Not forcing my daughter to share her bedroom or stop going out to eat?

[tamarvin]

Right now my sister, her husband, and their three kids (14f, 10m, 5m) are staying with me and my family temporarily while they are waiting on council housing. I have two kids (13f and 11m).

So I have four bedrooms in my house. The first is my own. The second one is my daughters bedroom. The third is my son's bedroom. The last bedroom is the guest room where my sister and her husband are sleeping.

From the first night they were here my son has wanted his 10 year old cousin to sleep in his room. Those two get along very well and enjoy each others company. So we set up my 14 year old niece and my 5 year old nephew in the lounge downstairs. My 5 year old nephew is apparently having a lot of anxiety problem so most of the time he sleeps in the guestroom with his parents.

My niece is unhappy with this arrangement because she feel likes she gets no privacy (downstairs is open plan). To solve this my sister wants me to force my daughter to share her bedroom with my niece. My daughter however is not as close with my niece as the boys are with each other. My daughter and niece have very different personalities. My niece can be loud and intimidating and my daughter on the other hand is very soft spoken. Having so many other people in the house has already been making her feel stressed and overwhelmed. All three boys being younger and energetic can make things feel chaotic. I don't want to force her to give up her only private area to retreat to for peace and quiet.

I told my sister that we can try to add a privacy curtain to a corner of the lounge for her daughter. My sister said that wouldn't help at all because anyone could just barge in. She says that a teenage girl should be able to have access to a lockable room especially in a house full of mostly boys. She doesn't see any issue with the girls sharing even though I told her my concerns. She thinks it would be a good opportunity for them to bond.

Another issue we've run into involved a weekly dinner I do with my kids. So far we've had no issues with regular dinner as we all contribute to the groceries and all the adults take turn cooking. I however would get my takeaway for my kids once a week. I let my them take turns each week to choose what they want. It's a treat at the end of the week that they both look forward too. My sister and her husband have a tight budget so they cannot afford to buy takeaway regularly. While I am a better off financially paying for everyone every week is not feasible as it is already expensive and it would cost double.

I thought that eating takeaway in front of them at home would be cruel though. I've had a little discussion about it with my kids and told them that while my sister and her family are staying with us we would be having our weekly dinner out instead of doing takeaway and eating at home. I thought this was a fair compromise.

My sister did not agree. She says it's obvious that we are going out to eat good food since we leave before dinner and when we come back home we don't eat anything. While my kids won't brag about going out to eat they will answer honestly when my niece or nephews ask where we went. They then end up feeling bad and my sister says they wouldn't feel bad if I just said no to my kids and that it wouldn't hurt my kids to not go out as often. I will also add that on a selfish note I don't want to stop taking them out to eat because its the only time I get to have with just the three of us alone now.

This situation does not meet a teenager's basic needs. It is like putting up a young family for a year and saying the baby can sleep in a cot in the bathroom and then calling her a cheeky fucker when the mother complains.
It's not the OP's responsibility to house another family in the way they want and cater to their preferences.

The OP has been more than hospitable and highly generous in their offer of somewhere to live for a year.

This teen's parents could choose to give the guest room to their daughter and then they could have the living room with their son. Or teen niece and mum could share the guest room with mum's partner and the younger brother downstairs.

If the OP's offer of somewhere to stay is so awful, and the OP is awful for not fully making sure life stops around the second family, the family can always try their luck with alternative accommodation, but their teen isn't going to be very disappointed with the reality of many alternatives options.

Pop up tent in the lounge. Not outside!

I'd bet that @tamarvin had no idea what can of worms he was about to open up and let loose on MN! 😆

I hope you're able to find a solution that works for you and your kids @tamarvin. I think your sister and her family are very lucky to have you and they should be bending over backwards (instead of making life difficult for you).

While it might have been 6 years ago, I'm very sorry for your loss. You sound like a very decent person.

The poster i quoted actually suggested a tent in the garden!

Yes of course I am for real, I know plenty of people that have done this, helps out the family from being on the streets, stops arguments, the kids would think it’s an adventure for sure
Families all in the same house never ends well, been there and done that… Obviously reading these posts the sister is the more dominant one, and plays on her brothers kindness. If the kids all start arguing about rooms, tent it is… will shut them up

I think you need to prioritise your own children in this situation, they have had enough happen in their short lives and need you to protect them. Your Sister is a chancer. You should tell them that they need to find a private let. Councils take years to house families, and if they are in a house with you and yours they won't be a priority for housing. Will you let them live with you forever?

