How would you "encourage" development and change in this person?
A colleague at work and his bipolar wife had one child, a daughter now age 30. They started off raising her as an achiever – music disciplines, bilingual school all of that. In her teens she got into drugs, altercations with parents and ended up leaving home for several months. She came back with a better attitude but it dissipated as familiarity with the good economic life settled back in. Gradually she began living in earnest as a “princess.” They were that glad to have her back again.
My colleague is the “breadwinner” for the household – he’s a professional and away from home a lot. The daughter attempted and abandoned two paths of training for her career. She finally realized she has aptitude and skill for very fine work – making jewellery and she has a job at an orthodontist lab. She doesn’t pick up more that 30 hours a week on the job and doesn’t want any other job. She let herself get quite overweight and lazy.
She now lives away from home in an apartment dad set up for her to the tune of about $10,000 and contributes $300 monthly towards her rent. She ran up her credit card to maximum and hasn’t even the funds to keep the interest on the card in control.
The dad has over a period of time come to see what the true picture of his daughter is. He has confiscated her credit card and strongly advised her to get a part time job to supplement the lack of regular work hours. She is holding on to her princess crown quite firmly at the moment.
Do you have any insight on how anything can be changed to mature her at this very late time without completely dismantling their relationship? P.S. The mom loves to shop too but her “swings” cause her to go back and forth between supportive of her daughter and seeing her as “fat and lazy”....
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The only way it will work is if they stop enabling her. That would mean withdrawing all financial support.
If they don’t have the stomach for that, she really has no motivation to change. Why would she. This is working for her now. Unless they change that, she really has no reason to change.
I’m not saying they should withdraw their love for her or encouraging her efforts. But in this case money is not love. It is the opposite because it keeps her in a dependency state rather than her growing up.
That’s the plain honest truth.
I do not understand how this became your business, or why you think anything you say is going to change how your colleague and his wife raise their daughter.
Your colleague has provided no boundaries for his daughter, arbitrarily alternating between giving her what she wants and trying to enforce rules. And she has been raised by a mother with a serious mental health condition that sounds like it has been either untreated, or not successfully treated.
Her father made the decision to finance her life, and now that the girl has spent herself into a financial black hole so that she badly needs (rather than simply wants) financial support, he feels like stopping? No wonder she’s holding on to what you call her “princess crown”—she is financially screwed without the income she had been counting on from her father.
It sounds like the whole family needs counseling to learn how to set and enforce boundaries with each other, and the daughter should independently get herself some financial counseling so she learns how to budget money appropriately. If the daughter is having out of control spending sprees, she should probably also get checked out for bipolar.
@nikipedia, you have a hard hitting style, you would have my flabby abs in proper six pack format in no time! I value what you have to say and have lots of wisdom and also @Buttonstc thank for your insights also. I have worked with the dad “forever” and his daughter and mine are the same age. Our families tried to connect socially many years ago, however the mom shut that down. I didn’t realize in those years she was bipolar.
It would be my pleasure to follow you both on Fluther and I hope others will contribute any thoughts or experiences they may have.
You can do nothing here.
You have no role.
The father has the choice of cutting her off (the only way she will develop) or not.
@marinelife, true enough and I should have stated that this is not a meddling issue.
Cutting this person off wont help, if you take away all her money it will just make her give in all together. If we are talking about some rich girl who has never had a problem, then cutting her off could work, but with a history of drug use, cutting her off could be the worst thing to do.
I would recommend putting a pinch on her. Don’t totally cut her off, but do keep cutting off more and more in small parts until she is forced to do something about it.
She needs time not only to know she is getting cut off, but needs to see it slowly happening. She will need a lot of time to think about the reality of the situation, if you just cut her off cold turkey she will spiral downwards.
@poisonedantidote, gradual tapering off seems to be the way that adjustments can be made constructively.
If you read through your own details, you will see you’ve got quite an issue with this situation that goes beyond ‘concern’. You provide details to ‘help your case’ like calling his wife bipolar and saying the daughter ‘got overweight and lazy’ as if these things excuse your negative attitude towards the situation. I can’t help what is going on and I don’t think you should be the one to help either.
@Simone_De_Beauvoir, most of us do not live in socially autistic work cultures. There is plenty of dialogue that goes on over a quarter of a century of working together. The truth is this person shares his emotional load with me. It is he who uses the adjectives in describing his soap opera. And if we are alive on this planet, we all have soap operas of some sort.
@smilingheart1 That’s neither here nor there. You can realize the terms he uses and not perpetuate using them. If this emotional load is so burdensome then you can explain you don’t want to be burdened with it. You have just as much power to shape your work situations as anyone else. You can always say that you’re not very well-equipped (or that you don’t feel comfortable) dealing with a family situation that is clearly complex and though you’ll be there to listen (if that’s what you want to do), you simply can’t offer advice without hearing other people’s sides and angles and since that would be inappropriate to do (given that this is a work colleague), you don’t think you can solve the problems they face.
