Am I a bad mother for liking my step-daughter more

[Clariey]

Okay first of all, I want to clarify, I love my daughters more than I love anyone on this planet, that’s not what this is about.

Background, I have 2 daughters, they are 19 and 21. Lovely girls, both still live at home and I think like most families we have our issues but I love them deeply. As they have gotten older I’ve struggled at times with “liking” them, it’s tricky to explain, as they have all the traits one would want their child to have, they are kind and intelligent, they are funny and in every way I’m proud of them.
However there are traits they both have that sometimes irritate me, a lack of self-awareness, a desperate need to follow every trend and sometimes I feel they lack any originality and seem to be incapable of thinking truly for themselves. We can’t discuss politics as they just regurgitate opinions heard on social media, they pick holidays based on wherever some influencer has said is cool. It often feels like I could be talking to any late teen/early 20s girl. This frustrates me as I’ve always believed in the power of forming your own thoughts and opinions, I feel like this often what makes someone really interesting.

My step-daughter is 22, she moved in with us in September as she moved to the uk for her masters. I never really knew her before this, my husband and her mother were never a couple, she was raised by her mother in one country most of the year then spent summers with her dad in another. When she first moved in with us, I found her hard to read, intensely private and to be honest I didn’t really get her or like her. I loved her as an extension of my husband but didn’t really know her as an individual. Over the months I’ve gotten to know her and I have realised I really like her as a person. She doesn’t seem fussed by trends, not in a contrarian way where if something is trendy she must hate it, more in a I like what I like regardless of the popularity sense. She is incredibly intelligent, she reads books by authors I’ve never heard of, is capable of having meaningful conversations about most topics, from politics to feminism and history. She’s happy to have her view point challenged and her supporting arguments are never “such and such on TikTok said such and such”. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think she is perfect, I think she can be extremely cynical and seems to be permanently dissatisfied with the world.

Lately I’ve felt like I’d rather talk to my stepdaughter than my own children, not because I don’t love my children or enjoy their presence but I sometimes find their life boring. They surround themselves by people who are just like them, all caught up in a whirlwind of trends. Conversations quickly turn to arguments as they get defensive if I ever question a thought process (my theory here is they don’t have a thought process but rather they are regurgitating an opinion, they can’t defend it or talk about it in any real depth as it’s not their own).

On the flip, I feel like my step-daughter challenges me intellectually which I really enjoy. She teaches me things I never knew, has recommended some books to me which have left me feeling haunted and changed as a person. Equally she is receptive to criticism, she is open to discussing anything in depth and being challenged on her views and even conceding that her own opinions aren’t always correct. I know partially it is because she isn’t my daughter, we don’t have the same bond or relationship and probably look at each other more as equals than my own daughters and I do (I think they view me as past my best and a relic of the past while I often view them as naive and immature). Then there is the fact that my step-daughter grew up in a very different world to my own, learning about her childhood, her home city and her culture is all fascinating to me.

Last night I was chatting to my step-daughter and my own daughter wanted to change the topic to a date she had been on recently. I realised I felt a sense of dread at hearing about it as it’s always the same story with a different character. However when my step-daughter goes to share a story from a date she’s been on I am keen to listen, this is because she often has more profound views on the dates, her standards for men are higher and she’s attracted to more interesting people. I felt awful afterwards as in my mind my own children should be my priority, I should be grateful that they want to let me into their life and me being bored by it makes me feel like a bad mother, they are my own flesh and blood, how can I be anything but excited to hear what they have to share?

Now I can’t sleep, I feel like I’ve let my children down in some way, both by comparing them to my step-daughter when they are wonderful people in their own right but also by failing to instil some of these qualities in them.

Has anyone else ever felt like this? Am I awful and unreasonable for feeling this way?

I feel like this thread is very outing due to the specifics you have given, and if I found out my mother was telling the world how bored she was of my one-dimensional thinking compared to my wonderful shiny new stepsister, I would be pretty miffed.
It’s ok to celebrate one person without using that to tear someone else down.
It doesn’t sound like by constantly challenging their opinions that you are getting any closer to the perfectly well-rounded daughters you are hoping for so it may be time to try a different approach and celebrate them for who they are rather than being constantly disappointed by who they are not.

Your daughters sound normal. You sound sneering and mildly out of touch.

My MIL has 3 children. She is my best friend and we spend a lot of time together. She would rather have a conversation and spend time with me, than them. It doesn't mean she loves them any less, or me any more.

