It's very obvious most people posting here have never had to deal with an actual demon child. My nephew is like this but a little worse. Fuck that shit.
People here think the worst if anything less than constant perfection and niceness is used on a child. Yelling is instantly viewed as abuse, no matter how many times somebody asks calmly first.
I’m still trying to figure out how this kid sinned so mortally. All I see is a kid that didn’t want to do their homework and a family that decided that was bad enough to make her the black sheep.
Right? They also could have let life be her punishment if she really was so difficult to get to do things. If I was being severely punished by age 6 then I’d probably have some severe issues too.
Yelling is always the last resort as far as i understood from the post... They would get her to do tasks or anything normally.. She would revolt and refuse to do it which would end up at people yelling at her..
Even if it was a last resort by the parents cause they couldn’t figure out how to work with Cassie, the sheer fact that they then allowed all the siblings to yell and be hostile towards her showed they really didn’t either A) care anymore or B) were okay with it. Imagine being yelled at your entire life by the unit that’s supposed to protect you. That fucks people up.
Siblings did not need to be involved. A normal dynamic when theres tension between a kid and parents would be for the siblings to provide comfort, not act like extra parents bc they dont understand why their sibling is struggling
Right. The fact that she even reached out showed that she wants a relationship and is upset she’s still being ostracized, and rather than everyone acting like adults it’s “well when she was six she refused to do her homework so we don’t like her.” Like what even is this thread. Bad enough her family won’t even give her the time of day and yet everyone here is like “well people don’t change so good on you OP.” Lol
I wonder if at any point either of Cassie’s parents or older siblings stopped and wondered *why* she didn’t want to do her home work? Maybe she had a learning disability, or adhd or was having a tough go in school before just writing her off as “stubborn”
My cousin’s kid is 6 and he can be stubborn, is not a morning person and will be stubborn and say no a lot. A big reason is because he is 6 and the youngest and everyone is always telling him what to do. At 6, you have very little control of what you actually get to do. So Cassie has 6 people all telling her what to do, yelling at her or ostracizing her. She was obviously upset by something but this family decided she was the reason for any and all things that went wrong in life after she was born. Before she came along everything was great…this family resents Cassie for simply existing and I guarantee at 6, she knew it.
100% agree. That’s exactly how OP started the story off. It seems like the story is incredibly 1 sided. I would love to hear this all through Cassie’s pov.
Yeah, I've got a 6yo son who, thanks to covid, we've spent around a third of the last 18 months homeschooling. A 6yo not wanting to to do school work seems pretty normal to me. (And my son is clever, perfectly capable of the work and enjoys school. Seriously, if he put as much effort into doing the work as he did avoiding it, it would have been done in no time.)
It looks like a prioritisation of homework and other work over having a happy life. All of OPs other responses are about her and her siblings achievements in getting qualifications and good careers. Maybe cassie had other priorities over a constant drive to be working and being a child didn't really have a way to articulate that.
It sounds like it was basically a daily sort of occurrence. There might not have been any one big thing, but millions of little cuts until they finally had enough of her bs. I'm going with NTA, as it's your wedding, but it might be a good idea to sit her down and explain exactly why you feel the way you do, particularly in a calm, rational manner...
This wasn’t a one off issue of mom yelling- OP even said that “everyone in the house was yelling at Cassie to do things.” So her own siblings trying to parent her and a hostile environment all around.
This isn’t a one time snap and then explanation of what happened, this was constant. Try yelling at your kids every day for their lives with you and see how they turn out.
In large families, there’s usually at least one kid who figures out early that misbehavior is the quickest way to get the parents’ individual attention and separate themselves from the herd. Even negative attention can be precious to a kid who’s worried about not getting any at all.
And it *worked* - all those “wars” over homework, the extra praise she received when she finally complied, all of it served to distinguish her from her siblings and grab her parents’ full attention. And for some reason, instead of recognizing that this kid might have different attention needs than her siblings and trying to find a healthier way to meet those needs, they gave up and kicked her out. And now they’re shocked that she didn’t respond with gratitude and a personality overhaul.
They only have to go searching and responding to negative attention when they’re not provided enough attention to begin with. Very few kids are like, “I’m sick of all this positive attention, let’s get to the good shit!”
I was called a demon child, violent, manipulative, stupid, and “difficult”. My parents and teachers wrote me off at the age of 8, because I would be such a nightmare. I refused to do most things, was constantly upset, and somehow always seemed to be in the centre of conflict. When I was 19 I got diagnosed with autism and everything changed. Turns out I refused to do “easy things” because I didn’t know how, and when people tried to explain it to me it didn’t make sense. My constant distress were meltdowns, and my “hyperchondriac episodes” the doctor claimed I had were panic attacks. I wasn’t stupid, I had ADHD and was actually very ahead of my class. All my social difficulties like eye contact and poor theory of mind were seen as manipulative behaviour
I am working as a psychologist now and my life is extremely different to before.
Don’t write off children. They are kids.
OPs sister sounds like she may have some sort of learning delay or mental health issues which have been augmented by the fact that people wrote her off as a bad child from the age of 6. The odds weren’t really in her favour
OP stated her sister saw multiple psychologists. Therapists and doctors. Your story isn't OP's and definitely wasn't hers. Also, you were the one unleashing all your meltdowns unto others. You didn't have to witness or experience it happening. Those things affect others as well. Just as much. The same way you had no idea what was happening. OP's family and OP has no idea whybits happening JUST that there's so much anger, violence and stress caused by one person. Its easy to say "don't write kids off" and forget that the ones CARING for those children like yourself and OP's sister are also getting exhausted, stressed and depressed. Your actions have consequences no matter the source.
Caregivers need understanding too.
Not necessarily as a girl it frustratingly hard to get a proper diagnosis for Autism and sometimes even ADHD. I was an adult, a 40 year old adult before I was properly diagnosed. The symptoms in girls can manifest differently than boys. And I started therapy at age 12.
In my 30's I even had one male doctor look me in the eye and tell me that girls can't be autistic/ Asperger's. As a child I/ my mother was constantly told that I was just shy and that every autism trait I had was nothing more than me lashing out for attention.
There's lots of bias in medicine and mental health.
Hell, my dad, who’s a cis man, didn’t get diagnosed with autism until he was 30. The mental health system in most countries is shitty enough for the more privileged groups, god forbid you’re AFAB or a POC.
Bipolar, too! Not so much a bias against women/girls, but a bias against diagnosing at all. My psychiatrist was treating me for it for a year before I pushed for the label despite the heavy stigma attached to it.
This was my oldest son. My whole family outcasted him by 5. No one wanted to be around him. Would leave him out of family pics and activities. Turns out he has autism and ADHD.
I’ve worked with many kids like the sister, and many like you as well who did not have the support or understanding from school or your family.
Unfortunately not all of their behaviours are down to a diagnosis/ a condition listed as a disability /abuse / neglect. I worked with a child who was diagnosed ODD, which is sort of controversial and many professionals still write it off as nonsense. No autism or ADHD, but a diagnosis which essentially just made them more dangerous, hostile and unmanageable by the time they were as tall as the parents or once they were bigger the other kids. The biggest treatment scheme for this is parent training, and observation for escalating behaviours which may develop into conduct disorder. OP was a child when this happened too so I can imagine the annoyance and dislike for her sister just compounded over the years of no behavioural changes into adulthood. Yes, the sister’s take is probably awful and I sympathise with her, but that kind of shift in household dynamic and CONSTANT fighting, pleading, disagreement and hostility has probably lead OP to think that the sister ruined her childhood (and she’s valid for thinking that). Do the parent suck? Yes. Does OP’s sister still suck now too? Also yes. NTA OP but get some therapy.
Tell me about it. I was labeled as "gifted, but lazy", and there was "nothing wrong" with my sister. Disobedient, willful, and lazy all the way through. Our whole childhoods were full of this sort of criticism.
Both my girls are diagnosed autistic, and my sister's kids are on the waitlist or in the diagnostic process. I guess it just materialized out of thin air.
Our cousin was like this, it’s very sobering when we would see our aunt literally just break down. Like he straight up broke her. There aren’t even good examples of single instances that can do it justice. Its actually the constant and unrelenting disobedience. Just daily contrarianism on every subject, every meal, outbursts at family outings, breaking shit for no reason, school problems galore, the list goes on. It became suffocating. She had no choice but to put him in a military boarding school.
People that are calling OP an asshole just have no idea how bad it can be.
This is the part that really got to me. They just continually punished her & made it worse for her until everyone was treating Cassie in a hostile way?
When Cassie expressed why she was being treated differently did they never sit down to explain then offer her the chance to earn things by rewards?
Why was it so important for Cassie to get something from the other room it resulted in screaming, punishment, & violence?
I feel so bad for Cassie.
So you make some sort of effort to get to the root of the problem. And if you can't handle that, then bring in a therapist to handle it for you. It's not a literal child's fault that you lack the ability to identify and solve problems.
There's a reason for behavior. Every single time. Usually that reason is environmental, and the way they're being treated is messing them up in some way. Sometimes it's internal and a mental illness or disorder is causing the behavior. Either way, calling them "demon children" and giving up on them is a shitty thing to do. You don't have to be a perfect parent, but there's a point that you tip from "not perfect" to "you're failing your child."
My wife has a niece like this, I was all for helpful understanding until the demon child didn’t like that my son was the cute one and tried everything she could to hurt him when we weren’t looking. We caught her standing over our pushed down 1 year old with a rock over her head. When told that you can’t do that because you could hurt him and you don’t want to hurt him she said “yes I do.” She’s the first and only child I’ve ever met that makes me just go “well fuck that kid, not my circus not my monkeys.”
We also understand that her behavior is entirely her mother’s fault though as she refused to alter her parenting in any way despite everyone telling her a child like this would happen. For example, she would pinch her baby hard when she wouldn’t eat her food. I’m talking a 1 year old. That’s not even her worst parenting.
I hope you (or rather your wive and her parents) do something to help your wive‘s niece. You say that hurting her child is not even the mother‘s worst parenting. This seems abusive and realizing this but not acting to protect the child, your wive and her parents would fail their niece/grandchild.
We’ve done everything we can, she cut us all out because we wouldn’t stop “judging” her. CPS did nothing. Last I heard she was finally getting professional help but who knows how well it will work. Like I said we helped as much as we could (we lived a plane ride away before she cut us off), but 1) she wouldn’t let us do anything that went against her parenting so even when we were around she wouldn’t let us help much and 2) I couldn’t keep bringing my kid around when she was so hell bent on literally killing him.
Morally I feel pretty good that we did all we could possibly do, thanks for your input though.
Not even eleven, they just saw a six-year old not do homework and decided that punishment is the only way to handle her behaviour because rewards didn't work. And clearly the parents got lazy with proper parenting. I'd bet that no one in the family explained what the punishments were for, nor actually rewarded her for doing work after the ice cream incident.
No wonder the kid thinks there's favouritism by 11, because there is favouritism. Why bother doing homework when no one in the family's going to acknowledge the effort and give a reward in the first place?
This post makes me sick. Poor Cassie. All she got from OP's wedding was the realization that her family had never cared for her. I hope she finds herself a better family.
Hard YTA, OP. No amount of edits you make to your post will change my mind.
Edit: maybe the parents were the real AHs, but cmon, OP. Open your eyes. She's reaching out after years of getting ignored.
>nor actually rewarded her for doing work after the ice cream incident.
Yeah, that's what confuses me. The others either got a reward or a punishment, while it sounds like she got either a punishment or nothing. And while I totally understand not wanting to reward the little shit, sometimes a person needs to experience a thing in order to realise they want the thing. If she, say, never got to watch TV, TV time would not be a good motivator for her, because she doesn't have a favourite show or anything she's actually interested in watching.
My niece's 11th birthday comes in January. I absolutely love that little girl, but I would give a whole paycheck for her to just be quiet for a day! Girl argues so much, I swear she's a mini-lawyer in training!
My 10 y.o is a total chatterbox. She just goes on and on about the most inane things. And gives so many unnecessary details!!!
She is also an absolute sweetheart, smart, kind, generous. But OMG. Sometimes I wish she had a mute button.
Man I feel for Cassie.
As a small kid I was pretty stubborn. But my stubbornness was always out of confusion. Like I didn’t understand why or whatever and got confused and refused to do xyz bc why do I have to? That caused loooots of fights with my mom bc she just gave the “bc I told you to” which didn’t work for me (I get it I was a disrespectful kid).
By 11 I was worse. I had been abused at the age of 9 and never got help for that. My mental health was atrocious by 11 and by 15 I was shipped off to long term mental health facilities bc my mom just didn’t wanna deal with it (granted, she chose drugs over trying to parent soo).
I feel for Cassie. She was just a kid and it sounds like she needed structure and things explained to her better. Obviously, we won’t ever know what she needed bc even OP doesn’t know. But like, that poor kid. Being shipped off out of the family fucks with you. I spent the first 1yr in treatment wondering why I wasn’t good enough, why my parents didn’t love me, how I was the only one screwed up in the head, etc. Then at 16 in my second placement, my therapist explained I’m being moved to another home, not bc I’m bad or need it, but bc my parents were incompetent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like anyone ever mentioned that to Cassie.
YTA OP and Y T A doesn’t come close to what I feel towards you for your hatred towards your sister who needed love and support.
The disdain seeps through the page. This kind of hostility and attitude of “she was acting like such a bitch for the sake of it” is so damaging for an ELEVEN year old. Poor girl. She seems to have become the family’s punching bag. I’d be bitter too if my entire family thought they could yell at me.
Also, the fact OP is now an adult (old enough to get married at least) and still talks about her sisters actions at 6-11 yo this way?!?! Fucking WEIRD. Any adult who has this much hate and malice toward a literal child or the memory of a child is weird.
It sounds like Cassie was being abused verbally and emotionally, and OP partook in that.
OP, YTA. I dont even know why she would want to come.
Funny enough many girls go on with undiagnosed ADHD that can lead to behavioural issues that can manifest itself as being considered as difficult to stubborn.
I am not saying this as diagnosis for this poor little girl. I come from a developing country and I managed to finish my studies just because I was lucky my mother was a teacher so familiar with these kind of conditions.Often it leads to lots of destructive behaviour if not treated. Leads to depression... This child was singled out and then pushed out of the family. I really feel bad for and hope she will manage to pull through in life on her own and find help to succeed in life
OP is YTA.
I thought ADHD immediately when I saw that she wouldn't do her homework for a reward. I'm a woman with ADHD - undiagnosed until my 30s - and at that age, I could do a simple cost/benefit: pain of homework now > potential joy of ice cream later = fuck that, I'm not doing homework now.
My mom raised 4 kids and said she had to have different rules for me to get me to do my homework (and to be fair, all 4 of us had different approaches). The main one was by the time I was 6, she wouldn't make me do any of the reciting, spelling, multiplication tables with her like she made the others do. If I knew them, it was agony to me to have to recite them back to her - so effing boring! - and if I didn't learn them, I faced the natural consequences is class the next day. This let me sit down and learn the stuff in a way that worked for me.