I am saying the OP should never have offered to put up a family when he can't meet the children's basic needs. It was unrealistic. It may be the living room is not large enough for two adults to sleep in e.g. teenager may be sleeping on the couch. Only big houses have enough space for two couches two adults could sleep in. I assume OP does not want to turn the family living room into a bedroom, so it may simply not be physically feasible for the parents to sleep there.

Just to add, most bedrooms are not large enough to sleep two adults and a teenager as you suggest. I know a lot of MNers are well off, but most rooms like in my house fit a double bed and a small bit of furniture. No space at all for another single bed.

How about maybe his sister should not have accepted the offer?

re: your last point:

When my friend was in temporary homeless accommodation the family of mum, dad and two teen boys were allocated a ‘family room’ in a hotel (a double bed and a set of bunk beds) with a shared bathroom down the hall.
Cooking facilities were a microwave and a kettle in the bedroom.

I don’t imagine that a family of 5 will be allocated much more, sadly (although some councils have mobile home parks as well as B&B accommodation).

Worse case scenario, some families are being turfed out of their emergency accommodation hotel room every morning and not told where they will be
sleeping that night until gone teatime (as it depends on who has vacancies).

it’s proper shit for homeless families nowadays. Two parents with no additional mobility needs should really be looking at finding a private rental, perhaps through a council deposit scheme (private rent is now out of reach for lots of single parents but just about manageable on two incomes).

I suggested upthread a bunkbed with a double on bottom and single on top!

I completely agree.

Blending familys has been an unmitigated disaster in the lives of the few people I know who grew up in that environment.

100% about the parents, selfishly putting themselves first IMO.

I have a few friends in successful long term relationships that have kept their homes completely separate as they realised it was a completely unfair thing to foist on divorced children or in two cases where parents were bereaved.

Teens do not need people they are not close to, foisted on them.

I agree that for the niece sleeping in the living area is not ideal, but that is down to her parents, not the OP.

A decent parent, seeing their child distressed would give them their room.

The sister isn't a decent parent, she wants the problem solved by foisting her child on a teen that is struggling already with this arrangement and has the bereavement in the background.

The sister is the essence of a CF.

Expecting a teen to have recovered and moved on from the loss of their mother is so unrealistic.

8 years ago a classmate of my son lost his mother completely unexpectedly on holiday. She died in her sleep, no health issues at all. Shocking.

His father was such a lovely devoted man doing everything he could to support his children.

One day my son told me that his friend was very upset in school, this was 3 years after his mum had died.

He had had a row with his dad over something trivial and had roared at him that he wished he had died as he just wanted his mum back.

He said he felt really guilty afterwards, but he just missed his mum so much.
His dad was called, he was collected from school.
He was in counselling all the time.

My son was very upset for him.
It upsets me now to think of the grief he has gone throughout over the past 8 years.

It comes out occasionally when he drinks with very close old friends.

Teens in my experience are extremely sensitive and the hurt of loosing a parent never leaves you.

Yes! Why should your daughter be the one to give up her room?!

It is awful how many people are calling the sister a cheeky fucker without knowing all the details. Maybe the sister has no recourse to public funds so would have her kids taken away if she did not stay with the OP? Maybe the only emergency housing she would be offered would be a few hundred miles away which would mean moving schools for the kids to stay in one room in a bed and breakfast.
I don't think most of you have the first bit of understanding about what being homeless is like.

Yet none of this is for the OP to sort.

If she and her DH are not happy they can get their own place.

All of this ^

I realise OPs DSis was in a shit situation but as far as we can tell from the story as given, Auntie seems oblivious to the emotional needs of her niece and nephew, which are (thankfully) atypical of children their age. Most of us will not experience such profound and life altering loss until we are much, much older.

Becoming homeless is also a difficult situation for children and teens but the immediate needs of Dsis’ three do not override or cancel out the long term needs of her brother’s two. Homelessness is temporary, but motherloss is forever.

Yes, totally can't believe these posters. OP is right putting his dc first. The children have lost their mother and sister is complaining that her children might feel badly done by because their cousins go out for a meal once in a while with the one parent left! her children might feel bad! Talk about selfish!

@MNHQ, You deleted my post calling a poster disgusting for pretty much suggesting Ops daughter should be removed from his care a 'protected' from him and the chaos he has brought to her life, yet let their post remain. In what way have I broken talk guidelines? This is crazy!

