel like a gift now, but in time, you may see things differently. In the meantime, if "food in the living room" is the most striking example you can muster of how your parents are spoiling your sister, I think you can safely let it go.

GIP!

[jadelennox]

Kids and teens find empathy very difficult, too -- and even as an adult, gaining perspective about your siblings is so difficult. My oldest sister will never quite get over how I had a private school education because the local public school fucked her over, and how I was allowed to go into the city all the time because my parents had lost the energy to worry. I will never quite get over how she was allowed to intern at an alt radio station in the middle of the night, because my parents hadn't yet realized it was located in a dangerous hive of scum and villiany, and how my parents clearly enjoyed having one precious beautiful moppet but were absolutely sick of kids by the time they got to number three. Families are messy.

Also, LW: train the sister that she needs to be grateful to you for everything. Large allowance? It's because you taught the 'rents how expensive it is. Food in the living room? It's because you convinced them to chill. (I can't promise it will work, but a fair amount of it worked on me, as a kid.)

[lemonsharks]

I usually like care and feeding a lot, but I think they're being too harsh.

I think the LW actually wants some kind of (1) apology being (overboard?) strict with her and comparatively lax with her sister and (2) acknowledgement that they completely upended her life by having anothet kid, when she'd reached an age where she likely neither expected nor wanted a sibling to appear.

And I suspect she wants these conversations to be spontaneous and brought up by her parents. Which ... Those are reasonable a desires but not realistic expectations. They /could/ be a couple of really good conversations, as LW and her parents amove toward having a relationship between adults, though.

[cereta]

I'm really unclear on where you're getting #2 from the letter. Am I missing something?

[lemonsharks]

She signed off "Shortchanged" which I read as as having some resentment over having a sibling at all. It's a leap, but I don't think it's too big of a leap.

[laurajv]

I mean, I felt shortchanged by my mother disciplining my younger siblings differently than she did me, but it wasn’t because they existed.

[cereta]

It's possible. Having a significantly younger sibling, or being a significantly younger sibling, was so common among my schoolmates, that I just don't think that mindset even occurred to me. I think I was gone to college before I even thought to wonder how different my adolescence would have been if my parents hadn't had more kids, and that's having spent a lot of time and energy helping raise said kids.

[lemonsharks]

It wasn't common at all in my cohort, and when it did happen having much younger siblings usually included the parents leaning hard on the older kids for childcare. Often it was attached to a divorce and new stepparent, as well.

(One friend basically raised her 7- and 12- years younger siblings while her parents were dealing with their own stuff, and has been really open about resenting the heck out of her parents over it. I think the words she used were, "I've done my time, and I am never having kids again.")

[cereta]

I suspect this is one of those "I went to Catholic School in a very Catholic neighborhood of a very Catholic city" things.

[laurajv]

Oh, LW, I feel you. My youngest sister is 11 years younger than I am — although there are other kids between us — and I was OUTRAGED at how much laxer my mom was with her (and the other much-younger siblings). But I asked my mom about it once, and she said...pretty much what Nicole said. That she’d learned a lot about parenting since I was little, and learned what to let go and what actually needed correction. That there were certain developmental things you could fight a kid on, or not, but either way the kid would grow up at the same time, so why make extra strife?

It was a useful lesson to carry into my own parenting, I must say.

[minoanmiss]

Everything Nicole says is totally true, but... teenagers don't yet *know* that most things Aren't Actually That Big, and being dismissively told so doesn't really help, I think, even though it's true. I might have sweetened this with more sympathy and/or explanation ("first time parents can be nervous and strict, but, in part because you turned out so well, they realized they can relax!") if I'd answered it.

[movingfinger]

I wonder whether 17 is still the focus of a lot more parental discipline, or has freshly been. I do think some communication from the parents would be beneficial, especially to help build good relations going forward, but parents never think to initiate this sort of conversation, do they? Although this difference in treatment can feed differences and even animosities down the years.

[conuly]

Oh, honey. When you were small, your parents, I'm guessing, weren't that much older than you are now. Which is why everything was Such A Big Deal to them. When you're as old as they are now, you'll probably have loosened up a lot, just like they ddi.

[eva_rosen]

'You'll understand when you're older' doesn't usually fly with the very young, specially when they're old enough to realize the adults are just as unreasonable as they. And reason sometimes doesn't make this stuff suck less: my older aunt had to leave high school to work because they were peniless; my younger uncle, 15 years her junior, went to college and my grandmother paid for it, having re-married into money by that time. My aunt will never not mention this at every chance she gets.

[conuly]

Oh, it definitely doesn't work, and if LW were here I wouldn't bother. But it's the truth in this case.

[tielan]

I recommend doing any one of the thousand incredibly fun things you can do that your sister cannot.

I rather like this advice. Although I'm not sure it would do the relationship between the sisters any good, making 7 resent 17 and all the 'freedom' she has...

[staranise]

I think one of the basic issues here with Shortchanged's worry about being "spoiled" is, maybe they as a kid have assumed that being extremely frugal/law-abiding/conscientious is the same thing as being a "decent human being", and they could actually do with some acknowledgment from their parents that they could have been treated a little more laxly.