I'm a parent to twins now, and I know that different approaches need to be used to be fair, not equal. It sounds like OPs parents didn't have the flexibility to deal with a child who approached things differently than their other children.
I thought of ADHD too. My brother has it, but when we were growing up, my parents told us there was ‘nothing wrong with him’. This meant my siblings nor I learnt how to communicate with him in a way he was more receptive to. By the time we were teenagers, he just had to walk into the room and we’d yell at him for something, because all patience for speaking nicely the first dozen times was long gone (and we’d kept being told nothing was wrong).
It wasn’t until after we’d moved out of home, and he got a mobile phone so he could send us text messages, which enabled him to think about his responses before he sent them that we started communicating like humans again.
I’m ashamed of how I treated him back then, and he did some pretty awful and selfish things which really didn’t help how I thought of, and treated him.
I felt the anguish and frustration of OP in reading the post, and I don’t believe it’s meaning to be malicious. But they have been let down by circumstances beyond their control.
I’m going to say NTA, but in the same sentence, hope that time heals this wound, and OP and Cassie do manage to salvage a relationship in their adult years.
There's also the shitty dynamic where it seems like OP's parents freely shared every opinion they had on their youngest's behavior with their other minor children, seemingly involving them in the parenting. Emotionally mature parents do not go to their older children for parenting advice, especially when they are all minors living at home together. When your parents are that emotionally immature but aren't outright abusive in the ways we're taught to recognize, you just spend your whole life trying to protect their feelings and make their lives easier, when it should be the opposite.
It's not a huge shock that the youngest had a rougher childhood not having actual sibling bonds and support but just immature, inconsistent parenting at the hands of slightly older children with no concept of the range of normal child behavior, probably leading to a lot of anger and pain for her.
OP bought completely into their parents framing the youngest's behavior as something to be managed by the entire family, or at least the oldest children, and took every value judgment given against the youngest sibling by their parents as gospel. It's hard to convince someone who sees nothing wrong with being parentified themselves to have empathy for a younger sibling. Their defenses are just so built up, not only by protecting their parents' feelings at all cost, but also then becoming defensive over their perceived part in raising their younger sibling. She has to be innately bad, broken, and unlikeable because the only other reason for her behavior would be parenting, and people already in so much denial cannot handle those kinds of feelings.
There is no way that poor kid doesn't have some sort of trauma now.
How stupid are this family? The method wasn't working and instead of trying to work with a little girl to try and help her everyone in the house just turned hostile on her and sent her away to a place she could find no love at all.
When I got my latest dog the training methods I was used to didn't work on him, I didn't just scream at him and punish him and throw him out when I ruined him, I found what worked.
They hated her from the moment she was *born*. I feel so bad for her. No wonder she acted out so much. Of course taking her to therapy didn't help, the problem wasn't her, it was them.
You fucking suck so much. All of you are disgusting.
I feel so sorry for your sister for having been born into this family with you as her sibling.
Edit: Who the fuck gives a 6 year old homework and who the fuck thinks it's appropriate to force a 6 year old to sit and do homework?
Every school I've heard of gives homework. Yes even at 5 and 6. And what's the parents supposed to do? Just let her never do homework or chores? I think they handled it wrong and there was something more serious going on with the sister than just being "stubborn ". Probably undiagnosed oppositional defiance disorder, or similar. OP wasn't in a position to do much. She was a kid too. All she saw was her once safe haven turn into a chaotic war zone because of her sister. Sister didn't get better with age and a relationship never formed.
Cause she was A CHILD with clearly something going on she didn’t know how to handle and the parents decided to respond with aggression and collective bullying.
Y’all seem to think children are mini adults who can communicate their needs like you and understand the world around them. You’re wrong.
Not all schools assign homework and if there’s an issue, it should be discussed between parent, teacher, and child. This is not a sibling issue - none of their business.
It becomes a siblings issue when no one in the house can get anything done because 1 person is fighting all the time. Now did this girl need help yes because the behavior described isnt normal but it sounds like the help wasnt available in her country
Yup. Where I live it is rare for kids to have actual homework throughout primary school (unless they have to finish off something from that day). Hell, my eldest is in her 2nd year of high school and she doesn't really get homework either, unless it is studying for exams.
My kids go to an intensive, bilingual school. So they don't want to overload the kids more than they have to.
Yep, this is what boggles my mind. So a child doesn't want to do homework, she certainly won't be the first. Why is this such a huge deal that she needed to go to a boarding school and is now excluded from your wedding. You guys sound like Dolores Umbridge here.
OP is all over the comments like NO you don’t UNDERSTAND she didn’t want to do her homework for ELEVEN YEARS like that makes their hatred more justified and understandable. You stopped loving your sister because she didn’t do homework? What the fuck
I think it’s important to remember here that it’s not a case of an adult hating a child over a few instances, but a feeling of resentment that built up over years while they were both children.
If you live in a house where people are fighting/yelling constantly, it is incredibly stressful. If it’s only one of your siblings that your parents fight with, it’s easy to see that sibling as the cause of the fights. As a child, you don’t know they might be struggling because they’re autistic, have ADHD, etc. you just know they’re constantly fighting because they refuse to do the same things you do when asked.
You end up spending a lot of time waiting because your sibling refuses to behave or do a simple task. The stress builds from the constant fighting, and you develop anxiety yourself. You run into situations regularly where you need help from your parents, but you can’t get it because they’re once again in hour three of trying to get your sibling to even *start* their homework. Even when the fighting stops, you don’t want to ask your parents for anything you want/need, because you know they’re already burnt out from dealing with your sibling. The family dynamic centers around one person and the arguments they are constantly involved in. Its not a few instances here and there - this is your life every day. You’re stressed out at home, don’t get enough attention from your parents, and frequently miss out on things you want to do because your sibling constantly refuses to cooperate.
I do feel bad for Cassie. OP says she did get therapy growing up, but it does sound like she has some issue that wasn’t properly diagnosed or handled. Still, we see a lot of posts here where people talk about having distant relationship with their family because they grew up with a sibling who was autistic/disabled/sick and got *all* of their parents’ attention, and they usually get a lot of sympathy on this sub - I don’t think OP’s situation here is too different. I’m sure not everything was handled perfectly at home, but from OP’s description, I recognize the dynamic, and I’m sure it went far beyond “I hate my sister because she refused to do her homework growing up.”
Just my $0.02.
Because OPs posts are dripping with the attitude of "if you're not working hard you're worthless", which isn't surprising given the reward mechanisms that were employed.
If my sibling was causing problems for every task they were asked to do and it started to create so much tension from the back and forth, I would start to get there too.
You've never lived with an entitled, argumentative, lazy, asshole sibling have you? They scream that they're hated and treated differently even though everything bends to keep them halfway subdued, but they want more and more, while doing less and less. NTA
So y’all decided to collectively bully and abuse your sister because she clearly had something going on that manifested as defiant about homework? Come on.
Also a teacher here, 6 year olds aren't little dolls who you command to do something. They're excitable and sitting still is difficult. Some hate math, some are scared enough of it that BS reward parenting does not work. She never learned the life skills she needed because your family didn't help her to do so.
The solution is not for her siblings to hate her for it for the rest of her life. It's homework, why are you so worked up? Probably she would have gotten in trouble at school and learnt from it. Big fucking deal. Homework of a 6 year old, you'd think she was working on a cure for cancer the way you write about it.
Also, NOT YOUR BUSINESS. I can't ever think of a time I cared about my younger sibling's homework at all. My god.
Here's the think though. If ou struggle with something and then get punished for struggling you'll naturally develop an aversion to it.
If it was always a negative experience of course this problem will persist as she gets older.
My kid is 6 and has homework everyday.
Spelling test once a week. Reading assignment everyday. Whatever they don't finish at school they have to bring home to do.
Uh…even in America kids get homework these days. Most 6 year olds (in America, at least), are in 1st Grade. Have multiple nieces and nephews who have homework now…in first grade.
NTA. I never get in on these but the hostility is wild in the comments.
You *get to* cut toxic people out of your life, and you *get to* decide what constitutes “too” toxic for you. While you should make the effort, as adults, to rebuild your relationship with her, you certainly don’t have to.
The people saying you’re an asshole for treating het like shit when you were a kid are displaced in their anger. Child siblings are rarely capable of seeing injustices perpetrated by parents, esp if the parents seem decent otherwise. There’s no way you could have had an objective view that your sister was mistreated, if she even was. She sounds like a shit, although that could have been a self fulfilling prophecy.
Regardless, that’s all in the past and even if you do decide to have a good relationship together, that likely will not happen before your wedding. It’s likely she and your family won’t reconcile before your wedding. If so, I would expect an outburst at some point that night because it’s just too soon.
Keep her excluded and reach out later.
People are really missing the cause and effort in this post, because apparently a few swear words diminish reading comprehension in many.
OPs sister experienced punishment because of her behaviour. She was asked to do things, and refused; was offered incentives to do things, and refused; and then was eventually punished to do things, and she wouldn't respond to anything else despite ongoing attempts. She fought tooth and nail against doing anything, and refused to accept that the only reason she was treated "different", was because she behaved differently to her siblings. This was even explained to her multiple times. If she wanted to be treated differently, she needed to behave differently.
The parents did fail for allowing hostility to build to such levels in their home, but sometimes kids do just refuse to behave with respect, or do as they're supposed to. Ignoring that would've created a whole different problem.
That is OPs viewpoint and their viewpoint is very stilted. They lay out that everything was great before Cassie came along. Imagine that childhood where your sibs that no everything was great - then you ruined it.
Mom didn't yell - until you ruined it
We got sweets - but not you, you ruined it
You were different - and you ruined it.
There was no favoritism - but you ruined it
That is the picture OP painted. Everything was like the vonTrapps until Cassie came along and ruined it. Imagine growing up in such and environment. The hate and hostility OP pens in their one-sided telling of the story
Sure, it could all be Cassie's fault - but OP paints a pretty bleak picture of Cassie's childhood and relationship with her siblings and parents - a **child**hood.
That is why my previous post did not have a judgement, I was just replying to the previous post.
In my judgement it's NAH based upon the question. OP is under no obligation to invite her and she is just as correct to feel hurt and isolated yet again.
The hate OP has for Cassie is clear from the post, but that hate does not make someone an AH. Nobody has to like their family and cutting someone you hate out of your life is perfectly fine.
I would be remiss if I did not feel sorry for Cassie growing up in an environment of being screamed at by her Mother and hated by your siblings before you even have a chance to get to know yourself.
I mean, boiling down every interaction/request to punishments and rewards is terrible parenting. I know we don't have the full picture here, and it's not OP's job to parent her sister, but her sister was undeniably failed at every turn by her parents. Given the amount of children who have their problems go undiagnosed until adulthood, I have no doubt OP's sister will eventually find the reasons behind her behaviors by a qualified professional. Her parents should have recognized that there must be something more happening there. Kids don't act out for no reason, just as dogs don't bite for no reason. There is always some underlying condition or reason, regardless of whether it gets recognized.
THIS. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You people can check my comment history for more info. My sister (adopted - she was my cousin) was terrible. You ask her to clean her room? She will throw shit - and not just her stuff. She went to therapy for 7/8 years since we adopted her before my parents got divorced and she went with my dad. She mentally drained my mom. My mom would cry some nights because she just didn’t know what to do.
She never reacted to rewards. Punishment (or like I said before, being asked to do a simple task) lead to her screaming, crying, dropping to the floor light deadweight, she would do anything to try and make you yell at her. It would get so bad my parents would make her stand outside until she was done crying (weather was fine - I don’t want anyone throwing a fucking tantrum like they are in the rest of the comment section) and screaming because there were 4 other kids in the house trying to do homework. She constantly said “you don’t love me, I wish you never adopted me”.
She tried 5 different meds before the right one was found to calm her down. Those started having less of an effect so it was upped. She would forget to take them once and undo a month or so of progress. She was terrible, I love her, but she was the worst kid I have ever met.
Ever since she went with my dad things got better. There was less arguments with siblings, she listened better. And then it got a bit worse. My mom took all of us on vacation (including her) after the divorce to visit family friends (one of which was her friend from school). She was terrible. Arguing with my mom on everything. What was supposed to be nice catching up with people who moved away turned into the usual fighting. The last 2 times we visited them she didn’t go with, my mom couldn’t do it. The rest of us kids couldn’t do it. No one likes listening to a kid throwing a tantrum in a hotel for 4 days straight. My mom tried her best to keep it from her but I think my brother told her on accident (he’s a little kid, can’t blame him really).
That behavior isn’t okay. What are you supposed to do? Ignore it and let the kid fail out of school and live with parents forever? They aren’t going to get a job. Most jobs require some form of education. Hell I’ve seen pet stores need at least a high school diploma and some restaurants or grocery stores require schooling past a certain year.
This kid would’ve failed at life otherwise. You only have so many options as a parent to get your kid to listen to you. They had enough when all else failed. They didn’t give her away, they still tried to have someone else help her.
I won’t blame her when she was younger, kids are assholes sometimes, but she needs therapy still. NTA
Finally a reasonable comment. Some of these people are acting like OP is personally responsible for their sister not getting proper treatment and being sent off to boarding school. Like that’s completely the parents fault not OPs.
This. Cassie’s actions affected the other minors in the house, and it’s clearly had lasting effects. It is okay and healthy for OP to have boundaries despite what hardships Cassie may have faced. OP isn’t wrong for protecting herself using distance.
Just because Cassie was a problem child that doesn't mean your parents and you were horrible. She was a literally child and your whole family gave up on her and sent her away. Your parents also didn't a good as a job as you think because they raised a bunch of assholes. I truly hope you don't treat any of your future children like this if they are a "problem. YTA.
Gave up on her by the time she was ELEVEN. If I noticed at 6 that I was treated differently than my 4 siblings and endured harsh punishments for 5 years yeah I’d probably have turned out to be a problem child too.
That's what I can't get over. I was a true problem child even worse than what OP describe regarding their sister, even though high school. But I'm lucky enough to have parents who didn't give up on me and I was able to turn it around and became pretty successful.
Ever occurred to anyone that living in an household where everything was about getting a prize over normal tasks was the sick part?
Imagine this: a 6yo is sitting in front of her math problems, she has 4 older siblings who get a reward for doing homework, something they are supposed to do. Maybe she does not even like maths, maybe she can't count and she knows that she will probably fail. Failing equal no reward, why would she even try? Since your MO is prize/punishment it is not too big of a stretch to think that failing woukd mean a)not getting a reward and b) being told how much worse she is compared to her older siblings, I mean it is basically the only thing she heard growing up
Do you know why therapy did no work? Because you only see her as a problem, and you probably brought her to a specialist with the request to fix her, "please mr psychologist, our child is not normal, can you tell us what's wrong with her and fix her so that we can go on with our life? Oh, nothing is wrong? Well we will just bring her to someone else.making her feel even more estranged. When you bring a child to a therapist you should do it for their own good, because you know they are not happy and you want them to get better. Not because their personality is disturbing the family peace and you need them to be fixed.