I would say it's similar here, you see her as a friend who you enjoy spending time with.

Did she?

"I think their heart is in the right place and they are wonderfully kind girls (more so than my step daughter, who is more cautious with her kindness)."

Different values - fun and kind vs serious and less kind ? Maybe they could all take this opportunity to learn a bit from being exposed to each other? That would require you to get out of the way, stop sneering and encourage the girls to nurture their step-sisterhood which will potentially have a much longer lifetime relationship than the one with you.

@BoredZelda I agree entirely with your post.

Exactly this!
This is what I was thinking.

I don't think it's bad to feel that way personally, it's just about how you relate to people slightly more and sounds like, at present, you relate more to your SD. It may change over time but suspect it just feels fresher and newer to speak to her and hear her opinions.

You love them all and that's the most important thing.

@Clariey i think you would see step daughter differently if you have helped raise her .
You have met an adult that interests you and sounds like friend type relationship than mother and child .

Can you see it like you need more than being a parent . ?
Maybe you should focus on studying something that fulfills a little more of you?

We are very Americanised and I hate it too but it’s there reality for our kids in the uk these days . Yours will grow out of it and move on .
Seems step daughter hasn’t been Americanised .

Interesting. Maybe this is a thing. When we were teenagers, my stepfather sometimes used to compare me and my sibling to his own child and find them lacking. (We were the resident kids though so that was different.)

As an adult I think maybe it was reflecting his own insecurities in some way. Stepkids are the ultimate comparison - maybe he was harder on her than on us because he wasn’t responsible for creating us. In your case, I would focus on what’s great about your kids instead.

BTW, my step-sibling is great and my SF massively underrated them as a teenager - though not so much later on. However, they were still trying to gain his approval years later and felt they had to work hard at the relationship.

Encourage your DDs to tell you about their experiences (e.g dates)

I agree 100% with this approach. IMHO all your DD's happiness and successes through life will depend on their emotional intelligence and how successfully, or not, they navigate and negotiate intimate relationships. As mothers this is where our life experience and wisdom can guide and support our daughters more so than re-directing to some intellectual source. This is especially important to this age group of women who have to contend with young males raised with Andrew Tate as their role model.

Try not to see it as liking your step daughter more than your daughters.
You have had your daughters from birth, they grew inside your womb, and you raised them.
The relationship with your step daughter will be entirely different and not even comparable. You met her as an adult, and she will be more like a friend than a daughter.

Try to see it as a positive that you have formed such a great relationship with your step daughter.
You don't need to feel any guilt.
It would be different if they were children, but all 3 are adults.
I think the mistake you are making is comparing the relationship with your SD with the relationship you have with your daughters. They will naturally be completely different, but this doesn't mean you love your daughters less.
It just means you have bonded with your step daughter.

Yes you are right it is like a crush. Wonder if the op is generally someone who gets their head turned by new people.

I'm not sure why there is a need to compare?

My DS is the same on Israel, very black and white, and no interest in learning the history of how the borders came into existance, he seems to want to believe that Israel has been launching unprovoked wars on its peaceful neighbours for decades, and that the Israelis can all go back to Europe. We don't talk about it anymore, I couldn't stomach his dismissal of the Hamas rape, massacre and hostage taking as 'whataboutery'.

I am very critical of the Israeli response, but also of Hamas refusal to return the hostages, but that's seemingly a moral failure of mine.

It gets to a stage that it's willful ignorance, and it's so dissapointing when your kids engage in this. It's absolutely not the OPs fault that her young adult kids think this way, as a PP claimed. They get carried away by their idealogical purity, and being on the right side, nuance goes out the window.

I hate having topics I can't discuss with my kids, but Palestine and Trans issues are off the table in our house.

I feel very sorry for your daughters because unless they are totally oblivious i am in a similar boat. I don't live with my Mum and neither does my Mum bf's daughter but everything she says about her seems to be a little dig at me. '[daughters name] is a foody, she cooks wonderful meals for us' [daughters name] is frightfully clever' the most hurtful was when she spent Christmas with them and said pointedly ' its so nice to have children in the house at Christmas again' knowing full well that i can't have kids and his daughter has two step children. It's like she is trying to replace her kids with better ones cos both her kids are disabled and great disappointments to her. Please, don't let your daughters feel like this, please.

