DD wants to cut ties-Says her childhood was toxic

[SadandStressed3]

This is long, so my apologies.
I’m in a horrible, stressful situation with my 19yr old daughter. Basically, she feels that she had a very unhappy childhood and now doesn’t want to have a relationship with us (apart from us continuing to support her at university and keep her during holidays from university 🙄) She does not keep in touch whilst away and when home, spends the entire time in her room. I’m just going to give a brief overview so as not to drip feed.

She is the eldest of 3 with a 5yr gap and essentially says she feels like we ruined her life by having the younger two. Apparently this meant no time for her and less holidays. She said she had to listen to us saying we couldn’t do stuff because of money but yet we chose to have the younger kids. She said it was toxic due to arguments and stress. There was an awful 2yrs after the youngest was born where I had hideous PND but still had to try and cope as we have zero extended family and DH was working away through the week. There’s 18mths between the younger 2 so DD would have been 7-9yrs during this time.
When she was Y5 we put her in for grammar entrance (she’s exceptionally able academically) She passed and went to an all girls grammar. She hated it and we let her move to the comprehensive for Y8. She hated that too but still came out with 4 top A’levels.
There has been lots of teen drama and she was under CAMHS for a year. This was counselling and I was called in for the last 10mins of each session to be told how awful I always made her feel. How she was belittled and unloved and how the younger two were treated more favourably and how I gaslit her. She complains that the younger two have more relaxed rules on bedtime and internet use (probably marginally true but not by a significant amount) She’s also very angry that family holidays can now be more teen focused whereas when she was their age, we had to accommodate younger kids. To me this is all just what happens when you’re the eldest. Every year, I’ve made sure her and I had a weekend away just us. I’ve also taken her shopping for clothes and when she was 14, we completely redid her bedroom allowing her to choose and putting in a make up desk etc. If anything, she’s probably been over indulged a little.

It breaks my heart that she refuses all contact when away and lives by this narrative of having had a toxic childhood. I work in child safeguarding and thus deal with kids daily who really have experienced toxic situations and it frustrates me and upsets me so much to hear DD say such things. Half of me wants to support her and acknowledge, as I have tried to, that there was a very difficult period when her siblings were young and the other half wants to tell her to stop wallowing in self indulgent MC bullshit. Obviously the latter isn’t ideal and I do push that away. As things stand, she’ll finish next year and we’ll never hear from her again and I’m desperate to sort this out beforehand. Well done if you’ve got this far. Any advice is very welcome.

Completely agree with this

Do you have any experience of neurodiversity or emotional neglect?

I suggest you further educate yourself about the vulnerability of young people dealing with this.

Have you heard of predators? Exploitation? This can happen to well educated “smart” young people. Especially if they have a proven track record of mental ill health or low self esteem. They might have been sheltered in some ways and neglected in others. This sort of estrangement can be very complex.

@OriginalUsername2, I’m open to every viewpoint on here even when I don’t feel it’s all been fair but I honestly don’t know any family where, as @yesmen says, it doesn’t all get a little less stringent, a little more relaxed or lenient with the younger one(s). I have just learned what to be less bothered about plus I’m more knackered and they’re not my PFB and I’m not smug.

The thread is packed with people determined to make OP the problem, so they can reassure themselves they’ll never have any issues like this with their own children because OP is awful and they’re not.

Either that or turning OP into their own mother, DD into themselves, and trying to work through their own trauma.

The only advice I can offer OP is to keep reaching out but setting boundaries. Ask her, if she’s able to engage seriously in the discussion, what her actual hope is here. Is it that she refuses to speak to you but you continue to give her money and let her stay with you? And whether she thinks that’s a fair proposal that many people would accept? That she’s old enough to realise that all relationships are give and take, and she seems to be wanting to take a lot and give literally nothing.

"... she feels that she had a very unhappy childhood and now doesn’t want to have a relationship with us (apart from us continuing to support her at university and keep her during holidays from university 🙄) She does not keep in touch whilst away and when home, spends the entire time in her room. "
Did her belief that she had an unhappy childhood begin when she moved to university? I wonder if she is in an environment where kudos is gained by being 'oppressed'. As a middle-class, clever (and you call her beautiful) 19 year old with supportive parents funding her - well, she's had to scour around for something to claim the social status in such an environment, and she'd decided a toxic childhood will do nicely! No-one there can say it ain't so.

Cynical of me I know, I guess I've just watched too many videos of students play-acting SJWs.

I have plenty of personal and professional experience with both @OverTheBridges , do you know what else I have experience with? Manipulation. Your reply to the OP was a lesson in manipulation so well done you 👏 . FYI, it was a little too overt though, do better next time, bit more subtle.

Yep. It's all part of the "identity" phenomenon IMHO - there's something about social media and/or ND that seems to make kids think that if they are feeling the same way as someone, that the cause of those feelings is the same.