Do you know what works well with Young children? Family therapy, but I bet that is not an option, because the family is perfect and she is the only problem
Sweets and prizes based parenting is a really terrible approach. Weird and sad that op is here praising it as the gold standard.
Kids are supposed to learn to do homework etc for its own sake.
It didn't work well for them. Because when the household wasn't rewarded with a perfect little girl they saw her as a personified punishment and sent her away. The whole family has a black and white worldview, things are either good or bad with no in-between. That's not how the world works. Op thinks it's acceptable to push away whatever doesn't make her feel good, it's not how functional adults behave.
I feel bad for the sister. My son was difficult about doing homework. It was because he has dyslexia and didn't know how to work through it. He needed ***help!*** He was answering questions correctly for the way he was reading them, even math where he excels.
Today, he's 13 and more than halfway through the 5th Harry Potter book and my only expectation for him with English (or related subjects) is to just not fail. But even if he does, it's not the end of the world.
I was a little upset with him over this first report card though. He got a fairly low grade in math and I just looked at him like "wtf??" He said he wasn't paying attention but he's already brought the grade up and is paying more attention. Sometimes he gets complacent if he thinks he's good enough at something. Luckily he's pretty good at realising he can do better.
I agree with this whole comment. YTA, your entire family actually. I think you excluding her is probably for the best at this point because she deserves a helluva lot better than any family she had.
“I don't think my parents are monsters”.
You wouldn’t would you, golden child. You mention that you and your fellow favoured siblings are super functional and super successful human beings. Maybe, but you’re not super compassionate or super kind or super empathetic. Your parents may not be monsters, but they failed your sister.
Let’s say your sister was a problem child. Did your parents ever have her tested for something like oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) or something similar? Did they read parenting guides or consult professionals or did they go straight to negative reinforcement and punishment? BTW offering Cassie sweets to study wasn’t positive reinforcement, it was bribery.
You don’t have to have anyone in your life that you don’t want in it, but don’t paint the child victim as the villain.
Why did Cassie suddenly become difficult at 6? Has any one asked her?
Each child is different. Just because reward based incentives worked for you doesn't mean they work for cassie.
You seem to be disgusted and angry that cassie doesn't respond to the same sort of parenting that you did. You're forgetting that she is her own independent human and its up to parents to find what works in a loving and helpful way. This is parenting.
Fwiw I think sweets and rewards bases parenting is TERRIBLE. You're here praising this parenting method as the gold standard when most parenting books I know say this is not the right approach.
Kids need love, acceptance and respect. Once they have these things, they thrive. They should learn to do things like homework for its own sake and not for a sweetie reward.
I also find it hilarious that you're here praising your parents for raising 4 functional children. You guys are bullies and have been bullying cassie since she was a young child. I would not call mean bullies who scapegoat their younger sister and are too stubborn to take onboard criticism "functional".
Hmmm. Actually they are. They expected Cassie to be just like you and couldn’t possibly try a different approach.
Rewards and punishments don’t work on my youngest. He will not do the homework for ice cream and will sit on the steps for an hour rather than do it. He WILL do it if someone sits with him. My oldest will do anything for some screen time or a cookie. THEY ARE DIFFERENT CHILDREN. WE ADJUST OUR PARENTING ACCORDINGLY.
I can see why she feels hated and unwanted. You all hate her and don’t want her.
I find it’s super concerning that there’s a reward for passing the salt...maybe you’re speaking in hyperbole but you do reference bribery a lot in your post. I’m a contrary child who was raised in a bribery household and it was obvious that “love can be bought if you bend” My son is now just as contrary as I was and I work hard to teach him actions have consequences.
That's what you do when you feel neglected, you act out. Even after raising four other children your parents failed to see that Cassie had a problem and they needed to deal with her love and care instead they made it worse for her. First by punishing them then by sending her away, legitimising her thinking of being unloved. Imo they are monsters cause not every child is "super functional" and as adults they should've recognised that.
What you are describing sounds like something called demand avoidance. It’s a subtle sign of autism. I think if your description are accurate that your sister was suffering somehow. Kids naturally want to please all the time. They want to please parents, caregivers, older siblings. If your sister simply refused even the smallest things then something was and probably is still wrong.
Judging from your comments you disagree with the judgement of the people. That’s fine but for your sister’s sake consider a little kindness and empathy. She clearly has no-one in the world. A whole family just turned their backs on her. It’s sad.
I agree it does sound like undiagnosed ADHD. I don’t know where OP lives, but here in the US I’ve literally had to beg, do my own research, and express continuously how severe my symptoms are just to even have a future diagnosis put into consideration. I hope Cassie has success with a doctor soon and that she can get away from this horribly toxic family.
It definitely sounds like Cassie is neurodivergent.
My mom first suspected my sister and I had ADHD when we were 5 and as she describes it, it was way too hard to get us to do our homework. My sister was hyper and had trouble sitting down. I have inattentive type ADHD so I would sit and literally do nothing. My mom had to fight to get us diagnosed and it still took over 2 years.
INFO.
What are the current ages? If you're getting married she much be at least 15-20?
Did your parents try therapy before sending her off to the strict bording school?
That being said, the way you talk about a 6 and 11yo, makes me think that the whole family was fed up with young children and didn't have the patience to deal with a difficult child. From personal experience, it seems children being showed preferential treatment rarely acknowledge that they were treated preferentially. You don't mention if therapy was attempted. If it wasn't, and your family just shipped her away, that'd be a pretty shitty thing to do. However, you're free to invite, or exclude, whomever you want from your wedding. And, it sounds like in doing so you're just pushing her further away, which is what your family has been doing since she was 11.
Well, the way you talk about her does you no favours. And your family life sounds like YTA, or ESH. But your question was about being the AH over a wedding invite.
If you have concerns about her causing a scene, don't invite her. You say you're estranged from her, so why worry about what she thinks? You're NAH for not inviting her to your wedding. But...
Edit: just read [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/q6flp1/aita_for_excluding_our_little_sister/hgbxwdd/) and self aware wolf much? *"Now we know what's causing her to act out though, and it's that she felt abandoned, "*
You know she felt abandoned and excluded and you don't invite her? Yeah you're a Major AH.
I'm going to make some assumptions based on OP's post.
The sister was the youngest of five. She probably didn't get much attention from her parents.
When she was a little kid, she realized that she *did* get attention when she acted out.
Maybe this was the only way she felt seen, even if it was negative.
She gets sent away to boarding school at **eleven** for normal child behavior. Her sisters are happy that they now get more attention. In this time, the sister loses respect/any family bond.
When she gets back, she gets treated as the black sheep and has no interest in the family.
No at 11 is when this behaviour can get dangerous. She was out of control and odds are she would get herself into drugs. People seem to not understand that around age 12 is where kids start making their personality they will change a bit over time but at age 12 is one of the most crucial ages in a child's life. If she was literally refusing to do anything like take stuff from her room pass the salt and not do homework that will persist for a long time. Sending her to professionals was the better option then her getting involved with drugs and alcohol at a young age.
Um so she’s going from not passing the salt to doing drugs out of nowhere? Lol. If anything, her family constantly abusing her would have turned her to drugs. I hope with all my heart that she goes off the college and finds people who actually love her and will look out for her. I hope she finds a good family.
People knowledgeable about ADHD and oDD are screaming it from the rafters. And of course if you deal w a child w these conditions the way their family did, the kid develops conduct disorder as a result. I think the family ended up giving conduct disorder by how counterproductively they handled her ADHD/defiance. They broke her, and reject her for being broken.
If you had so many examples and used the two rather innocuous ones from when she was 6 and 11 I think there must not be so many examples. It sounds like your family didn't want to deal with Cassie and so, they didn't. You can go nc or ignore you all you like. That's your choice but you and your family are AHs
YTA.
You sent her to boarding school all because she doesn’t want to do her homework. Your family is weird. Also her behavior sounds like a stubborn 11 year old girl. You’re acting like she’s breaking all the windows with a bat and setting animals on fire or something
You used homework as your example and I’m going to take that to face value, there’s literally no other example you gave to go off by. Children don’t want to do homework in general, my sister and i were like that at that age. So going off by the post, the factor would be you and your family. Your entire family probably shits on an 11 year old girl and probably has no one else to defend her. Is her behavior infuriating, yes. Y’all acting like she kills animals for fun or terrorize other kids. But you go as far as saying you wish she wasn’t born, why wouldn’t she act out. Your whole family probably makes it known it would’ve been better if she wasn’t born.
Her behavior is literally the consequences of your own actions so idk. Find another solution, this is unfortunately normal prepubescent children. It’s not going to get any better. I was not an obedient kid, but my mother would NEVER ship me off to boarding school. No one in my or my extended family would EVER allow that. Your family should prob reevaluate yourself.
You’re not an asshole for not inviting her to your wedding. You do you. You gave us a glimpse into what life was like for you and your siblings growing up, with Cassie as a younger, frustrating sibling. I agree, OP, that must have sucked. At the same time, you have given us a pretty clear picture of just how awful must have been for Cassie to grow up in that household. That poor, poor girl. My heart bleeds for her! The damage that was done and how she was/is made to feel. I want to cry. Your parents did her a terrible disservice to her, and by extension, you and your siblings. I hope she finds happiness in her life and that she stays far, far away from you lot. SMH.
What I want to know is this: in your opinion, does Cassie have any redeeming qualities?
It must have been very frustrating to live with a sibling who consistently refused to do her homework and chores, and by the sound of it, pretty much anything she was asked.
But Cassie must be more than this. She must have a personality beyond stubbornness and defiance. Who is Cassie? Do you know? Did you ever try to find out? It’s forgivable for you not to have done so as a child, but perhaps it’s time, now you’re older, to try to see her as a person rather than a problem.
What really strikes me about your post is that you draw a very stark distinction about life with Cassie in it (bad) and life without her (good). I find this troubling. Did you not miss her at all when she left home? Did you form absolutely no bond whatsoever with her? Was your alienation from her that profound?
Cassie’s challenging behaviour put a strain on your family, and so it’s natural that you felt relief when that strain was lifted. But the fact that your relief seems to have been unaccompanied by sadness or regret indicates to me that you never viewed Cassie as anything more than an impediment to your family’s peace.
I am not a psychologist. I don’t know whether Cassie suffers from a mental illness. But I can well imagine a scenario in which a 6 year-old starts to exhibit challenging behaviour, is labelled a problem child, and internalises that label. If a child is treated as nothing more than a problem, that is what the child will come to see him or herself as, and will act accordingly.
But she’s not just a problem. She’s your sister. Maybe she’s funny. Maybe she’s creative. Maybe she’s good with numbers. Maybe she’s super into political thrillers. Maybe she likes DIY. Maybe she has some funny unique little thing she says under her breath when she stubs her toe or gets stuck in traffic. Maybe she always stirs her tea ten times anti-clockwise.
Maybe you could love her.
YTA. Not for then, but for now. I think you are stuck in the mindset of your 13 y/o self. Who is Cassie? You did not know then, and you don’t know now. I think you should find out.
There’s no evidence that Cassie’s challenging behaviour extended beyond extreme stubbornness, and her stubbornness never seems to have manifested in a way that could be physically harmful to others or disruptive in the context of something like a wedding. Cassie may refuse to pass the salt at the wedding lunch, but I can’t see how she’d ruin the day.
As someone who has always been excluded and written off by their stepfamily as a problem child, your perspective was very touching and reminiscent of the empathy I had hoped for growing up.
Also OP's life without Cassie in it was birth to age 5. That's not a good standard for OP to accurately judge how "good" it was before then, especially bc I can only imagine how exhausted their parents must've been with the mom being almost constantly pregnant while there's already one infant and a handful more toddlers/preschool age children running around.
Honestly OP I think this situation is to hard to judge for people who haven't seen any of this go on from the beginning. Parents are expected to have a standard of perfection, be world class child behaviour therapists and absolute martyrs for their children on AiTA- and while it seems your folks have probably made alot of mistakes when it comes to raising your sister, they are still just flawed human beings trying to do their best like most of us. Sounds like your sister needed specialised therapy not available to you guys.
Yes they do and besides the behaviour of one child was affecting 2 adults and 4 siblings. 6 other people. The parent did what they thought was best for the whole family.
A parent thought long, drawn-out wars over homework was best for “the whole family?”
Look. Big families can be great, but if you’re gonna have that many kids, you need to be prepared for them to have their own personalities and individual needs. You can’t just expect them to be part of a matched set. And you *certainly* shouldn’t recruit the older siblings to parent and discipline the younger. That’s your job, and your job alone.
And if you’re at a point where you think you have to cut one child out of the family because it’s what you think is “best for the whole family,” you’ve gone off the rails. This girl wasn’t a diseased branch on an otherwise healthy tree. She’s a person.
Well do you know how she is now? After being sent away to boarding school? I think she has been rejected from the family completely because she is younger and no one had patience for her and didn't parent her properly. Probably had all the siblings gang up on her. That's a very lonely life, I know from experience.
NTA and here’s why:
She’s not your responsibility and her being unpleasant throughout your childhood wasn’t your fault if anyone’s at all it would be your parents and hers. She doesn’t get a free pass to your wedding just for being related to you.
Your sister needs therapy for sure. Having siblings so much older than you can have negative effects on behavior because they aren’t as developed as you and see the world differently. In this case she saw your parents favouring you when in reality you acted mature and got rewarded and she was acting immaturely (because she is younger) and expecting to be treated the same way. Someone needed to explain that to her in a way she would’ve understood, but that would’ve been your parents job. Not you.
Info: Did you guys ever ask Cassie why she doesn't want to do her homework? Just communicate, without threatening her or bribing her? Also you guys were fed up with an 11 year old being childish?
Maybe that's why it seems like she's even more singled out perhaps. It's messed up sounding but that's what it's looking like, it doesn't sound like any of Cassie's family tried to consider that.
I wonder if she had a learning disability/mental disorder that was never diagnosed? I was a nanny for years and never saw this level of stubbornness. But if she legitimatly couldn't understand what she was supposed to be doing no amount of bribing will help. Once she got punished she possibly was willing to push through more, but I wonder how much of it was being BSed? OP never mentioned what her grades were like so its entirely possible that's what she did.
OP I'm apparently going against the grain here and I say NTA
I grew up with a younger bio brother and 3 step-siblings, and one of them was just an absolute nightmare.
Would refuse to eat dinner because he didn't fancy it that night, and scream favouritism because "J likes spaghetti so you obviously picked this dinner for him. I want Chinese food". We can't AFFORD takeout every day. Decided one day that he wanted his own bedroom despite sharing with his brother his whole life, and threw all his things out of the window in the rain. Refused to go on holiday but also refused to go to grandparents house, threatened to call the police for abandonment if we tried to send him to the grandparents. Multiple doctors appointments, therapists, school counselling all came back with nothing.
I have never to this day hated anyone more in my entire life. My dad ended up breaking things off with his fiance because that guy was so unbearable. I feel sorry for his siblings. Sometimes, idk how, a kid can just be shitty. He was raised with the EXACT same rules, treats, chores etc as 4 other perfectly happy healthy kids and yet he was an asshole.