All those complaining about the nieces privacy, it’s on her parents to provide that not the op who has been extremely generous. I also think his sister should be explaining to her daughter how lucky they/she is. I do have empathy with the niece but she needs to suck it up and be grateful with what she has or have her parents swap rooms.

My family were made homeless 2 weeks before my 13th birthday. I was extremely lucky that my Nan convinced my DF to let me stay with her rather than go into the homeless accommodation, I cent remember if it was a shelter or bedsit. Once we got temporary housing my parents insisted I went back to them, I was so upset, not because of the living arrangements but because I had a close bond with my Nan and was having the best time away from my toxic mother. The house we were given was awful, in an extremely bad area, burnt out cars, not even safe to walk to the shop 100 yards away, blood on walls but most importantly it was 2 bedroom which meant I had to share a room with my 2 brothers (3yrs older & 4yrs younger) between the ages of 13 & 14.5. It certainly wasn’t ideal and although I may be remembering wrong I don’t remember complaining, nor did my brothers. My older DB and I understood the situation, we’d gone through Christmas’ and birthdays with no presents, hid from the bailiffs, overhead our parents talking and knew enough to know our home had been repossessed and things were really bad.

There was no barrier in the room or curtain, my brothers and I just got on with things and although we had our sibling squabbles we tried not to make things worse for our parents and ourselves. Both our parents had always worked and coming from a time and place where children were definitely left to their own devices more we were use to doing what we needed to. My DF started drinking heavily and we saw the toll on him, my M for all her faults (I have issues with her) was also doing her best. Money was so bad my older DB would actually shop lift and steal clothes so myself and younger DB wouldn’t do without.

As for privacy, it wasn’t an issue, my DBs would always knock and make sure I was ok with them coming in the room. I think this was more for them than me though, they, especially older DB always felt uncomfortable with my body, I was a DD cup before leaving high school, I suspect he got into more than one or two fights because of comments made about my breasts. Sure it wasn’t an ideal living situation but it could have been a lot worse and we knew it.

I come from a big family, I know offers were made by many for us to stay, but my parents knew that wasn’t the answer, if they wanted council housing they had to go through the motions to make it happen. My M was at the council offices most days putting pressure on them, she didn’t even need to over exaggerate the situation, that’s how things were done and it still took over 18 months to get us moved. Our next house was in a slightly better, not an area my parents would have chosen but it was at least 3 bedrooms and I finally got my own room again. There is no way we would have been given it is we had been living with relatives.

As for those saying OPs DD should be sharing with her cousin, absolutely not, being cousins dose not make them friends. I have cousins who I love and adore, but I also have cousins I can’t stand, I would 100% choose sharing a room with my DBs all over again than with a female cousin I didn’t get on with.

We don't know what the alternatives for his sister and family were. Or how they ended up homeless in the first place.

I think sofa bed for the adults and teen daughter shares with little brother. Not ideal but the best of a bad situation.

Not feasible for the 5 yo to be camped out in the living room. The neice needs some privacy and place to study too.

Why should the OP take a parental responsibility for the well being of her sister's DCs?

Surely the sister and her loser DH can get off their arses and find their own accommodation rather than sat whining and whinging. How is a grown man not embarrassed at having to be housed and supported by his SIL?

@AliceMcK It isn't as simply as a lack of privacy. I had to sleep in the living room for a bit. It meant I could never go to sleep early and always had to be up early so people could use the living room. Teenagers need their sleep. I was simply over tired as a result as I literally could not sleep enough as I had nowhere.

Is there a reason why your sister couldn’t rent a property more appropriate to her needs? Is this convenience or necessity? I don’t think it’s the end of the world for your niece to have to sleep in the living room, she’s likely be in a very small space with all her family if they went into temporary accommodation. It wouldn’t be fair on your own daughter to expect her to share

I was replying to the poster saying op should not have offered if he could not provide adequate sleeping arrangements for his niece. Its really not ops responsibility to do that, he has done enough already. This is down to her selfish parents not wanting to give up their space.

How is a grown man not embarrassed at having to be housed and supported by his SIL?

Worse still by another man...
OP is loser DH's BIL...

Your sister is a piss taking, entitled, cheeky twat.

How about they house their own kids before making demands on others.

I feel really sorry for your kids tbh.