One of the reasons I became a Fluther jellie was the friendly looking leader that said something along the lines of “join if you are true of heart.” One of the other reasons was that I wanted to interact with not only those who see life through similar eyes, but also those who look at things differently. I have not been disappointed! And I do see that the better one poses a question, the better the responses will be. I CAN see that what you see in the preamble is a woman who should go mind her own business. It isn’t like that, but I have come away from the responses you have crafted realizing that it may appear that way. That I have sat in judgment of a family or that I am a meddler.
I am sincerely grateful to those who have so far taken the time to respond and I hope that others choose to add their comments. You have caused me to meet the goal of looking out at life through your eyes and I feel changed by that and have grown some already in that. I am a fearless truth seeker and that is all I want whether it causes me to wince a little with the stretch marks or not.
I love you all!
My coworkers and I are also very close, so I sympathize with the feeling of wanting to help. But at the end of the day I don’t think there is anything you can do to help this dysfunctional family.
I had a Great Aunt that fits this description to a T…
She remained the same with “Tough Love”, and “Unconditional” (we’ll provide for your home/prvisions love).
My personal advice: This family needs serious therapy. Seeking help from outside non professionals is not going to help them at all unless they get serious with themselves and identify that they are at the root of this.
As for the daughter, it could be that she’s emotionally immature or stunted partly because of the way they raise her. I wouldn’t want to get involved by telling anyone that.
My Aunt needed “bail-outs” her entire lfe. I now think she was undiagnosed with some sort of social disorder.
Here is some irresponsible speculation—but hey, free advice is worth every penny you pay for it.
The daughter is fat and lazy. Probably a sign of abuse.
The daughter is out of control with spending: probably a sign of mania.
Mother is bipolar—daughter probably inherited it.
Daughter did drugs—again, probably a sign of pain and an attempt to self-medicate, perhaps as a result of abuse or depression or both.
Inability to do things due to depression is often seen as laziness.
Dollars to doughnuts, the kid is bipolar.
Such is my irresponsible instant diagnosis, turning molehills into mountains. If I’m right, you owe me 5% of the Dad’s salary for a year.
@wundayatta, thank you for redeeming a smile! I liked your insight: “Inability to do things due to depression is often seen as laziness.” Very good.
I think family counseling (they might have to try several before they get a good match) that could be recommended by your co-worker’s primary care physician is just about the only way to help this situation. The family counselor would have to meet with them (all 3 of them would have to be agreeable to this) and then the counselor would ask each of them what they think the problem/s are, and then if they could come to some sort of an agreement about the problems, then the counselor would set out a plan of action for them to follow, which would most likely mean changing how they currently live, and having some sort of a course to follow that would have real and realistic goals.
If the Dad just keeps paying, that won’t help. If the Mom doesn’t take her bi-polar meds, that won’t help, if the Daughter simply gets cut off without any guidance of vision of how to make a life for herself, that won’t help. They need a plan of action, but they need an un-biased party (most likely in the form of a family counselor) to help them. But most of all, Dad needs to want to fix this situation in a way that is best for all of them. And then he has to talk the other 2 into going along with it.
@smilingheart1
In one of your responses you referred to a “socially autistic work culture.”
What on earth does that even mean and what does it have to do with the situation at hand? Could you please clarify, as I’m scratching my head in puzzlement.
@Buttonstc, social autism is social retardation. My intent in saying that we do not work in a socially autistic work culture was to say “hey, we do talk.” Surely people in, say office environments, spend more time together than with our immediate families. Few families spend upwards of forty hour weeks in each other’s company.
@Simone_De_Beauvoir, you are taking the medical condition of autism and translating into what I am using as a colloquial term. Offering all due respect, anyone who was a teen, for example a few decades ago, threw around the word “retard” as an everyday phrase to their chums. They did not mean that their friend was retarded anymore than today when we hear it said “oh, that’s so gay” that we literally mean homosexual. My intent was to use the term social autism as it is referred to in urban language. Here is the interpretation from an Urban Dictionary I looked up on line to try to communicate what I meant:
“Relating to the social retard or social retardation. A person who causes undue awkwardness and misses normal social cues during conversation, while technically being considered “normal”. Unlike a social retard, this person is usually of a high IQ, and manages to sporadically control the conversation with an interesting, savant-like twist for specific subjects and topics.”
I think we have strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. Does that need an explanation?
If this was me, I would seek professional help from the various agencies that deal with this type of situation.
@smilingheart1 Again, it is up to you to try to express yourself better than teenagers who wrongfully used retarded whatever which way they felt like it. I don’t think either autism or retardation applies to what you’re trying to say about work environments. As for what you perceive as ‘urban language’ – generally speaking, what you find on Urban Dictionary are offensive terms that people love to use and then tell others to stop being so PC. Are you one of those people?
What is PC, don’t know that acronym and I know you want to educate me!
Definitely not politically correct, have real thoughts, emotions and genuine.
Thanks all, it was great to lurve you today.
Sad situation but if the parents accept this we can’t do anything for them not even suggest it’s not a good situation. mainly because they are glad to have her back in their life. While it sounds strange they prefer wasting money then not having with whom to spend them.
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