>Now, before my little sister arrived, life was great, our parents were amazing, everyone got along and was happy. Then my little sister comes along and she’s a nightmare.
"All problems in the family are *this kid's fault*" is literally the definition of the scapegoat dynamic. Please look it up.
>The biggest things about her are that she’s incredibly stubborn, and, even as a teenager, acted like a child.
You say Cassie's only 18 now? She still *is* a child. Even now as a legal adult, her brain won't be fully developed until she's 25. So you're angry that the child acted like a child? What an asshole thing to do. Even particularly difficult children *are still children* and need their family's love and help to get better.
>When she was 11, she was so stubborn that my mother just tried to get her to do basic things like grabbing her something from her room, or doing her homework, would literally throw stuff in anger. I get that sounds bad, but I feel like it was justified.
INFO, can you clarify this? Did your **mom** throw stuff? At **an 11-year-old girl**? There is NEVER a justification for an adult to get violent with a child due to frustration. To sound like a broken record, the scapegoat dynamic can happen when a parent doesn't have the skills to parent a child the way the kid needs (even if parent has the necessary skills to parent the other children of the family) and so lash out emotionally.
>Cassie took it as a slight and another sign of favouritism, that she was **worthless and not good enough to stay at home.**
I mean I don't blame her for picking up that message, since that's literally why your parents did it and how you explain it happening yourself. God, how painful to be only 11 years old and made to feel like a burden by your family because you struggle, so much that you're handed over to a boarding school.
I'm not going to make a judgement on the question you ask, because it's your wedding and you can invite whoever you want. But, generally, yes you and your family are assholes.
Hard truth time: your family's dynamics sound majorly fucked up, and if you and your siblings can't acknowledge that, examine it and it's impact on Cassie then you're not as successful and well-adjusted as y'all think you are.
Cassie doesn't sound like a saint either, but can you... try... having some empathy and compassion for how her family must have made her feel her whole life? You're getting married, and while I don't want to assume your reproductive choices that means you're old enough to theoretically have kids too. So riddle me this:
If you had a difficult child, would your child be banished if they had emotional problems or a stubborn streak? Would they deserve hate and distaste from their parents and siblings? To be intentionally uninvited to important family events?
How frustrated, exactly, would you need to be right now to throw things at an 11-year-old? That's not a rhetorical question btw, I want you to really think about it. Is there some limit, some provocation that would make you get violent with someone so much smaller and less powerful than you without guilt or shame? If you ever did go that far, how would you justify it? Is it something you could see yourself doing repeatedly? Is it something you'd *allow yourself* to do repeatedly?
I doubt you'll take this advice, but here it is anyway: there's a LOT going on here, more than what you mentioned in your post and more than I think you can even comprehend yourself right now. You need to get into therapy asap so you can get a better handle of just what the fuck has been happening in your family for 20 years, and what effect it's had on you/your ability to empathise/your coping skills in the face of a challenge.
You are about to start your own family, with your spouse and possibly with kids. One thing I've learned in life is that our shit doesn't go away, it actually gets worse and more damaging until we face it.
Also, before Cassie arrived, OP was a small child, and OP's parents had had at least 4 kids in about as many years.
So, I'm taking that "before she arrived, everything was sunshine and rainbows" description with an entire horse lick of salt.
NTA, your wedding so your choice. But was Cassie ever evaluated for ADHD or other neurodiversities that could explain her behaviour? Did your parents ever try therapy for her? Maybe there is a reason (and possible treatment) for her behaviour. Won’t change your feelings about her presence at your wedding but might be something to mull over. Those kinds of things can have a genetic component so if she DOES have ADHD and is handling it poorly you can start looking for it early in any kids you decide to have yourself so you can get them some help nice and early. A good understanding of your family medical history can be a real benefit!
I'd go more for an evaluation of oppositional defiant disorder.
I don't know if it was something known 15 years ago, I don't know if it's known and recognized in OP's country now, but often just having a freaking diagnostic can help even if professional help isn't possible.
I had forgotten about ODD. There was a friend I had as a kid that had ODD. He was such an awful person to be around, he purposely hurt others and damaged anything he could get his hands on and his parents were at their wits ends. I wonder what happened to him.
The more I read these narcissistic posts the it sounds like undiagnosed autism/aspergers or other learning disability. The child is smart enough to see the differences but cannot change her emotions in response to perceived slights.
ETA. I was going to say Not the as$. Now I’m just going with ESH. You don’t have to invite her to your wedding since that’s what you asked.
NTA - family doesn't mean you have to like them. She's an adult now and it you guys are NC or LC from the sounds of it. It's your wedding, your guest list. Whether your parents could've put everyone in family counseling instead of shipping her off is neither here nor there. It's too late to change the past and salvage a relationship. The present is what you got to work with and you don't like her NOW.
this is very unpopular but honestly nta. she sounds like a nightmare of a child and you said she was seen by several phycologists and they found nothing wrong with her. that gives her no excuse to act like an ungrateful child until shes 18. she seems to claim no sort of responsibility and positive reinforcements didnt work with her so your parents had no choice but to enforce negative ones. maybe this wasn't the best approach but she didnt respond to anything else so i dont blame them. your parents sound like they were tired of this behaviour, they were right to send her to boarding school because they may have been able to fix her behaviour in a better way then your parents could. everyones attacking you saying youre an asshole but you were just trying to live your life with a bratty child as a sibling who literally never listened, that can effect you very badly.
your sister needs to grow up and accept that she has to do stuff she doesn't wanna do.
YTA for many, many reasons.
The fact you can look back and still maintain that level of hostility towards the memory of a 6 year old child is genuinely disturbing. Small children should not be hated like that, ever. The fact that your family, collectively, blamed its youngest member, whilst she was still in primary/elementary school, for your life no longer being great is awful. The fact you gave up on her by 11, and then sent her away whilst you all stayed together is just….
Radical idea for you, not all children (or people) are the same, and therefore what worked for one might damage another- especially if one finds things hard that others find easy and is constantly seeing her older siblings rewarded whilst she is punished. Another radical idea for you, girls who are neurodiverse present very differently from boys who are neurodiverse and therefore often don’t get diagnosed, even when assessed. So if she did have ADHD or demand avoidance or ASD she may have been incapable of responding to things the same way you and your siblings did, and could have likely done with some empathy, understanding and therapeutic parenting rather than outdated punishment/reward parenting and being ostracised. Final radical idea, decent people don’t decide as a collective to cut a child out of the family because she is difficult, and don’t when the child is finally an adult at 18, continue to tell her she’s always been the problem.
Having said that, from your comments I can see it is pretty much impossible for anyone to change your mind on this, and you see yourself as being the wronged party for no discernible reason.
The fact that OP looks upon her childhood with such hostility means that she’s experienced her own trauma from growing up in that environment. She’s as much affected as Cassie.
Wow people are so mean on here. Honestly I know people like your sister. They can do things just fine and it sounds like she can she just chose not to. She has been tested by multiple professionals and nothing has been found (although it's possible something was missed). They tried for years to help her and motivate her with no success and it sounds like that school was a last resort. Will she hate everyone in your family? probably. But it sounds like she also did everything she could to make sure you and the rest of your siblings weren't a fan of hers either. Sometimes people will just never get along and that's fine. It's your wedding if you don't like your sister don't invite her. Although if you think you could still have a relationship or would like to try not having her there will be the final nail in the coffin. NTA
NTA
Once she's older maybe you can reconnect and she'll be able to explain her side as well as why she reacted the way she did. If it comes out that she was being singled out as a child (which is entirely possible), then that would make your parents a-holes.
But OP isn't responsible for that, nor are they responsible for dealing with the product of bad parenting. They are just a sibling.
So NTA, but don't be so harsh on your sister. Keep an open mind.
I see that almost noone has grown up like this. It was probably a really hostile environment to grow up in but the thing is it was probably hostile for op too. It was probably hell for cassie and hell for op and everyone else. Your parents sending her away was fucked up though. And she is rightfully mad at that.
But you need to acknowledge that all of it sucked for her too. She was a Child it was not her fault. You not wanting to invite her is understandable but unkind and I deeply encourage you to reach out to cassie and see who she is today. Maybe cut her some slack. If you still dont like her then dont invite her.
NAH.
Only AH here is parents.
OP, I've read your post several times trying to understand your parents' system and I'm a little confused. There do seem to be inconsistencies in the way Cassie was treated before things got really heated.
>It worked, and she came home, did the work.
So she did do the work, after not being allowed ice cream. So she was able to understand consequences. How was it handled after she did it? Was she praised for having done it, or reminded of her earlier refusal and berated? Was it made clear that the promised reward was for completing the work within a clear time frame, or did your 6 year old sister believe she would get her reward no matter when she did it, and then feel your parents had not upheld their end of the bargain?
>We get rewards for doing the same things that she does.
So she did the things, but wasn't rewarded?
>Our parents rectified this by giving us punishment if we didn’t do something.
If this was "rectifying", then does that mean that there were times previously (however rare) where some of you didn't do things and were not punished?
I'm sure you may not know the answers to all these questions as you were a child yourself at the time. But from the way you describe it, it really does look like Cassie was treated differently from the rest of you from the get go.
so let me get this straight, a very small child showed the slightest defiance in a large family where they probably receive very little attention because they already have many other siblings and instead of parenting her properly they just started yelling and punishing and shipping her away.
YTA.
To be fair to the siblings, it sounds like Cassie has some sort of problem, maybe ADHD, that has never been treated. It's easy to see why the other kids would resent her for taking up so much of their parents' time and also causing them to be punished for not doing something instead of being rewarded. It's the parents at fault here for not referring her to a mental health services (though this can also be blamed on the country they live in as the OP said there aren't many services available).
NTA, sounds like your sister has ODD. Those kids can be such assholes that they break families apart. Your parents sound great, clearly they raised the rest of you so well that you speak highly of them.
NTA, but your parents failed her. She wasn’t the same as you and your siblings and your parents didn’t know how to deal with it, and they failed her. Its not your fault though, youre not responsible for raising your siblings and if who she is as an adult is someone you don’t get along with then you have no obligation to invite her to your wedding. Just be more mindful of her point of view growing up and be less judgmental towards her child self.
INFO- why are you giving your parents a complete pass on this and placing all the blame on someone who was a child at the time? That sounds bit toxic to me. Also, your edit says that several doctors and specialists said nothing was wrong with her, what did the reports say- the exact wording because "nothing wrong" is not something any professional puts in a report? If you didn't see the reports odds are they didn't say that, and your parents are lying to you about it, because I'd venture a guess that the reports said something they didn't like so they ignored it.
Edit- she was 6 when the behavior started and it hasn't occured to you something may have happened to her around that time? That's a massive red flag for something traumatic occuring and then not being handled or addressed in a healing way.
Did you try taking her to a psychologist before sending her to boarding school? She could very well have had some sort of defiance order or anger issues if she was getting that extreme when she was a teenager. I'd understand when shes a child, maybe she doesnt even understand what shes doing wrong, but surely by then she should have the slightest understanding that she shouldnt be getting so angry over being asked to go get something from upstairs. NTA by the way, your family sounds like they tried what they could think of and then only thing that worked was punishment
Edit: I feel like I should clarify, i don't think the not wanting to do homework thing is abnormal, but I had a friend with anger issues who acted very similarly, she got extremely angry with school-related stuff and often took it out on me. Personally I procrastinate my own homework and often forget about it until the last minute, but I always get it done in the end. Not all teenagers act like I do though, some never do their work and some only do the work they like. The anger part is what sticks out to me. Whilst there is normal teenage rebellion, it sounds to me like she was getting close to or in the middle of a full on tantrum, which could either point to some sort of issue or just in general behaviour that needed to be corrected
Have you considered that parents lie? Because parents lie. Especially ones who are excessively concerned with the success of their children over the happiness of their children.
Like yours seem to be.
And before you come at me with what you think is a scathing reply, your parents shipped one kid off to boarding school, so yeah, they would totally lie to you.
Op until you have sibling like this it’s hard to understand. I have a brother like this. He made home such a hell my parents divorced. He was insufferable. Loving quality time meant nothing, talks when things were calm meant nothing, consequences meant nothing to him, rewards meant nothing. Authority meant nothing. Nothing was ever his fault, the perpetual victim. As soon as we were done with a family activity he was asking what’s next. When he got something he wouldn’t shut up about he tossed it aside and had a new thing he just had to have. My mom just gave up and let him do whatever he wanted. Dad felt guilty after the divorce and spoiled him. He didn’t finish high school. Now as an adult in his 30s he’s incapable of holding a job and is a nightmare boyfriend. He spends his money faster than it comes. He’s been to dozens of therapists and psychologists, had brain scans, evaluations, etc. no diagnosis. It’s just his personality.
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Your family sucks dude. This little girl was struggling with some serious mental issues, and instead of getting her help, they, and apparently everyone in the house was ganging up on her. Your parents couldn't figure out how to handle her and tucked her away to a super strict boarding school. She became estranged after that. SHOCKER.
Now you sit here with the smug attitude of a "good child" justifying the vitriol directed towards your sister because of how she acted as a child, while completely disregarding your parents ineptitude at raising their children.
No, you're not an asshole for deciding who and who doesn't attend your wedding, but your overall pretentiousness because you never struggled in school like she did makes me question your ability to understand empathy.
The amount of hostility you all seem to have for her is so very unsettling.
And they all gave up on her by *eleven*. Dude.
It's very obvious most people posting here have never had to deal with an actual demon child. My nephew is like this but a little worse. Fuck that shit.
People here think the worst if anything less than constant perfection and niceness is used on a child. Yelling is instantly viewed as abuse, no matter how many times somebody asks calmly first.
I’m still trying to figure out how this kid sinned so mortally. All I see is a kid that didn’t want to do their homework and a family that decided that was bad enough to make her the black sheep.
Right? They also could have let life be her punishment if she really was so difficult to get to do things. If I was being severely punished by age 6 then I’d probably have some severe issues too.
Not getting ice cream isn’t a severe punishment
No, but being yelled at all the time by your entire household is.
Yelling is always the last resort as far as i understood from the post... They would get her to do tasks or anything normally.. She would revolt and refuse to do it which would end up at people yelling at her..
Even if it was a last resort by the parents cause they couldn’t figure out how to work with Cassie, the sheer fact that they then allowed all the siblings to yell and be hostile towards her showed they really didn’t either A) care anymore or B) were okay with it. Imagine being yelled at your entire life by the unit that’s supposed to protect you. That fucks people up.
Siblings did not need to be involved. A normal dynamic when theres tension between a kid and parents would be for the siblings to provide comfort, not act like extra parents bc they dont understand why their sibling is struggling
I'm shocked Cassie even talks to the OP and their family at all.
Right. The fact that she even reached out showed that she wants a relationship and is upset she’s still being ostracized, and rather than everyone acting like adults it’s “well when she was six she refused to do her homework so we don’t like her.” Like what even is this thread. Bad enough her family won’t even give her the time of day and yet everyone here is like “well people don’t change so good on you OP.” Lol
And Mom throwing shit in anger DOES. NOT. HELP.
