13 year old refusing to come home!
Hello!
Just after some advice really. Bit of background, my 13 year old step daughter lives full time with me, her father and our 4 year old daughter. She has lived with us full time for a year now after a huge falling out she had with her bio mother. Her mother didn’t have any contact with her for a year and made no effort to reconcile their relationship. This isn’t the first time that this has happened, they have always had a very toxic relationship, and the mother will always pick new boyfriends and things over her.
Now everything was absolutely fine, my step daughter would insist that’s she’s happier without her, we got her into private therapy which she had asked us for, she was doing a lot better at school and generally things were just really positive for her.
However, during the summer holidays we went away on holiday as a family, and took one of her friends along too. My stepdaughter was acting a lot differently, she would snap at us and our 4 year old which obviously understandably hormonal teenagers will be like that, this was different. We were worried that something maybe going on at school, or maybe going on with a new boyfriend that she’d recently told us about, so her dad decided to check her phone. Lo and behold she is back in contact with her mum, also been seeing her mum with her maternal grandparents who have only bothered with her a hand full of times this last year.
We didn’t confront her about any of this, she came and asked us after the holiday if she could stop doing therapy, and when asked why she then told us that she was back in contact with her mum. We made it very clear that we were absolutely fine with her seeing and talking to her mum.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, she’s been giving a lot of attitude and just generally being very selfish. Her dad got annoyed a few nights ago when he told her that she needed to go to bed, she asked for more time on the phone to her friends which she agreed with but then she ran half and hour over that which caused an argument between him and her. The next day, I drove her to school and she gave me a kiss on the head and then left. A couple of hours later my partner had a call from the school to say that she hadn’t turned up and they needed a reason for absence. We were absolutely sick with worry, her tracker on her phone had been turned off at the time that I dropped her off which she always does when she goes to school as she turns her phone off.
My partner demanded that the school check again, and they then called back 10 minutes later saying that our daughter was in her maths lesson. So we just assumed that there may have been a glitch in the system somewhere. Once off the phone the maternal grandad called my partner and said that he’s just dropped our daughter off at school and she’s been with him all morning saying that she’s scared of her dad and that he shouts and screams in her face (which is not the case at all! She’s voices can be raised at times which we now feel guilty for!)
She hasn’t come home since, minimal contact. She’s apparently staying with her maternal nan, my partner tried to pick her up from school but she never turned up.
The nan has asked my partner to go round tonight to talk to her and his daughter (but we know what will be coming and she’ll say she doesn’t want to come home which is what she did with her mum!)
Any advice welcome! We are at our wits end and we’ve only ever tried our best to pick up the pieces from her mum leaving.
She hasn’t seen her mum much since being back in contact with her, mainly through messages and the 2 maybe 3 times she has seen her the mother won’t let her into the house so I don’t think her living back with her mum is even an option anymore.