DD's half siblings treat her badly

[Lyannaa]

Does anyone else have this type of thing going on?

My youngest dd is 5 years old and she has a half brother and a half sister who are her dad's children. The half brother has behaved really badly towards her. Examples;

He complains to his dad that he wants time alone with him when she is having her contact time with him at weekends. This man is 27 years old! He has a job and a girlfriend he lives with.

A few years ago, he agreed to be DD's godfather and then pulled out 2 days before the actual Christening and didn't come to the Christening either. This meant that dd ended up not having a godfather because, of course, we couldn't ask someone 2 days before the Christening as it would look like an after-thought.

He also doesn't like it if dd is with her dad for Christmas. Her dad keeps on saying to me that he'll change but there's no way he will - he's been raging and foot stomping about his dad having another child since I was pregnant with her.

The half sister has never met dd and doesn't want to.

Luckily, my older children love their half sister. My youngest one before dd wasn't remotely jealous when she was born.

I know there is no real solution to this but really, it confuses me how grown adults can treat a little child this way.

That is odd behaviour. At the beyond your post, I expected the older siblings to be between 11-15. Not a grown man of 27!

For this to be going on, I would suspect some very deep seated issues between the father and the son. Probably going on a lot longer than dd has been around.

What was ex like as a father to his son when younger, as far as you know?

For your dd's sake, I would have a good chat to her father about accepting that his older dc find the situation difficult and perhaps it is best that he sees DD individually as much as possible. I would do this in order to protect dd, not bend to a grown man's tantrums.

Apologies for typos... beginning not beyond

Sounds as though he was not expecting his dad to start a new family.

Obviously it’s not great, but there's no real reason a 22 year old would want a baby sibling, be interested in a baby sibling, or feel obliged to develop much of a relationship with a baby sibling.

If he felt his dad to be absent during his own childhood and now watches his dad be a better father to his second family, I can see why he’d resent that.

Obviously I know nothing about his relationship with his dad or whether your husband was a good dad. But that may be how the older sibs feel about it.

Presumably they didn’t ask for a baby sibling?

Yes, I completely agree. I told him that he has to accept responsibility for how his son has turned out and ask him to talk to the son about the sons grievances. And I imagine that he was not a great dad to him because why else would he be so weird and immature as an adult? My feeling is that when his son and older daughter were little, he and his ex wife were so wrapped up in each other that they didn't look after their children's emotional needs.

I also agree that he shouldn't take dd to see him. Unfortunately I think he will still keep on trying to force it.

If he felt his dad to be absent during his own childhood and now watches his dad be a better father to his second family, I can see why he’d resent that.

Me too, but that isn't DD's fault. And his behaviour around the Christening was spiteful. Why didn't he just say no in the first place?

I think with the age gap you have to treat these people like more distant cousins than siblings. Try to manage your child's expectations here because you can't change the situation.

Yes, I think that's the best thing to do. This isn't a situation that I can fix. As a PP said the seeds of it probably come from before he ever knew me.

It's just so weird to me. My other children's dad got remarried to their step mum when the oldest one was 15 and I remember them hoping that they would have a baby. They didn't but if they had, my kids wouldn't have been resentful or upset. And I would have been happy for them as well.