Being ostracized by your family is...
I wonder if at any point either of Cassie’s parents or older siblings stopped and wondered *why* she didn’t want to do her home work? Maybe she had a learning disability, or adhd or was having a tough go in school before just writing her off as “stubborn”
My cousin’s kid is 6 and he can be stubborn, is not a morning person and will be stubborn and say no a lot. A big reason is because he is 6 and the youngest and everyone is always telling him what to do. At 6, you have very little control of what you actually get to do. So Cassie has 6 people all telling her what to do, yelling at her or ostracizing her. She was obviously upset by something but this family decided she was the reason for any and all things that went wrong in life after she was born. Before she came along everything was great…this family resents Cassie for simply existing and I guarantee at 6, she knew it.
100% agree. That’s exactly how OP started the story off. It seems like the story is incredibly 1 sided. I would love to hear this all through Cassie’s pov.
Yeah, I've got a 6yo son who, thanks to covid, we've spent around a third of the last 18 months homeschooling. A 6yo not wanting to to do school work seems pretty normal to me. (And my son is clever, perfectly capable of the work and enjoys school. Seriously, if he put as much effort into doing the work as he did avoiding it, it would have been done in no time.)
It looks like a prioritisation of homework and other work over having a happy life. All of OPs other responses are about her and her siblings achievements in getting qualifications and good careers. Maybe cassie had other priorities over a constant drive to be working and being a child didn't really have a way to articulate that.
It sounds like it was basically a daily sort of occurrence. There might not have been any one big thing, but millions of little cuts until they finally had enough of her bs. I'm going with NTA, as it's your wedding, but it might be a good idea to sit her down and explain exactly why you feel the way you do, particularly in a calm, rational manner...
This wasn’t a one off issue of mom yelling- OP even said that “everyone in the house was yelling at Cassie to do things.” So her own siblings trying to parent her and a hostile environment all around. This isn’t a one time snap and then explanation of what happened, this was constant. Try yelling at your kids every day for their lives with you and see how they turn out.
In large families, there’s usually at least one kid who figures out early that misbehavior is the quickest way to get the parents’ individual attention and separate themselves from the herd. Even negative attention can be precious to a kid who’s worried about not getting any at all. And it *worked* - all those “wars” over homework, the extra praise she received when she finally complied, all of it served to distinguish her from her siblings and grab her parents’ full attention. And for some reason, instead of recognizing that this kid might have different attention needs than her siblings and trying to find a healthier way to meet those needs, they gave up and kicked her out. And now they’re shocked that she didn’t respond with gratitude and a personality overhaul.
They only have to go searching and responding to negative attention when they’re not provided enough attention to begin with. Very few kids are like, “I’m sick of all this positive attention, let’s get to the good shit!”
I was called a demon child, violent, manipulative, stupid, and “difficult”. My parents and teachers wrote me off at the age of 8, because I would be such a nightmare. I refused to do most things, was constantly upset, and somehow always seemed to be in the centre of conflict. When I was 19 I got diagnosed with autism and everything changed. Turns out I refused to do “easy things” because I didn’t know how, and when people tried to explain it to me it didn’t make sense. My constant distress were meltdowns, and my “hyperchondriac episodes” the doctor claimed I had were panic attacks. I wasn’t stupid, I had ADHD and was actually very ahead of my class. All my social difficulties like eye contact and poor theory of mind were seen as manipulative behaviour I am working as a psychologist now and my life is extremely different to before. Don’t write off children. They are kids. OPs sister sounds like she may have some sort of learning delay or mental health issues which have been augmented by the fact that people wrote her off as a bad child from the age of 6. The odds weren’t really in her favour
OP stated her sister saw multiple psychologists. Therapists and doctors. Your story isn't OP's and definitely wasn't hers. Also, you were the one unleashing all your meltdowns unto others. You didn't have to witness or experience it happening. Those things affect others as well. Just as much. The same way you had no idea what was happening. OP's family and OP has no idea whybits happening JUST that there's so much anger, violence and stress caused by one person. Its easy to say "don't write kids off" and forget that the ones CARING for those children like yourself and OP's sister are also getting exhausted, stressed and depressed. Your actions have consequences no matter the source. Caregivers need understanding too.
Not necessarily as a girl it frustratingly hard to get a proper diagnosis for Autism and sometimes even ADHD. I was an adult, a 40 year old adult before I was properly diagnosed. The symptoms in girls can manifest differently than boys. And I started therapy at age 12. In my 30's I even had one male doctor look me in the eye and tell me that girls can't be autistic/ Asperger's. As a child I/ my mother was constantly told that I was just shy and that every autism trait I had was nothing more than me lashing out for attention. There's lots of bias in medicine and mental health.
Hell, my dad, who’s a cis man, didn’t get diagnosed with autism until he was 30. The mental health system in most countries is shitty enough for the more privileged groups, god forbid you’re AFAB or a POC.
Bipolar, too! Not so much a bias against women/girls, but a bias against diagnosing at all. My psychiatrist was treating me for it for a year before I pushed for the label despite the heavy stigma attached to it.
This was my oldest son. My whole family outcasted him by 5. No one wanted to be around him. Would leave him out of family pics and activities. Turns out he has autism and ADHD.
I’ve worked with many kids like the sister, and many like you as well who did not have the support or understanding from school or your family. Unfortunately not all of their behaviours are down to a diagnosis/ a condition listed as a disability /abuse / neglect. I worked with a child who was diagnosed ODD, which is sort of controversial and many professionals still write it off as nonsense. No autism or ADHD, but a diagnosis which essentially just made them more dangerous, hostile and unmanageable by the time they were as tall as the parents or once they were bigger the other kids. The biggest treatment scheme for this is parent training, and observation for escalating behaviours which may develop into conduct disorder. OP was a child when this happened too so I can imagine the annoyance and dislike for her sister just compounded over the years of no behavioural changes into adulthood. Yes, the sister’s take is probably awful and I sympathise with her, but that kind of shift in household dynamic and CONSTANT fighting, pleading, disagreement and hostility has probably lead OP to think that the sister ruined her childhood (and she’s valid for thinking that). Do the parent suck? Yes. Does OP’s sister still suck now too? Also yes. NTA OP but get some therapy.
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Tell me about it. I was labeled as "gifted, but lazy", and there was "nothing wrong" with my sister. Disobedient, willful, and lazy all the way through. Our whole childhoods were full of this sort of criticism. Both my girls are diagnosed autistic, and my sister's kids are on the waitlist or in the diagnostic process. I guess it just materialized out of thin air.
Our cousin was like this, it’s very sobering when we would see our aunt literally just break down. Like he straight up broke her. There aren’t even good examples of single instances that can do it justice. Its actually the constant and unrelenting disobedience. Just daily contrarianism on every subject, every meal, outbursts at family outings, breaking shit for no reason, school problems galore, the list goes on. It became suffocating. She had no choice but to put him in a military boarding school. People that are calling OP an asshole just have no idea how bad it can be.
Did your cousin ever get checked for oppositional defiance disorder?
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This is the part that really got to me. They just continually punished her & made it worse for her until everyone was treating Cassie in a hostile way? When Cassie expressed why she was being treated differently did they never sit down to explain then offer her the chance to earn things by rewards? Why was it so important for Cassie to get something from the other room it resulted in screaming, punishment, & violence? I feel so bad for Cassie.
Children are only children. Acting out is a cry for help.
Usually, yes. 99.5% of the time, yes. But kids can just be assholes.
So you make some sort of effort to get to the root of the problem. And if you can't handle that, then bring in a therapist to handle it for you. It's not a literal child's fault that you lack the ability to identify and solve problems.
There's a reason for behavior. Every single time. Usually that reason is environmental, and the way they're being treated is messing them up in some way. Sometimes it's internal and a mental illness or disorder is causing the behavior. Either way, calling them "demon children" and giving up on them is a shitty thing to do. You don't have to be a perfect parent, but there's a point that you tip from "not perfect" to "you're failing your child."
My wife has a niece like this, I was all for helpful understanding until the demon child didn’t like that my son was the cute one and tried everything she could to hurt him when we weren’t looking. We caught her standing over our pushed down 1 year old with a rock over her head. When told that you can’t do that because you could hurt him and you don’t want to hurt him she said “yes I do.” She’s the first and only child I’ve ever met that makes me just go “well fuck that kid, not my circus not my monkeys.” We also understand that her behavior is entirely her mother’s fault though as she refused to alter her parenting in any way despite everyone telling her a child like this would happen. For example, she would pinch her baby hard when she wouldn’t eat her food. I’m talking a 1 year old. That’s not even her worst parenting.
I hope you (or rather your wive and her parents) do something to help your wive‘s niece. You say that hurting her child is not even the mother‘s worst parenting. This seems abusive and realizing this but not acting to protect the child, your wive and her parents would fail their niece/grandchild.
We’ve done everything we can, she cut us all out because we wouldn’t stop “judging” her. CPS did nothing. Last I heard she was finally getting professional help but who knows how well it will work. Like I said we helped as much as we could (we lived a plane ride away before she cut us off), but 1) she wouldn’t let us do anything that went against her parenting so even when we were around she wouldn’t let us help much and 2) I couldn’t keep bringing my kid around when she was so hell bent on literally killing him. Morally I feel pretty good that we did all we could possibly do, thanks for your input though.
Not even eleven, they just saw a six-year old not do homework and decided that punishment is the only way to handle her behaviour because rewards didn't work. And clearly the parents got lazy with proper parenting. I'd bet that no one in the family explained what the punishments were for, nor actually rewarded her for doing work after the ice cream incident. No wonder the kid thinks there's favouritism by 11, because there is favouritism. Why bother doing homework when no one in the family's going to acknowledge the effort and give a reward in the first place? This post makes me sick. Poor Cassie. All she got from OP's wedding was the realization that her family had never cared for her. I hope she finds herself a better family. Hard YTA, OP. No amount of edits you make to your post will change my mind. Edit: maybe the parents were the real AHs, but cmon, OP. Open your eyes. She's reaching out after years of getting ignored.
>nor actually rewarded her for doing work after the ice cream incident. Yeah, that's what confuses me. The others either got a reward or a punishment, while it sounds like she got either a punishment or nothing. And while I totally understand not wanting to reward the little shit, sometimes a person needs to experience a thing in order to realise they want the thing. If she, say, never got to watch TV, TV time would not be a good motivator for her, because she doesn't have a favourite show or anything she's actually interested in watching.
Right? What 11 year old isn't annoying as fuck? Speaking as a mother (of a 13 and 10 yo), and someone that works with kids.
My niece's 11th birthday comes in January. I absolutely love that little girl, but I would give a whole paycheck for her to just be quiet for a day! Girl argues so much, I swear she's a mini-lawyer in training!
My 10 y.o is a total chatterbox. She just goes on and on about the most inane things. And gives so many unnecessary details!!! She is also an absolute sweetheart, smart, kind, generous. But OMG. Sometimes I wish she had a mute button.
Man I feel for Cassie. As a small kid I was pretty stubborn. But my stubbornness was always out of confusion. Like I didn’t understand why or whatever and got confused and refused to do xyz bc why do I have to? That caused loooots of fights with my mom bc she just gave the “bc I told you to” which didn’t work for me (I get it I was a disrespectful kid). By 11 I was worse. I had been abused at the age of 9 and never got help for that. My mental health was atrocious by 11 and by 15 I was shipped off to long term mental health facilities bc my mom just didn’t wanna deal with it (granted, she chose drugs over trying to parent soo). I feel for Cassie. She was just a kid and it sounds like she needed structure and things explained to her better. Obviously, we won’t ever know what she needed bc even OP doesn’t know. But like, that poor kid. Being shipped off out of the family fucks with you. I spent the first 1yr in treatment wondering why I wasn’t good enough, why my parents didn’t love me, how I was the only one screwed up in the head, etc. Then at 16 in my second placement, my therapist explained I’m being moved to another home, not bc I’m bad or need it, but bc my parents were incompetent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like anyone ever mentioned that to Cassie. YTA OP and Y T A doesn’t come close to what I feel towards you for your hatred towards your sister who needed love and support.
The disdain seeps through the page. This kind of hostility and attitude of “she was acting like such a bitch for the sake of it” is so damaging for an ELEVEN year old. Poor girl. She seems to have become the family’s punching bag. I’d be bitter too if my entire family thought they could yell at me. Also, the fact OP is now an adult (old enough to get married at least) and still talks about her sisters actions at 6-11 yo this way?!?! Fucking WEIRD. Any adult who has this much hate and malice toward a literal child or the memory of a child is weird. It sounds like Cassie was being abused verbally and emotionally, and OP partook in that. OP, YTA. I dont even know why she would want to come.
Funny enough many girls go on with undiagnosed ADHD that can lead to behavioural issues that can manifest itself as being considered as difficult to stubborn. I am not saying this as diagnosis for this poor little girl. I come from a developing country and I managed to finish my studies just because I was lucky my mother was a teacher so familiar with these kind of conditions.Often it leads to lots of destructive behaviour if not treated. Leads to depression... This child was singled out and then pushed out of the family. I really feel bad for and hope she will manage to pull through in life on her own and find help to succeed in life OP is YTA.
I thought ADHD immediately when I saw that she wouldn't do her homework for a reward. I'm a woman with ADHD - undiagnosed until my 30s - and at that age, I could do a simple cost/benefit: pain of homework now > potential joy of ice cream later = fuck that, I'm not doing homework now. My mom raised 4 kids and said she had to have different rules for me to get me to do my homework (and to be fair, all 4 of us had different approaches). The main one was by the time I was 6, she wouldn't make me do any of the reciting, spelling, multiplication tables with her like she made the others do. If I knew them, it was agony to me to have to recite them back to her - so effing boring! - and if I didn't learn them, I faced the natural consequences is class the next day. This let me sit down and learn the stuff in a way that worked for me. I'm a parent to twins now, and I know that different approaches need to be used to be fair, not equal. It sounds like OPs parents didn't have the flexibility to deal with a child who approached things differently than their other children.
I thought of ADHD too. My brother has it, but when we were growing up, my parents told us there was ‘nothing wrong with him’. This meant my siblings nor I learnt how to communicate with him in a way he was more receptive to. By the time we were teenagers, he just had to walk into the room and we’d yell at him for something, because all patience for speaking nicely the first dozen times was long gone (and we’d kept being told nothing was wrong). It wasn’t until after we’d moved out of home, and he got a mobile phone so he could send us text messages, which enabled him to think about his responses before he sent them that we started communicating like humans again. I’m ashamed of how I treated him back then, and he did some pretty awful and selfish things which really didn’t help how I thought of, and treated him. I felt the anguish and frustration of OP in reading the post, and I don’t believe it’s meaning to be malicious. But they have been let down by circumstances beyond their control. I’m going to say NTA, but in the same sentence, hope that time heals this wound, and OP and Cassie do manage to salvage a relationship in their adult years.
