I will try to make this as short as I can. I am a stepdad of a 15 year old. I had been been raising her since she was 16 months old and her dad lives states away. My wife had a very hectic upbringing with her parents divorce, so for the sake of my stepdaughter my wife and her exhusband stay amicable to this day.
Through the years her dad has appeared here and there, and has taken her out and spoiled her by buying anything and everything that she wants. As she has gotten older, has been able to see that for what it is. She still speaks with him on a regular basis, and per our court agreement he gets to keep her for the summer.
She is 15, about to turn 16. Something that I started to notice about two years ago started bothering me was her inability to focus on anything possitive. If she rides a roller coaster, she will talk about passing out or how she hit her head. If she eats ice cream, she will talk about her ice cream headache. If its to a band concert, she will talk about how she almost passed out due to X reason. It doesnt matter what it is, if it is supposed to be an enjoyable experience she will find and focus on negatives.
She then started to proceed to "establish" an identity, but always seems to be a minorioty or a victim with whatever it is she is attempting to establish. Example would be she would buy a pansexual flag, but she will not hang it up. Instead she will hide it and claim people around the are homophobic/disagree with that lifesytle etc. She claims to be a Fury, but she tells us she cant tell anyone or go to any sort of convention because people will judge her. She claims to want to be a digital artist, but now AI is replacing all the things that artists due so woes to her and she will not entertain other career paths. She was doing the nonbinary thing for a while and would jump down our throat if I used the wrong pronoun on her friends whom I had just met. She will not take responsibility for anything. It is always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS someone elses fault that she cannot do X or Y.
This year has been something else. She went to her dads for the summer and toward the end, she was caught having an explicit chat on discord with someone. I believe this was some sort of roleplay. I guess it was so graphic that her dad had talked to us to let us know that it was CPS level stuff, and this was not a small thing.
She initially apologized, but then as the days went on she spun the whole incident to she had not done anything wrong and it was an invasion of privacy. She claimed to be chronically ill in the latter half of the summer (this illness only occurred when she had to go somewhere she didnt want to go, or do a chore.) We took her to the doctor to have bloodwork done in the unlikely chance that she did in fact have something. She was later diagnosed with anxiety/despression and later ADHD. Since that diagnosis, her grades have plunged and she had stopped turning in her assignments "It slipped my mind, I have ADHD". It feels like she uses the diagnoses as a crutch for her to be lazy. She will not take any of the meds that they had prescribed her, but she will then almost gloat about having anxiety and tell her friends how awful it is and how she would not wish it on her worst enemies etc- yet she wont take any medicine for it.
She is absolutely addicted to sugar. Claims that water is boring and she cannot drink it because she will throw up. She will have a few sodas a day, heavy on snacks, desserts, and light on dinner if it is not chicken nuggets from some sort of fast food.
She is now failing highschool and I hate that for her. We were paying a tutor for math which she was struggling in, but he didnt want to tutor her this year because he was constantly chasing down assignments and she constantly lying to them about homework. This year we had her staying after school for a homework help program, where we learned she was skipping the program and hanging out with some of her friends. We then switched to a tutor through the school, and she has stood them up half of the time (She will come home on the bus claiming that she forgot, and by then it is too late to take her back). We have her opening her online progress book and doing the digital assigments, but we cannot enforce her turning in her paper assignments. Even today I let her know that she was on track to be held back and she needed to turn in her missing assignments which she had lied to us about (claiming that she had already turned them in). I emailed the teacher this morning, and she let me know that she did not turn them in and she had a test today (which my daughter did not mention yesterday).
She is failing world history, math, digital design, and she is barely passing english. Next year she is going to be embarassed to go to school and I know for a fact that is going to be a living hell for us parents. I refuse to send her to a private school for 10's of thousands of dollars because she wants to decide to not turn anything in and use her ADHD as a crutch all the meanwhile not taking her medicine because it makes her "Feel sick"
I am sort of at a loss here. My other daughter who is 7 years old is special needs, and she looks up to her half sister. This is not the behavior that we want her to be masqing or emulating by any means. Not to mention that our teenager constantly bullies her and makes fun of her speech rather then trying to help her in any means. I have worries that this is going to impact my 7 year old long term as she thinks that this is what a loving relationship looks like.