Does your eldest DD have the same father as the younger two?

Reading these responses I can see why there is so much 'trauma' and 'anxiety' on Mums Net. OP is clearly totally in the wrong, this girl is traumatised and must be neurodivergent because that's the answer to everything on here. OP I would financially support her to the end of undergraduate study and then she can move on and cut ties (but she wont). This isn't trauma. I too work with children who suffer real trauma - this is control.

Parents don’t get to decide whether or not their children experienced emotional neglect. That’s not how it works. Of course every parent would claim that their child didn’t.

Being the eldest with a parent that suffered with PND makes it much more likely that she did experience emotional neglect at a pretty critical point in her development. This is where it is important not to be dismissive.

A friend had a son with issues like this the spotlight was always on him. His younger sister neglected unfortunately. His sister eventually after being given a Saturday job by a mutual friend in a shop was caught stealing/selling stock to mates out of the back door at a knock down rate to pay for cigarettes, vodka.

Friend was oblivious up to this point. daughter was biddable at home because of her brother's dramas. Her rebellion unhappiness came out in other ways.

Where's your DD's dad in all this, OP? It's all about you and your relationship with her. How does she get on with him?

Well, everything was just fine then.

In which case there is no problem, right?

What do you want us to say? Here you go: “She is a spoiled ungrateful little princess who is treating you awfully! You are an unappreciated saint! We admire you for not coming down on her like a ton of bricks!”

Do you feel better now? Good.

This a delicate time, even for non neurodivergent teens without a history of mental ill health. Some drop out, some fall into a bad crowd, others buckle under the stress. That age is statistically the age when one is most likely to experience serious mental ill health.

I hope she will find all the understanding and support she needs in the next phase of her life.

I would gift her some therapeutic hobbies if you have the funds, it will help her mood, and possibly how she’s viewing everything.

Except that is NOT what she said. There is no "so" in between the words "drama" and "was". It says "and", making it two different types of events.

The DD could have been doing a lot of teen drama that had nothing to do with being under CAMHS. Not everything a teen does that causes drama and household upset is CAMHS material.

Some of you are just looking for reasons to attack the OP. 🙄

You need to talk this out with a professional and stop jumping on OP.

You sound exhausted. I think your daughter is very lucky to have had the childhood she’s had. Smile and let her do as she likes, keep a room for her and be welcoming but make it known that you having feelings too and her words and actions are painful. She has a lot of growing up to do, including establishing a filter. We all have issues of some sort with our childhoods. While she feeling unsure about herself, the future, university stuff it’s very easy for her to blame other people for everything. It’ll be interesting to see how she goes on when she has her own children.

The main problem her other children are having is probably that they have a very difficult and possibly unloving sister with blames them for her childhood troubles when she's not busy blaming her mother.

^ This. Absolutely dripping with contempt and subtle put-downs.

Parents don’t get to decide whether or not their children experienced emotional neglect.

Nor do strangers on the internet who have not met any of the individuals in question.

She is self-indulgent and immature. No parents are perfect and no child has a perfect upbringing.

Acting like she'd been abused merely because she was not an only child any more is insanely narcissistic and selfish.

The fact she falls out with all her friends and can never accept fault says it all. The saying that if everyone else is an arsehole, you're the arsehole applies here.

She's an adult now, and it sounds like she's very entitled and just not a very nice or empathetic person. Some people are just born like that, and she's an adult now and only she can fix herself, if she even wants to.

You do need to stop indulging her and worrying about her feelings. Unless you are omitting something, they are baseless. She's making terrible accusations about you, and if she wants the benefit of a free roof over her head and university support then she should keep her irrational and selfish feelings to herself.

Some people are just wired that way, everything is other peoples fault and they are OWED everything. You can break your back trying to please them and NOTHING WILL WORK! You can only do wrong.

I have a sister who is like that. She made my parents, my mothers mostly, life hell as a teenager. They even went to therapy back then to no avail. Now she is over 40 years old and thing work better but it didn't happen until she moved away from home and grew up a bit.

My advise is to let your daughter go. Let her have her narrative and her feelings. Stop defending yourself and don't indulge her. Let her grow up and hopefully you can have an adult relationship with her in the future.

And crucially, never, ever the fault of the person’s own actions themselves

Exactly. OP has zero interest in them it appears. Which is concerning. Hopefully they escape, go on to have happy lives in spite of the dramas they're experiencing now.

I agree with this but I think there also needs to be an expectation that the DD will approach this in a way that acknowledges that her mum is human too and that life is simply not always perfect. I was the DD in a similar situation and while it of course had an impact on me I'm not oblivious to the fact that it was far from easy for my mum too and that I'm not the only person with feelings. I would never dream of threatening to cut contact over this which seems so selfish.

That is some toxic shit right there. Yay for another way to make mums, especially those who have struggled with PND feel like everything is their fault.