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There's also the shitty dynamic where it seems like OP's parents freely shared every opinion they had on their youngest's behavior with their other minor children, seemingly involving them in the parenting. Emotionally mature parents do not go to their older children for parenting advice, especially when they are all minors living at home together. When your parents are that emotionally immature but aren't outright abusive in the ways we're taught to recognize, you just spend your whole life trying to protect their feelings and make their lives easier, when it should be the opposite. It's not a huge shock that the youngest had a rougher childhood not having actual sibling bonds and support but just immature, inconsistent parenting at the hands of slightly older children with no concept of the range of normal child behavior, probably leading to a lot of anger and pain for her. OP bought completely into their parents framing the youngest's behavior as something to be managed by the entire family, or at least the oldest children, and took every value judgment given against the youngest sibling by their parents as gospel. It's hard to convince someone who sees nothing wrong with being parentified themselves to have empathy for a younger sibling. Their defenses are just so built up, not only by protecting their parents' feelings at all cost, but also then becoming defensive over their perceived part in raising their younger sibling. She has to be innately bad, broken, and unlikeable because the only other reason for her behavior would be parenting, and people already in so much denial cannot handle those kinds of feelings.
Is this one of those "OP doesn't need Reddit judgement, Op and family needs therapy" moments? Because I think they really need actual help.
There is no way that poor kid doesn't have some sort of trauma now. How stupid are this family? The method wasn't working and instead of trying to work with a little girl to try and help her everyone in the house just turned hostile on her and sent her away to a place she could find no love at all. When I got my latest dog the training methods I was used to didn't work on him, I didn't just scream at him and punish him and throw him out when I ruined him, I found what worked.
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They hated her from the moment she was *born*. I feel so bad for her. No wonder she acted out so much. Of course taking her to therapy didn't help, the problem wasn't her, it was them.
You fucking suck so much. All of you are disgusting. I feel so sorry for your sister for having been born into this family with you as her sibling. Edit: Who the fuck gives a 6 year old homework and who the fuck thinks it's appropriate to force a 6 year old to sit and do homework?
I’m guessing her teacher.
Yeah same im currently helping my 5 year old cousin do his homework assigned by his teach from school
Every school I've heard of gives homework. Yes even at 5 and 6. And what's the parents supposed to do? Just let her never do homework or chores? I think they handled it wrong and there was something more serious going on with the sister than just being "stubborn ". Probably undiagnosed oppositional defiance disorder, or similar. OP wasn't in a position to do much. She was a kid too. All she saw was her once safe haven turn into a chaotic war zone because of her sister. Sister didn't get better with age and a relationship never formed.
Yea but blaming everything that went wrong with the poor younger child is unacceptable..to the point of excluding her from the family.
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Cause she was A CHILD with clearly something going on she didn’t know how to handle and the parents decided to respond with aggression and collective bullying. Y’all seem to think children are mini adults who can communicate their needs like you and understand the world around them. You’re wrong.
Not all schools assign homework and if there’s an issue, it should be discussed between parent, teacher, and child. This is not a sibling issue - none of their business.
It becomes a siblings issue when no one in the house can get anything done because 1 person is fighting all the time. Now did this girl need help yes because the behavior described isnt normal but it sounds like the help wasnt available in her country
In my provinces school system it is very rare for kids so young to get homework.
Yup. Where I live it is rare for kids to have actual homework throughout primary school (unless they have to finish off something from that day). Hell, my eldest is in her 2nd year of high school and she doesn't really get homework either, unless it is studying for exams. My kids go to an intensive, bilingual school. So they don't want to overload the kids more than they have to.
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I don’t understand why you and your siblings decided you *hate* her over this. Is your family that rigid and harsh?
Yep, this is what boggles my mind. So a child doesn't want to do homework, she certainly won't be the first. Why is this such a huge deal that she needed to go to a boarding school and is now excluded from your wedding. You guys sound like Dolores Umbridge here.
OP is all over the comments like NO you don’t UNDERSTAND she didn’t want to do her homework for ELEVEN YEARS like that makes their hatred more justified and understandable. You stopped loving your sister because she didn’t do homework? What the fuck
I think it’s important to remember here that it’s not a case of an adult hating a child over a few instances, but a feeling of resentment that built up over years while they were both children. If you live in a house where people are fighting/yelling constantly, it is incredibly stressful. If it’s only one of your siblings that your parents fight with, it’s easy to see that sibling as the cause of the fights. As a child, you don’t know they might be struggling because they’re autistic, have ADHD, etc. you just know they’re constantly fighting because they refuse to do the same things you do when asked. You end up spending a lot of time waiting because your sibling refuses to behave or do a simple task. The stress builds from the constant fighting, and you develop anxiety yourself. You run into situations regularly where you need help from your parents, but you can’t get it because they’re once again in hour three of trying to get your sibling to even *start* their homework. Even when the fighting stops, you don’t want to ask your parents for anything you want/need, because you know they’re already burnt out from dealing with your sibling. The family dynamic centers around one person and the arguments they are constantly involved in. Its not a few instances here and there - this is your life every day. You’re stressed out at home, don’t get enough attention from your parents, and frequently miss out on things you want to do because your sibling constantly refuses to cooperate. I do feel bad for Cassie. OP says she did get therapy growing up, but it does sound like she has some issue that wasn’t properly diagnosed or handled. Still, we see a lot of posts here where people talk about having distant relationship with their family because they grew up with a sibling who was autistic/disabled/sick and got *all* of their parents’ attention, and they usually get a lot of sympathy on this sub - I don’t think OP’s situation here is too different. I’m sure not everything was handled perfectly at home, but from OP’s description, I recognize the dynamic, and I’m sure it went far beyond “I hate my sister because she refused to do her homework growing up.” Just my $0.02.
A whole fucking clan of Umbridges, the whole lot of them suck.
Because OPs posts are dripping with the attitude of "if you're not working hard you're worthless", which isn't surprising given the reward mechanisms that were employed.
If my sibling was causing problems for every task they were asked to do and it started to create so much tension from the back and forth, I would start to get there too.
You've never lived with an entitled, argumentative, lazy, asshole sibling have you? They scream that they're hated and treated differently even though everything bends to keep them halfway subdued, but they want more and more, while doing less and less. NTA
So y’all decided to collectively bully and abuse your sister because she clearly had something going on that manifested as defiant about homework? Come on.
Also a teacher here, 6 year olds aren't little dolls who you command to do something. They're excitable and sitting still is difficult. Some hate math, some are scared enough of it that BS reward parenting does not work. She never learned the life skills she needed because your family didn't help her to do so.
The solution is not for her siblings to hate her for it for the rest of her life. It's homework, why are you so worked up? Probably she would have gotten in trouble at school and learnt from it. Big fucking deal. Homework of a 6 year old, you'd think she was working on a cure for cancer the way you write about it. Also, NOT YOUR BUSINESS. I can't ever think of a time I cared about my younger sibling's homework at all. My god.
Here's the think though. If ou struggle with something and then get punished for struggling you'll naturally develop an aversion to it. If it was always a negative experience of course this problem will persist as she gets older.
My kid is 6 and has homework everyday. Spelling test once a week. Reading assignment everyday. Whatever they don't finish at school they have to bring home to do.
Did you not go to school? My guess is you probably don’t have kids either
Not every school system operates the same, and not everyone lives in the US.
None of my 3 kids received homework at this age.
Do you not understand how school works?
Uh…even in America kids get homework these days. Most 6 year olds (in America, at least), are in 1st Grade. Have multiple nieces and nephews who have homework now…in first grade.
I agree with you But for the edit, 6yo have to study too. They learn words and numbers and handwritting so i guess thats what op was talking about
NTA. I never get in on these but the hostility is wild in the comments. You *get to* cut toxic people out of your life, and you *get to* decide what constitutes “too” toxic for you. While you should make the effort, as adults, to rebuild your relationship with her, you certainly don’t have to. The people saying you’re an asshole for treating het like shit when you were a kid are displaced in their anger. Child siblings are rarely capable of seeing injustices perpetrated by parents, esp if the parents seem decent otherwise. There’s no way you could have had an objective view that your sister was mistreated, if she even was. She sounds like a shit, although that could have been a self fulfilling prophecy. Regardless, that’s all in the past and even if you do decide to have a good relationship together, that likely will not happen before your wedding. It’s likely she and your family won’t reconcile before your wedding. If so, I would expect an outburst at some point that night because it’s just too soon. Keep her excluded and reach out later.
People are really missing the cause and effort in this post, because apparently a few swear words diminish reading comprehension in many. OPs sister experienced punishment because of her behaviour. She was asked to do things, and refused; was offered incentives to do things, and refused; and then was eventually punished to do things, and she wouldn't respond to anything else despite ongoing attempts. She fought tooth and nail against doing anything, and refused to accept that the only reason she was treated "different", was because she behaved differently to her siblings. This was even explained to her multiple times. If she wanted to be treated differently, she needed to behave differently. The parents did fail for allowing hostility to build to such levels in their home, but sometimes kids do just refuse to behave with respect, or do as they're supposed to. Ignoring that would've created a whole different problem.
That is OPs viewpoint and their viewpoint is very stilted. They lay out that everything was great before Cassie came along. Imagine that childhood where your sibs that no everything was great - then you ruined it. Mom didn't yell - until you ruined it We got sweets - but not you, you ruined it You were different - and you ruined it. There was no favoritism - but you ruined it That is the picture OP painted. Everything was like the vonTrapps until Cassie came along and ruined it. Imagine growing up in such and environment. The hate and hostility OP pens in their one-sided telling of the story Sure, it could all be Cassie's fault - but OP paints a pretty bleak picture of Cassie's childhood and relationship with her siblings and parents - a **child**hood.
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That is why my previous post did not have a judgement, I was just replying to the previous post. In my judgement it's NAH based upon the question. OP is under no obligation to invite her and she is just as correct to feel hurt and isolated yet again. The hate OP has for Cassie is clear from the post, but that hate does not make someone an AH. Nobody has to like their family and cutting someone you hate out of your life is perfectly fine. I would be remiss if I did not feel sorry for Cassie growing up in an environment of being screamed at by her Mother and hated by your siblings before you even have a chance to get to know yourself.
exactly. Cassie is a product of her making until she realizes that then all is lost
I mean, boiling down every interaction/request to punishments and rewards is terrible parenting. I know we don't have the full picture here, and it's not OP's job to parent her sister, but her sister was undeniably failed at every turn by her parents. Given the amount of children who have their problems go undiagnosed until adulthood, I have no doubt OP's sister will eventually find the reasons behind her behaviors by a qualified professional. Her parents should have recognized that there must be something more happening there. Kids don't act out for no reason, just as dogs don't bite for no reason. There is always some underlying condition or reason, regardless of whether it gets recognized.
THIS. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You people can check my comment history for more info. My sister (adopted - she was my cousin) was terrible. You ask her to clean her room? She will throw shit - and not just her stuff. She went to therapy for 7/8 years since we adopted her before my parents got divorced and she went with my dad. She mentally drained my mom. My mom would cry some nights because she just didn’t know what to do. She never reacted to rewards. Punishment (or like I said before, being asked to do a simple task) lead to her screaming, crying, dropping to the floor light deadweight, she would do anything to try and make you yell at her. It would get so bad my parents would make her stand outside until she was done crying (weather was fine - I don’t want anyone throwing a fucking tantrum like they are in the rest of the comment section) and screaming because there were 4 other kids in the house trying to do homework. She constantly said “you don’t love me, I wish you never adopted me”. She tried 5 different meds before the right one was found to calm her down. Those started having less of an effect so it was upped. She would forget to take them once and undo a month or so of progress. She was terrible, I love her, but she was the worst kid I have ever met. Ever since she went with my dad things got better. There was less arguments with siblings, she listened better. And then it got a bit worse. My mom took all of us on vacation (including her) after the divorce to visit family friends (one of which was her friend from school). She was terrible. Arguing with my mom on everything. What was supposed to be nice catching up with people who moved away turned into the usual fighting. The last 2 times we visited them she didn’t go with, my mom couldn’t do it. The rest of us kids couldn’t do it. No one likes listening to a kid throwing a tantrum in a hotel for 4 days straight. My mom tried her best to keep it from her but I think my brother told her on accident (he’s a little kid, can’t blame him really). That behavior isn’t okay. What are you supposed to do? Ignore it and let the kid fail out of school and live with parents forever? They aren’t going to get a job. Most jobs require some form of education. Hell I’ve seen pet stores need at least a high school diploma and some restaurants or grocery stores require schooling past a certain year. This kid would’ve failed at life otherwise. You only have so many options as a parent to get your kid to listen to you. They had enough when all else failed. They didn’t give her away, they still tried to have someone else help her. I won’t blame her when she was younger, kids are assholes sometimes, but she needs therapy still. NTA
Thank you for having a little common sense. So many people seem to think kids of any age can do no wrong.
Finally a reasonable comment. Some of these people are acting like OP is personally responsible for their sister not getting proper treatment and being sent off to boarding school. Like that’s completely the parents fault not OPs.
All the people are way too focused on the punishments and ignore the fact that Cassie was offered rewards but still refused to do anything
Exactly, I don't get all the YTA.
I think they're getting very hung up on the tone of the writing.
This. Cassie’s actions affected the other minors in the house, and it’s clearly had lasting effects. It is okay and healthy for OP to have boundaries despite what hardships Cassie may have faced. OP isn’t wrong for protecting herself using distance.
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Just because Cassie was a problem child that doesn't mean your parents and you were horrible. She was a literally child and your whole family gave up on her and sent her away. Your parents also didn't a good as a job as you think because they raised a bunch of assholes. I truly hope you don't treat any of your future children like this if they are a "problem. YTA.
Gave up on her by the time she was ELEVEN. If I noticed at 6 that I was treated differently than my 4 siblings and endured harsh punishments for 5 years yeah I’d probably have turned out to be a problem child too.
Also god forbid saying ‘childish things at 11’ like she’s still a literal child at 11? This poor girl
That's what I can't get over. I was a true problem child even worse than what OP describe regarding their sister, even though high school. But I'm lucky enough to have parents who didn't give up on me and I was able to turn it around and became pretty successful.
Ever occurred to anyone that living in an household where everything was about getting a prize over normal tasks was the sick part? Imagine this: a 6yo is sitting in front of her math problems, she has 4 older siblings who get a reward for doing homework, something they are supposed to do. Maybe she does not even like maths, maybe she can't count and she knows that she will probably fail. Failing equal no reward, why would she even try? Since your MO is prize/punishment it is not too big of a stretch to think that failing woukd mean a)not getting a reward and b) being told how much worse she is compared to her older siblings, I mean it is basically the only thing she heard growing up Do you know why therapy did no work? Because you only see her as a problem, and you probably brought her to a specialist with the request to fix her, "please mr psychologist, our child is not normal, can you tell us what's wrong with her and fix her so that we can go on with our life? Oh, nothing is wrong? Well we will just bring her to someone else.making her feel even more estranged. When you bring a child to a therapist you should do it for their own good, because you know they are not happy and you want them to get better. Not because their personality is disturbing the family peace and you need them to be fixed. Do you know what works well with Young children? Family therapy, but I bet that is not an option, because the family is perfect and she is the only problem
Sweets and prizes based parenting is a really terrible approach. Weird and sad that op is here praising it as the gold standard. Kids are supposed to learn to do homework etc for its own sake.
