"AITA for insisting on homeschooling my stepdaughter?"
My husband and I have 3 girls, 3, 5, and 12. Our 12 year old is his from a previous relationship. Our 12 year old has an undiagnosed stomach issue. We’re working with a gastroenterologist, they’ve done blood tests, stool tests, colonoscopies, endoscopies, biopsies down her gi tract, ultrasounds, CT scans, and MRIs. There’s a few things that it might be but nothing fits so far.
We’re going to another hospital across the country in a few weeks to see basically a real life Dr House. Her mom can be problematic. She believes in natural medicine and fought her being put on meds, gave her supplements that made her worse, withheld medication, and missed appointments. We had 50/50 custody until recently.
My step daughter was missing 3-4 days a week of school and was falling behind so my husband and I thought it would be best to home school her. We had already made the decision to homeschool our 6 year old for other reasons and I taught elementary and middle school in that district for nearly 20 years so I’m qualified to teach her.
Her mom refused to allow us to homeschool her because it would be unfair for us to see her on her mom's weeks and she refused our other suggestion, which is online school through the district, because it doesn’t count as real school.
We were already taking her to court over the difficulty with meds and appointments so we added the fact that she’s stopping my stepdaughter from getting an appropriate education to the list. Judge sided with us and we are able to make all medical and educational decisions and she sees her mom for 2 hours on Saturdays while being supervised.
My family and my husbands family thinks we’re being cruel to my step daughter and her mom, especially because she had gotten better about complying with her doctors orders after we threatened court but wouldn’t budge on homeschooling.
In their minds we took her daughter away because she didn’t want her to be homeschooled. Now I’m wondering if I’m wrong for insisting on homeschooling and taking things this far.
Here's what people had to say to OP:
Impossible_Rain_4727 said:
ESH: The mother absolutely should not be in charge of the child's medical decisions. That said, what your stepdaughter wanted - to live primarily with you, go to the same school with her friends, spend every other weekend with her mom - sounds like a more ideal scenario. It is a shame her wishes were not taken into consideration.
nylabuyer said:
ESH. The mom for withholding meds, but also you for forcing home school when your step daughter specifically doesn’t want to be home schooled. It makes sense that she is falling behind, but why is she missing 3-4 days a week? 12 is a key time socially and honestly home school will further isolate her from her peers.
Has your step daughter been evaluated by an OBGYN? I ask because a decent number of women I know had terrible stomach issues around 10-12 years old and turned out to have Endometriosis, PCOS or something similar that started to show prior to the onset of puberty.
Noclevername12 said:
YTA. Public schools have to provide homebound tutoring to sick kids. I personally think this is a YTA because there’s no way you should be forcing homeschooling on this unwilling teenager. Your reasons are bizarre – that other children are discipline problems?
This will affect her academically and socially and she will resent you and she will be correct. Being a middle school teacher does not qualify you to teach every single subject that a middle schooler learns.
Badga said:
If your stepdaughter doesn’t want to be homeschooled then YTA.
NefariousnessIll2135 said:
NTA. If Mom (and possibly daughter herself?) prefers her to be enrolled at a school in-person I would personally keep that as the long term goal. Hopefully you can sort things out medically so she’s able to attend in the future. For now homeschooling clearly works best. Maybe you can revisit custody in the future if Mom is able to get onboard and you are confident she will stick to the plan.
cv_adore said:
YTA. Based on your comments daughter doesn’t want to homeschool and she has a choice in the matter. If she is falling behind why not set aside time to tutor her and fill in the gaps instead of removing her from school all together.