Blended Family - who is BU?

[blendedfamilyopinionspls]

Hi. I'd like some unbiased opinions on some issues we're currently facing as a blended family.

Family set up + financial facts (think these are relevant)

Married couple
Joint mortgage

Wife has teenager from previous marriage who she is resident parent of.
Couple have two children together - 1 primary school (early years) and 1 baby (under 1)

Couple have been together since teenager was 3.

Husband works full time and contributes the majority of the family income. Higher tax payer.
Wife works part time (20hrs) and doesn't pay any tax. Currently on maternity leave (standard)

Couple have joint account. All bills are paid from this and they get an allowance each for personal spends.

Wife receives Child Maintenance from non resident parent which pays for teenagers phone bill, school lunches, any school trips, activities, days out with friends, clothes, uniform, shoes etc.

Joint household income covers the teenagers basic living expenses - mortgage, electricity, food etc.

Joint household income also covers holidays/days out etc.

Question 1 - Should the Child Maintenance payment also be used for petrol in the family car to cover the collecting of teenager from their non resident parent 2x per month? On average 200 miles per month (non resident parent lives 48 miles away via quickest route)

Question 2 - Should the teenager receive less at Christmas/Birthday than their half siblings as they also get presents from their other parent ?

Intrigued to read the general consensus. Thank you.

Honestly, this sounds really petty. Unless you are struggling financially and have to account for everything, I don’t think there’s any need for this.

Treating children equally isn’t spending the same amount of money in them. It’s making sure their needs are met. For example, you don’t give the 3 children identical amounts of food, because that’s wasteful for the preschoolers and would starve a teen.

This is a good analogy.

And it also works if you factor in the two homes factor for the stepchild. You wouldn’t make food for him when he’s with his dad. You do take into account that his dad is also feeding him.

What matters is the everyone gets enough food at the times they need it. Not that you’ve weighed out the portioned and ensured no one gets an extra chip compared to anyone else.

As a blended family each child is treated the same in this house. So wewould be using seperate money to do runs between parents but we do tend to take in turns between the 2 homes in theory. In reality one home does end up doing them more often.

School trips wouldnt come out of maintence we decided how manytrips we would finance /could reasonable afford for each childs education years so allwould be treated the same. The older childrens other parent did the same for their house so intheory this could mean the older children get more opportunities. But that islife.

The only thing that stands outis maintenecein your situation has been ring fenced only for eldest ratherthan partof a general pot. I want to know if this means the eldest is having additional things yr round that the rest if family arent able to do.

I'm from a blended family and my parents had joint custody of me and my sister, so we were constantly being shuttled between parents. My dad didn't have to keep a separate pot of money from my stepmum for taking us to my moms house, it was a joint expense because I'm her kid too.
As for presents, if I had been given half as many just because I had a second parent it would have hurt. Not because of the amount but because I would have been aware that I obviously wasn't as much a part of the family as I thought. I met my stepmum when I was 5 and she is a third parent to me, and not treated any differently than her 2 kids. If anything, we are the closest and as a teen reducing presents for me and my sister when my sibling 2 years younger got way more would have caused so many issues and probably have changed the custody agreement.

I agree with BurntToast that some issues are getting mixed in with others on this thread.

The two questions put forward are petty, I agree. I don't completely separate bills, including petrol, with my husband according to the fact he has more children than I do that would be petty in a marriage (although fine in a newer relationship imo), and frankly I couldn't be arsed working it all out. We just pay everything 50:50 in terms of household expenses. However, that doesn't include present buying, clothes for my SC, their school trips or whatever else. We keep everything like that separate and my husband uses his disposable income for it. All we pay jointly is bills and our joint DCs costs. I don't think that's terrible. At the end of the day my DSC have two parents paying for their things and I like to have the freedom to buy what I want for my children, save for them etc... and I'd have less funds to do that with if I paid half of everything for my step children. I don't think there is anything inherently terrible about having semi separate finances in a blended family. What works for one will not for another but neither is necessarily wrong.

In addition I don't think it's terrible that this man may not love like his own his step children. I don't. It doesn't mean I'm horrible or petty (like in the examples here), but no I don't love them like my own and to be frank I'd find it impossible. There's no one on this earth I love more and more fiercely than my own children. That's entirely natural. This man isn't the only Dad this teenager has ever known, she has a Dad. Her step dad doesn't have to love her like his own children. She shouldn't be made to feel second class of course, but feelings are something you cannot force and are entirely separate to how you treat a child.

@DreamTheMoors

Question #1: How petty can I be?

Question #2: How cruel can I be?

JHC.

Agree!

I couldn't deal with that level of chicken shittery penny pinching towards a child.

The maintenence should go into whatever family pot there is and then all bills for everyone come out of it.

Everyone should get the same spent on them at Christmas.

Eugh. What a small man.

It’s unfair that there is some focus on you earning less. You have had multiple mat leaves which always impacts a woman’s salary eventually. Hope you can sort this.

I think if the maintenance covers everything other than housing/eating you are doing quite well. I know people sometimes look at the costs for a child as being a proportion of the household, so one fifth in your case, but I (I was the RP) looked at it as additional costs, so unless you would sell up and move to a smaller cheaper house if the teenager wasn't with you then the split sounds quite fair to me.

Threatening to withdraw the car is the worst thing to me, mean and petty and I wouldn't think much of a man who would do that. If it's a family car then you all have a right to benefit from it.