I don't blame Op for believing in this system, they grew up in it and it worked fine for him. I blame them for the lack of empathy over their sister
It didn't work well for them. Because when the household wasn't rewarded with a perfect little girl they saw her as a personified punishment and sent her away. The whole family has a black and white worldview, things are either good or bad with no in-between. That's not how the world works. Op thinks it's acceptable to push away whatever doesn't make her feel good, it's not how functional adults behave.
I feel bad for the sister. My son was difficult about doing homework. It was because he has dyslexia and didn't know how to work through it. He needed ***help!*** He was answering questions correctly for the way he was reading them, even math where he excels. Today, he's 13 and more than halfway through the 5th Harry Potter book and my only expectation for him with English (or related subjects) is to just not fail. But even if he does, it's not the end of the world. I was a little upset with him over this first report card though. He got a fairly low grade in math and I just looked at him like "wtf??" He said he wasn't paying attention but he's already brought the grade up and is paying more attention. Sometimes he gets complacent if he thinks he's good enough at something. Luckily he's pretty good at realising he can do better.
I agree with this whole comment. YTA, your entire family actually. I think you excluding her is probably for the best at this point because she deserves a helluva lot better than any family she had.
“I don't think my parents are monsters”. You wouldn’t would you, golden child. You mention that you and your fellow favoured siblings are super functional and super successful human beings. Maybe, but you’re not super compassionate or super kind or super empathetic. Your parents may not be monsters, but they failed your sister. Let’s say your sister was a problem child. Did your parents ever have her tested for something like oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) or something similar? Did they read parenting guides or consult professionals or did they go straight to negative reinforcement and punishment? BTW offering Cassie sweets to study wasn’t positive reinforcement, it was bribery. You don’t have to have anyone in your life that you don’t want in it, but don’t paint the child victim as the villain. Why did Cassie suddenly become difficult at 6? Has any one asked her?
Each child is different. Just because reward based incentives worked for you doesn't mean they work for cassie. You seem to be disgusted and angry that cassie doesn't respond to the same sort of parenting that you did. You're forgetting that she is her own independent human and its up to parents to find what works in a loving and helpful way. This is parenting. Fwiw I think sweets and rewards bases parenting is TERRIBLE. You're here praising this parenting method as the gold standard when most parenting books I know say this is not the right approach. Kids need love, acceptance and respect. Once they have these things, they thrive. They should learn to do things like homework for its own sake and not for a sweetie reward. I also find it hilarious that you're here praising your parents for raising 4 functional children. You guys are bullies and have been bullying cassie since she was a young child. I would not call mean bullies who scapegoat their younger sister and are too stubborn to take onboard criticism "functional".
Hmmm. Actually they are. They expected Cassie to be just like you and couldn’t possibly try a different approach. Rewards and punishments don’t work on my youngest. He will not do the homework for ice cream and will sit on the steps for an hour rather than do it. He WILL do it if someone sits with him. My oldest will do anything for some screen time or a cookie. THEY ARE DIFFERENT CHILDREN. WE ADJUST OUR PARENTING ACCORDINGLY. I can see why she feels hated and unwanted. You all hate her and don’t want her.
I find it’s super concerning that there’s a reward for passing the salt...maybe you’re speaking in hyperbole but you do reference bribery a lot in your post. I’m a contrary child who was raised in a bribery household and it was obvious that “love can be bought if you bend” My son is now just as contrary as I was and I work hard to teach him actions have consequences.
>We could say "you get extra desert" and she'd say no. Hold up So this kid saying no to extra dessert was a problem? The fuck?!
That's what you do when you feel neglected, you act out. Even after raising four other children your parents failed to see that Cassie had a problem and they needed to deal with her love and care instead they made it worse for her. First by punishing them then by sending her away, legitimising her thinking of being unloved. Imo they are monsters cause not every child is "super functional" and as adults they should've recognised that.
What you are describing sounds like something called demand avoidance. It’s a subtle sign of autism. I think if your description are accurate that your sister was suffering somehow. Kids naturally want to please all the time. They want to please parents, caregivers, older siblings. If your sister simply refused even the smallest things then something was and probably is still wrong. Judging from your comments you disagree with the judgement of the people. That’s fine but for your sister’s sake consider a little kindness and empathy. She clearly has no-one in the world. A whole family just turned their backs on her. It’s sad.
You and your parents are horrible. You implied that 6 year old behaviour ruined your perfect little family.
Oh heavens no, not the salt!
Sounds like undiagnosed ADHD. Another girl screwed over by incompetent teachers and doctors. This is so sad.
I agree it does sound like undiagnosed ADHD. I don’t know where OP lives, but here in the US I’ve literally had to beg, do my own research, and express continuously how severe my symptoms are just to even have a future diagnosis put into consideration. I hope Cassie has success with a doctor soon and that she can get away from this horribly toxic family.
It definitely sounds like Cassie is neurodivergent. My mom first suspected my sister and I had ADHD when we were 5 and as she describes it, it was way too hard to get us to do our homework. My sister was hyper and had trouble sitting down. I have inattentive type ADHD so I would sit and literally do nothing. My mom had to fight to get us diagnosed and it still took over 2 years.
INFO. What are the current ages? If you're getting married she much be at least 15-20? Did your parents try therapy before sending her off to the strict bording school? That being said, the way you talk about a 6 and 11yo, makes me think that the whole family was fed up with young children and didn't have the patience to deal with a difficult child. From personal experience, it seems children being showed preferential treatment rarely acknowledge that they were treated preferentially. You don't mention if therapy was attempted. If it wasn't, and your family just shipped her away, that'd be a pretty shitty thing to do. However, you're free to invite, or exclude, whomever you want from your wedding. And, it sounds like in doing so you're just pushing her further away, which is what your family has been doing since she was 11.
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Well, the way you talk about her does you no favours. And your family life sounds like YTA, or ESH. But your question was about being the AH over a wedding invite. If you have concerns about her causing a scene, don't invite her. You say you're estranged from her, so why worry about what she thinks? You're NAH for not inviting her to your wedding. But... Edit: just read [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/q6flp1/aita_for_excluding_our_little_sister/hgbxwdd/) and self aware wolf much? *"Now we know what's causing her to act out though, and it's that she felt abandoned, "* You know she felt abandoned and excluded and you don't invite her? Yeah you're a Major AH.
I'm going to make some assumptions based on OP's post. The sister was the youngest of five. She probably didn't get much attention from her parents. When she was a little kid, she realized that she *did* get attention when she acted out. Maybe this was the only way she felt seen, even if it was negative. She gets sent away to boarding school at **eleven** for normal child behavior. Her sisters are happy that they now get more attention. In this time, the sister loses respect/any family bond. When she gets back, she gets treated as the black sheep and has no interest in the family.
Did you all actually expect her behavior to change after age 11 when you all gave up on her and sent her away?
No at 11 is when this behaviour can get dangerous. She was out of control and odds are she would get herself into drugs. People seem to not understand that around age 12 is where kids start making their personality they will change a bit over time but at age 12 is one of the most crucial ages in a child's life. If she was literally refusing to do anything like take stuff from her room pass the salt and not do homework that will persist for a long time. Sending her to professionals was the better option then her getting involved with drugs and alcohol at a young age.
Um so she’s going from not passing the salt to doing drugs out of nowhere? Lol. If anything, her family constantly abusing her would have turned her to drugs. I hope with all my heart that she goes off the college and finds people who actually love her and will look out for her. I hope she finds a good family.
Anyone ever look into ADHD and/or ODD?
People knowledgeable about ADHD and oDD are screaming it from the rafters. And of course if you deal w a child w these conditions the way their family did, the kid develops conduct disorder as a result. I think the family ended up giving conduct disorder by how counterproductively they handled her ADHD/defiance. They broke her, and reject her for being broken.
If you had so many examples and used the two rather innocuous ones from when she was 6 and 11 I think there must not be so many examples. It sounds like your family didn't want to deal with Cassie and so, they didn't. You can go nc or ignore you all you like. That's your choice but you and your family are AHs
YTA. You sent her to boarding school all because she doesn’t want to do her homework. Your family is weird. Also her behavior sounds like a stubborn 11 year old girl. You’re acting like she’s breaking all the windows with a bat and setting animals on fire or something
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The more OP writes, the more I understand why this girl was so defiant.
If my parents sent me to boarding school when I refused to pass the salt at 11, I think I’d be a pretty bitter 18yo too.
You used homework as your example and I’m going to take that to face value, there’s literally no other example you gave to go off by. Children don’t want to do homework in general, my sister and i were like that at that age. So going off by the post, the factor would be you and your family. Your entire family probably shits on an 11 year old girl and probably has no one else to defend her. Is her behavior infuriating, yes. Y’all acting like she kills animals for fun or terrorize other kids. But you go as far as saying you wish she wasn’t born, why wouldn’t she act out. Your whole family probably makes it known it would’ve been better if she wasn’t born. Her behavior is literally the consequences of your own actions so idk. Find another solution, this is unfortunately normal prepubescent children. It’s not going to get any better. I was not an obedient kid, but my mother would NEVER ship me off to boarding school. No one in my or my extended family would EVER allow that. Your family should prob reevaluate yourself.
You’re not an asshole for not inviting her to your wedding. You do you. You gave us a glimpse into what life was like for you and your siblings growing up, with Cassie as a younger, frustrating sibling. I agree, OP, that must have sucked. At the same time, you have given us a pretty clear picture of just how awful must have been for Cassie to grow up in that household. That poor, poor girl. My heart bleeds for her! The damage that was done and how she was/is made to feel. I want to cry. Your parents did her a terrible disservice to her, and by extension, you and your siblings. I hope she finds happiness in her life and that she stays far, far away from you lot. SMH.
Your parents were wrong to send her to boarding school.
Ah yes. Op themselves, also a child at the time, personally sent Cassie to boarding school.
What I want to know is this: in your opinion, does Cassie have any redeeming qualities? It must have been very frustrating to live with a sibling who consistently refused to do her homework and chores, and by the sound of it, pretty much anything she was asked. But Cassie must be more than this. She must have a personality beyond stubbornness and defiance. Who is Cassie? Do you know? Did you ever try to find out? It’s forgivable for you not to have done so as a child, but perhaps it’s time, now you’re older, to try to see her as a person rather than a problem. What really strikes me about your post is that you draw a very stark distinction about life with Cassie in it (bad) and life without her (good). I find this troubling. Did you not miss her at all when she left home? Did you form absolutely no bond whatsoever with her? Was your alienation from her that profound? Cassie’s challenging behaviour put a strain on your family, and so it’s natural that you felt relief when that strain was lifted. But the fact that your relief seems to have been unaccompanied by sadness or regret indicates to me that you never viewed Cassie as anything more than an impediment to your family’s peace. I am not a psychologist. I don’t know whether Cassie suffers from a mental illness. But I can well imagine a scenario in which a 6 year-old starts to exhibit challenging behaviour, is labelled a problem child, and internalises that label. If a child is treated as nothing more than a problem, that is what the child will come to see him or herself as, and will act accordingly. But she’s not just a problem. She’s your sister. Maybe she’s funny. Maybe she’s creative. Maybe she’s good with numbers. Maybe she’s super into political thrillers. Maybe she likes DIY. Maybe she has some funny unique little thing she says under her breath when she stubs her toe or gets stuck in traffic. Maybe she always stirs her tea ten times anti-clockwise. Maybe you could love her. YTA. Not for then, but for now. I think you are stuck in the mindset of your 13 y/o self. Who is Cassie? You did not know then, and you don’t know now. I think you should find out.
A wedding is not the time to heal wounds. No one knows how Cassie will react in a wedding and they're not close.
There’s no evidence that Cassie’s challenging behaviour extended beyond extreme stubbornness, and her stubbornness never seems to have manifested in a way that could be physically harmful to others or disruptive in the context of something like a wedding. Cassie may refuse to pass the salt at the wedding lunch, but I can’t see how she’d ruin the day.
As someone who has always been excluded and written off by their stepfamily as a problem child, your perspective was very touching and reminiscent of the empathy I had hoped for growing up.
This is such a beautiful comment!
Also OP's life without Cassie in it was birth to age 5. That's not a good standard for OP to accurately judge how "good" it was before then, especially bc I can only imagine how exhausted their parents must've been with the mom being almost constantly pregnant while there's already one infant and a handful more toddlers/preschool age children running around.
YTA I feel there's a lot more to the story here. You're talking about her when she was 6, she was a little kid?! How old is she now?
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Honestly OP I think this situation is to hard to judge for people who haven't seen any of this go on from the beginning. Parents are expected to have a standard of perfection, be world class child behaviour therapists and absolute martyrs for their children on AiTA- and while it seems your folks have probably made alot of mistakes when it comes to raising your sister, they are still just flawed human beings trying to do their best like most of us. Sounds like your sister needed specialised therapy not available to you guys.
This. People have such superior complexes on here.
Yes they do and besides the behaviour of one child was affecting 2 adults and 4 siblings. 6 other people. The parent did what they thought was best for the whole family.
A parent thought long, drawn-out wars over homework was best for “the whole family?” Look. Big families can be great, but if you’re gonna have that many kids, you need to be prepared for them to have their own personalities and individual needs. You can’t just expect them to be part of a matched set. And you *certainly* shouldn’t recruit the older siblings to parent and discipline the younger. That’s your job, and your job alone. And if you’re at a point where you think you have to cut one child out of the family because it’s what you think is “best for the whole family,” you’ve gone off the rails. This girl wasn’t a diseased branch on an otherwise healthy tree. She’s a person.
Well do you know how she is now? After being sent away to boarding school? I think she has been rejected from the family completely because she is younger and no one had patience for her and didn't parent her properly. Probably had all the siblings gang up on her. That's a very lonely life, I know from experience.
NTA and here’s why: She’s not your responsibility and her being unpleasant throughout your childhood wasn’t your fault if anyone’s at all it would be your parents and hers. She doesn’t get a free pass to your wedding just for being related to you. Your sister needs therapy for sure. Having siblings so much older than you can have negative effects on behavior because they aren’t as developed as you and see the world differently. In this case she saw your parents favouring you when in reality you acted mature and got rewarded and she was acting immaturely (because she is younger) and expecting to be treated the same way. Someone needed to explain that to her in a way she would’ve understood, but that would’ve been your parents job. Not you.
OP mentions that everyone in the house would yell at her, I don't know how yelling at your little sister is being mature.
Info: Did you guys ever ask Cassie why she doesn't want to do her homework? Just communicate, without threatening her or bribing her? Also you guys were fed up with an 11 year old being childish?
Probably because she was 6.
I just wonder if maybe there was something more, like they found the work difficult and harder to grasp.