Saying that anyone who understands the situation properly will inevitably be completely on the side of the Palestinians is vacuous. Anyone intellectually honest will always have the door open to the fact that they might be wrong, on any subject. But it sounds like the OP's kids don't understand the situation at all and are not capable of even the most basic conversation about it. It doesn't have to be a debate, it could be that you all agree with each other, but any decent conversation involves some examination of why you hold the views you hold. Otherwise you are just bouncing the same opinions back and forth and it never goes anywhere.

OP, it's possible that your DDs are just less mature than your SD. Those few years can make a huge difference. It could also be that as adults you will have a mother-daughter relationship but not so much of a 'friends'-type relationship. Sometimes that's the way it is but I imagine in ten years your DDs might be quite different and feel more like your equals.

I hate threads like this. Just because OP says that they are sheep and have no independent thought due to social media doesn’t mean that that’s true. It’s confirmation bias. Just because young people have different opinions from you doesn’t mean that their opinions are vapid and based on someone else telling them what to think.

Also before social media it was newspapers that influenced our opinions and morals so people shouldn’t think they’re intellectually superior just because you grew up without social media. As long as people aren’t just trusting whatever they see on social media - or newspapers then how they get their news isn’t important.

People grow up and develop a sense of self. That’s no different to 30 or 50 years ago. It’s just a cycle of different generations thinking they’re the ones who had it right and this next generation are useless/shallow/woke or whatever

Sounds like your daughters are not earnest enough for you. They seem to be enjoying life on a shallow level, as one can at their age, plenty of time for the worries and stresses of life to knock that out of them.

Don’t worry OP, when life has dragged them down enough and they no longer see life as fun you can have cynical and dissatisfied daughters too.

I think SM has actually made people more stupid. The trans and Israel-Palestine issues are prime examples of that. People end up expressing two completely self-contradictory opinions within the same sentence. E.g. 'Israelis are terrible, they are ethnic cleansing Gaza, so Israel should cease to exist and all the Israelis should ship out to Europe' or 'Trans women are at risk of male violence so need to be in women's prisons, even if they are convicted rapists'

But it sounds like they are just trusting whatever they see on social media. The OP says that when she asks them why they think what they think, they have no answer. I don't know why this seems implausible to you - I know loads of people like this. They believe everything they see in the Daily Mail/Guardian/TikTok/Mumsnet!

Its Perfectly ok.
If she was a ' person ' not your SD this wouldn't even be a 'thing'

I would prefer conversation with one of my peers over my mum sometimes didn't mean i loved them more or her any less

I wonder whether your daughters had everything they wanted from you on demand and whether your step-daughter, possibly having had a more complicated, possibly difficult, certainly different kind of life growing up, had to face reality and work stuff out for herself at an early age. I'd find your daughters shallow and mindless, from the way you describe them. Your SD sounds interesting, thoughtful and self-reflective. Let's hope her influence rubs off on your daughters.

I was very close to my niece as a child. I'm a lesbian and a feminist, her mum and I are both educated, thoughtful women and we both tried to to encourage her to use her brain, think for herself, go to university, develop some critical thinking skills and ideas of her own. But my niece grew into superficial young woman for whom hair and make-up and nails and boyfriends were all that mattered. I very rarely have anything to do with her these days. She's a wedding planner — totally obsessed with the fantasy of the perfect day rather than reality. She is openly contemptuous of my greenish, leftish, less-is-more lifestyle and regards her mum and I as failures in life, though we have both had interesting careers and are fully-rounded human beings. She's an influencer in her local neck of the woods, all botox and fillers. My sister and I just sigh when we talk about her. We both understand what you are saying.

Some people mature earlier than others. Maybe your DDs are just "younger" for their ages than SD. I read somewhere that children with ADHD, for example, can often be 2-3 years behind their peers in terms of maturity. I'm not sure whether that's the case, but I think it's certainly true that young people mature at different rates, shaped by their life experiences. Just enjoy the different qualities that SD and your DDs bring to your life.

You sound like an insufferable intellectual snob in many ways. My kids are similar ages to yours. They are young. Yes, they have some ‘silly’ views representative of their ages, and then they also have some interesting views which make me look at the world differently. They are still maturing. I think you are being unfair to compare them like this.

And there is a big difference in maturity between even 19 and 21 and then another change to 23 and onwards.

In a nutshell… this.

And I think what op has noticed is less that there is something unusually limited in her DD’s vis a vis most other young people round them, but that other cultures don’t seem to have these same issues to the same extent. They SAY they do, they worry too about social media etc; yet spending time with them ( which op has now done) I think you do sense a difference. We are very hampered by exactly the issues @WhatNoRaisins has outlined.