The present thing is complicated, I don't personally agree with every child gets the same monetary value, as an example a baby really won't need much in the way of expensive presents so I wouldn't look at the school aged child and the teenager having to have the same money as the baby. I'm thinking of a teenager needing a laptop, are the parents then going to spend £500 or £600 on teddy bears to make it "fair" I do think there is an issue with the teenager having two lots of presents if the NRP spends a reasonable amount on them, if you had two children close in age and say you spent £100 on each of them and then one comes back on Boxing day with another £100 worth of stuff it can be difficult but like you there was a significant age gap with mine so I don't think that matters, with mine their father was local and lots of stuff was left in his house so again it wasn't them arriving back with another load of stuff. I think that one has to be judged on a case by case basis.

Is you teenager happy, do they realise how resentful their step father is? I do think you need to think of how this will effect them as they probably do know.

Q1 one parent takes one picks up

Q2 don't Be so damn petty

You really are not a family "blended" or otherwise if you are being so picky about such petty shit.

Shameful.

It’s mad that it’s being broken down like this. Red flag to me, especially as the step dad has been in this kids life since he’s 3. Saying he gets less presents as he’s getting some from his dad is crazy. I couldn’t live like that personally

The second he said that he’d refuse use of the car any love or affection would’ve died on the spot.

I couldn’t be with someone so petty and cruel to my child.

Honestly it blows my mind that you are even questioning yourself on this. Your teenager is living with a man who is more than willing to treat them like a second class citizen in their own home!! A blended ‘family’, you are not.

OP, you made it sound so balanced that people were confused, so I hope your 'd'h recognises that.

I think your h is struggling with how much teenagers cost and becoming resentful especially considering there is another parent to provide. I have 3 teens and every year or present budget increases. It's probably double when they were 10, let alone when they were 1 (I got ds1 a ball when he was 1 for his birthday which cost about 2.00 and he loved it!). Phones, laptops, clothes (even non branded), shoes, trainers (adult sizes) are so expensive. We don't buy expensive brands or labels but it's still all so expensive. By the time your youngest are teens, your DS will be earning his own money so you won't have 3 teens to cover. He can be grateful for that! I'm the meantime, give the younger ones smaller gifts. Spending does not need to be fair, treatment needs to be fair.

I think your dh needs to accept what teenagers cost (I'll say it again, they are expensive!) and accept the family covers the shortfall for teen if their NRP isn't covering it. He also needs to treat your child the same as the other children, so for example if he's planning on paying uni fees for younger then he should also do that for older.

Basically there is too much emphasis on money and not enough on love or family. I hope your dh can read this thread and change his mind and heart towards his step child.

I feel sad for you OP - the father of your first child is flaky and the father of your second children is an unqualified arse.

I wouldn't expect your husband to love your first child. I would expect him to have accepted the child's presence of over a decade and the financial impact that will undoubtedly have, man up accordingly as a husband and step-father and treat that child fairly. Treating said child fairly does not include petty moanings about petrol and does not include wanting to see one of three children with fewer presents on Christmas Day, because that's how things will best even out financially. Your husband is showing the sort of man he is.

I feel far more sorry for your teenager though. I've been in their shoes and it's one of the reasons I don't have contact with my mother today. She either did things like your husband is suggesting, or didn't challenge them when a step-parent did. As a mature parent with good boundaries and a high bar for treatment myself these days I move between pitying her and finding her something of a disgrace.

Be careful OP. Protect your children, from their fathers as much as anything.

Your DH sounds abusive-he won’t let you use the car? This is financial abuse and to me emotional abuse-and even more so whilst you are on maternity leave after carrying his child. Really deeply unpleasant man. I’d find it hard to look at him in the same way; it feels like he is a pathetic man child who is jealous of an actual child who he has been parenting for most of that child’s life.

So no about the petrol and no about the gifts. The children are equal. Unless you want to create a huge divide and have a very unhappy teenager who will leave at some point and never come back…I hope they don’t overheat these conversations.

The 'he won't let me use the car' jumped out at me. This sort of shit is a massive red flag.

He's being massively petty. You will buy all sorts of stuff for the two little ones over time, at events like birthdays and Xmas it needs to be a united front with the kids receiving the same. We're blended - DD has been at the age of wanting 'stuff', whereas the now adult step kids want cash. So they get the same amount of cash that we spend on DD. They may be grown ups...but this stuff still matters.

@blendedfamilyopinionspls you need to prepare yourself for the fact that if your teen wants to go to university then their maintenance loan amount is based on "household" income ie yours and your husband's not the biological parents.

If your husband is kicking off now about petrol money, which is absolutely pathetic and mean, then there are potentially bigger issues further down the line.

On both counts of petrol and presents your husband is out of order.

Wow.

1. Maintenance into family pot.
2. No! That is a cruel suggestion.

OP I divorced my 2nd H over issues exactly like these. His resentment of my children from my 1st marriage killed our relationship.
Your H is resentful of your son. Your son will be aware of this.

or that he wouldn't allow me to use the car to take child

Your husband is being horrible. Why does he get to tell you you're not allowed to use your own family car to collect your own child?

I mean, he's begrudging your daughters about a tenner.

I get that your ex is a flake and that must be frustrating, FOR YOU, and your DD, but the impact this is having on your DH amounts to a tenner, and he wants your DD to be the one who suffers so he can get one over on your ex?

How can your DH be so cruel to your DD, when he's been her step-parent for over 10 years?

Blended family = blended finances??

Wow.

I can’t even begin to get my head around how utterly horrible this is.

A ridiculous post. Do you resent the teenager now you have your own?
Perhaps you want to send them to live with other parent?
How nasty and petty you sound to be itemising everything spent on them

And cutting Christmas presents is very mean and low. Just nasty.