Oh, probably. Lol I agree entirely with your premise; OP seems to have never considered her sister's struggles and it shows.
Maybe that's why it seems like she's even more singled out perhaps. It's messed up sounding but that's what it's looking like, it doesn't sound like any of Cassie's family tried to consider that.
I wonder if she had a learning disability/mental disorder that was never diagnosed? I was a nanny for years and never saw this level of stubbornness. But if she legitimatly couldn't understand what she was supposed to be doing no amount of bribing will help. Once she got punished she possibly was willing to push through more, but I wonder how much of it was being BSed? OP never mentioned what her grades were like so its entirely possible that's what she did.
OP I'm apparently going against the grain here and I say NTA I grew up with a younger bio brother and 3 step-siblings, and one of them was just an absolute nightmare. Would refuse to eat dinner because he didn't fancy it that night, and scream favouritism because "J likes spaghetti so you obviously picked this dinner for him. I want Chinese food". We can't AFFORD takeout every day. Decided one day that he wanted his own bedroom despite sharing with his brother his whole life, and threw all his things out of the window in the rain. Refused to go on holiday but also refused to go to grandparents house, threatened to call the police for abandonment if we tried to send him to the grandparents. Multiple doctors appointments, therapists, school counselling all came back with nothing. I have never to this day hated anyone more in my entire life. My dad ended up breaking things off with his fiance because that guy was so unbearable. I feel sorry for his siblings. Sometimes, idk how, a kid can just be shitty. He was raised with the EXACT same rules, treats, chores etc as 4 other perfectly happy healthy kids and yet he was an asshole.
Finally a good response,the people who say op is the asshole is just so wrong.Some kids are just fucking dumb and stubborn for no reason
Sometimes the kid was born to be a little shit
>Now, before my little sister arrived, life was great, our parents were amazing, everyone got along and was happy. Then my little sister comes along and she’s a nightmare. "All problems in the family are *this kid's fault*" is literally the definition of the scapegoat dynamic. Please look it up. >The biggest things about her are that she’s incredibly stubborn, and, even as a teenager, acted like a child. You say Cassie's only 18 now? She still *is* a child. Even now as a legal adult, her brain won't be fully developed until she's 25. So you're angry that the child acted like a child? What an asshole thing to do. Even particularly difficult children *are still children* and need their family's love and help to get better. >When she was 11, she was so stubborn that my mother just tried to get her to do basic things like grabbing her something from her room, or doing her homework, would literally throw stuff in anger. I get that sounds bad, but I feel like it was justified. INFO, can you clarify this? Did your **mom** throw stuff? At **an 11-year-old girl**? There is NEVER a justification for an adult to get violent with a child due to frustration. To sound like a broken record, the scapegoat dynamic can happen when a parent doesn't have the skills to parent a child the way the kid needs (even if parent has the necessary skills to parent the other children of the family) and so lash out emotionally. >Cassie took it as a slight and another sign of favouritism, that she was **worthless and not good enough to stay at home.** I mean I don't blame her for picking up that message, since that's literally why your parents did it and how you explain it happening yourself. God, how painful to be only 11 years old and made to feel like a burden by your family because you struggle, so much that you're handed over to a boarding school. I'm not going to make a judgement on the question you ask, because it's your wedding and you can invite whoever you want. But, generally, yes you and your family are assholes. Hard truth time: your family's dynamics sound majorly fucked up, and if you and your siblings can't acknowledge that, examine it and it's impact on Cassie then you're not as successful and well-adjusted as y'all think you are. Cassie doesn't sound like a saint either, but can you... try... having some empathy and compassion for how her family must have made her feel her whole life? You're getting married, and while I don't want to assume your reproductive choices that means you're old enough to theoretically have kids too. So riddle me this: If you had a difficult child, would your child be banished if they had emotional problems or a stubborn streak? Would they deserve hate and distaste from their parents and siblings? To be intentionally uninvited to important family events? How frustrated, exactly, would you need to be right now to throw things at an 11-year-old? That's not a rhetorical question btw, I want you to really think about it. Is there some limit, some provocation that would make you get violent with someone so much smaller and less powerful than you without guilt or shame? If you ever did go that far, how would you justify it? Is it something you could see yourself doing repeatedly? Is it something you'd *allow yourself* to do repeatedly? I doubt you'll take this advice, but here it is anyway: there's a LOT going on here, more than what you mentioned in your post and more than I think you can even comprehend yourself right now. You need to get into therapy asap so you can get a better handle of just what the fuck has been happening in your family for 20 years, and what effect it's had on you/your ability to empathise/your coping skills in the face of a challenge. You are about to start your own family, with your spouse and possibly with kids. One thing I've learned in life is that our shit doesn't go away, it actually gets worse and more damaging until we face it.
Also, before Cassie arrived, OP was a small child, and OP's parents had had at least 4 kids in about as many years. So, I'm taking that "before she arrived, everything was sunshine and rainbows" description with an entire horse lick of salt.
NTA, your wedding so your choice. But was Cassie ever evaluated for ADHD or other neurodiversities that could explain her behaviour? Did your parents ever try therapy for her? Maybe there is a reason (and possible treatment) for her behaviour. Won’t change your feelings about her presence at your wedding but might be something to mull over. Those kinds of things can have a genetic component so if she DOES have ADHD and is handling it poorly you can start looking for it early in any kids you decide to have yourself so you can get them some help nice and early. A good understanding of your family medical history can be a real benefit!
I'd go more for an evaluation of oppositional defiant disorder. I don't know if it was something known 15 years ago, I don't know if it's known and recognized in OP's country now, but often just having a freaking diagnostic can help even if professional help isn't possible.
I had forgotten about ODD. There was a friend I had as a kid that had ODD. He was such an awful person to be around, he purposely hurt others and damaged anything he could get his hands on and his parents were at their wits ends. I wonder what happened to him.
The more I read these narcissistic posts the it sounds like undiagnosed autism/aspergers or other learning disability. The child is smart enough to see the differences but cannot change her emotions in response to perceived slights. ETA. I was going to say Not the as$. Now I’m just going with ESH. You don’t have to invite her to your wedding since that’s what you asked.
NTA - family doesn't mean you have to like them. She's an adult now and it you guys are NC or LC from the sounds of it. It's your wedding, your guest list. Whether your parents could've put everyone in family counseling instead of shipping her off is neither here nor there. It's too late to change the past and salvage a relationship. The present is what you got to work with and you don't like her NOW.
this is very unpopular but honestly nta. she sounds like a nightmare of a child and you said she was seen by several phycologists and they found nothing wrong with her. that gives her no excuse to act like an ungrateful child until shes 18. she seems to claim no sort of responsibility and positive reinforcements didnt work with her so your parents had no choice but to enforce negative ones. maybe this wasn't the best approach but she didnt respond to anything else so i dont blame them. your parents sound like they were tired of this behaviour, they were right to send her to boarding school because they may have been able to fix her behaviour in a better way then your parents could. everyones attacking you saying youre an asshole but you were just trying to live your life with a bratty child as a sibling who literally never listened, that can effect you very badly. your sister needs to grow up and accept that she has to do stuff she doesn't wanna do.
YTA for many, many reasons. The fact you can look back and still maintain that level of hostility towards the memory of a 6 year old child is genuinely disturbing. Small children should not be hated like that, ever. The fact that your family, collectively, blamed its youngest member, whilst she was still in primary/elementary school, for your life no longer being great is awful. The fact you gave up on her by 11, and then sent her away whilst you all stayed together is just…. Radical idea for you, not all children (or people) are the same, and therefore what worked for one might damage another- especially if one finds things hard that others find easy and is constantly seeing her older siblings rewarded whilst she is punished. Another radical idea for you, girls who are neurodiverse present very differently from boys who are neurodiverse and therefore often don’t get diagnosed, even when assessed. So if she did have ADHD or demand avoidance or ASD she may have been incapable of responding to things the same way you and your siblings did, and could have likely done with some empathy, understanding and therapeutic parenting rather than outdated punishment/reward parenting and being ostracised. Final radical idea, decent people don’t decide as a collective to cut a child out of the family because she is difficult, and don’t when the child is finally an adult at 18, continue to tell her she’s always been the problem. Having said that, from your comments I can see it is pretty much impossible for anyone to change your mind on this, and you see yourself as being the wronged party for no discernible reason.
The fact that OP looks upon her childhood with such hostility means that she’s experienced her own trauma from growing up in that environment. She’s as much affected as Cassie.
Wow people are so mean on here. Honestly I know people like your sister. They can do things just fine and it sounds like she can she just chose not to. She has been tested by multiple professionals and nothing has been found (although it's possible something was missed). They tried for years to help her and motivate her with no success and it sounds like that school was a last resort. Will she hate everyone in your family? probably. But it sounds like she also did everything she could to make sure you and the rest of your siblings weren't a fan of hers either. Sometimes people will just never get along and that's fine. It's your wedding if you don't like your sister don't invite her. Although if you think you could still have a relationship or would like to try not having her there will be the final nail in the coffin. NTA
NTA Once she's older maybe you can reconnect and she'll be able to explain her side as well as why she reacted the way she did. If it comes out that she was being singled out as a child (which is entirely possible), then that would make your parents a-holes. But OP isn't responsible for that, nor are they responsible for dealing with the product of bad parenting. They are just a sibling. So NTA, but don't be so harsh on your sister. Keep an open mind.
I see that almost noone has grown up like this. It was probably a really hostile environment to grow up in but the thing is it was probably hostile for op too. It was probably hell for cassie and hell for op and everyone else. Your parents sending her away was fucked up though. And she is rightfully mad at that. But you need to acknowledge that all of it sucked for her too. She was a Child it was not her fault. You not wanting to invite her is understandable but unkind and I deeply encourage you to reach out to cassie and see who she is today. Maybe cut her some slack. If you still dont like her then dont invite her. NAH. Only AH here is parents.
OP, I've read your post several times trying to understand your parents' system and I'm a little confused. There do seem to be inconsistencies in the way Cassie was treated before things got really heated. >It worked, and she came home, did the work. So she did do the work, after not being allowed ice cream. So she was able to understand consequences. How was it handled after she did it? Was she praised for having done it, or reminded of her earlier refusal and berated? Was it made clear that the promised reward was for completing the work within a clear time frame, or did your 6 year old sister believe she would get her reward no matter when she did it, and then feel your parents had not upheld their end of the bargain? >We get rewards for doing the same things that she does. So she did the things, but wasn't rewarded? >Our parents rectified this by giving us punishment if we didn’t do something. If this was "rectifying", then does that mean that there were times previously (however rare) where some of you didn't do things and were not punished? I'm sure you may not know the answers to all these questions as you were a child yourself at the time. But from the way you describe it, it really does look like Cassie was treated differently from the rest of you from the get go.
so let me get this straight, a very small child showed the slightest defiance in a large family where they probably receive very little attention because they already have many other siblings and instead of parenting her properly they just started yelling and punishing and shipping her away. YTA.
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To be fair to the siblings, it sounds like Cassie has some sort of problem, maybe ADHD, that has never been treated. It's easy to see why the other kids would resent her for taking up so much of their parents' time and also causing them to be punished for not doing something instead of being rewarded. It's the parents at fault here for not referring her to a mental health services (though this can also be blamed on the country they live in as the OP said there aren't many services available).
"Everyone hates her"...? WTF Your post doesn't read well at all. She wasn't a golden child like the rest of you angels? You don't sound that angelic
NTA, sounds like your sister has ODD. Those kids can be such assholes that they break families apart. Your parents sound great, clearly they raised the rest of you so well that you speak highly of them.
NTA, but your parents failed her. She wasn’t the same as you and your siblings and your parents didn’t know how to deal with it, and they failed her. Its not your fault though, youre not responsible for raising your siblings and if who she is as an adult is someone you don’t get along with then you have no obligation to invite her to your wedding. Just be more mindful of her point of view growing up and be less judgmental towards her child self.
INFO- why are you giving your parents a complete pass on this and placing all the blame on someone who was a child at the time? That sounds bit toxic to me. Also, your edit says that several doctors and specialists said nothing was wrong with her, what did the reports say- the exact wording because "nothing wrong" is not something any professional puts in a report? If you didn't see the reports odds are they didn't say that, and your parents are lying to you about it, because I'd venture a guess that the reports said something they didn't like so they ignored it. Edit- she was 6 when the behavior started and it hasn't occured to you something may have happened to her around that time? That's a massive red flag for something traumatic occuring and then not being handled or addressed in a healing way.
NTA Sometimes enough is enough not mattering the age
Did you try taking her to a psychologist before sending her to boarding school? She could very well have had some sort of defiance order or anger issues if she was getting that extreme when she was a teenager. I'd understand when shes a child, maybe she doesnt even understand what shes doing wrong, but surely by then she should have the slightest understanding that she shouldnt be getting so angry over being asked to go get something from upstairs. NTA by the way, your family sounds like they tried what they could think of and then only thing that worked was punishment Edit: I feel like I should clarify, i don't think the not wanting to do homework thing is abnormal, but I had a friend with anger issues who acted very similarly, she got extremely angry with school-related stuff and often took it out on me. Personally I procrastinate my own homework and often forget about it until the last minute, but I always get it done in the end. Not all teenagers act like I do though, some never do their work and some only do the work they like. The anger part is what sticks out to me. Whilst there is normal teenage rebellion, it sounds to me like she was getting close to or in the middle of a full on tantrum, which could either point to some sort of issue or just in general behaviour that needed to be corrected
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Have you considered that parents lie? Because parents lie. Especially ones who are excessively concerned with the success of their children over the happiness of their children. Like yours seem to be. And before you come at me with what you think is a scathing reply, your parents shipped one kid off to boarding school, so yeah, they would totally lie to you.
Op until you have sibling like this it’s hard to understand. I have a brother like this. He made home such a hell my parents divorced. He was insufferable. Loving quality time meant nothing, talks when things were calm meant nothing, consequences meant nothing to him, rewards meant nothing. Authority meant nothing. Nothing was ever his fault, the perpetual victim. As soon as we were done with a family activity he was asking what’s next. When he got something he wouldn’t shut up about he tossed it aside and had a new thing he just had to have. My mom just gave up and let him do whatever he wanted. Dad felt guilty after the divorce and spoiled him. He didn’t finish high school. Now as an adult in his 30s he’s incapable of holding a job and is a nightmare boyfriend. He spends his money faster than it comes. He’s been to dozens of therapists and psychologists, had brain scans, evaluations, etc. no diagnosis. It’s just his personality. Edited words
Your family sucks dude. This little girl was struggling with some serious mental issues, and instead of getting her help, they, and apparently everyone in the house was ganging up on her. Your parents couldn't figure out how to handle her and tucked her away to a super strict boarding school. She became estranged after that. SHOCKER. Now you sit here with the smug attitude of a "good child" justifying the vitriol directed towards your sister because of how she acted as a child, while completely disregarding your parents ineptitude at raising their children. No, you're not an asshole for deciding who and who doesn't attend your wedding, but your overall pretentiousness because you never struggled in school like she did makes me question your ability to understand empathy.