Re: Difficult child destroying our marriage!

Your text starts with "I don't love this child...".

You and I may have totally different idea about what "love" towards kids is. For me, it is primarily acceptance and understanding and awareness that the child needs support and has a right to live his life happily; and you can dislike a child, and even feel contempt for her behaviour, but you have to understand that children behave as they are influenced to. They don't have a functional ego - they can only model their own behaviour and ego based on influences from their environment (parent of the same sex primarily). I think you can understand why she's like that, and that it won't turn out to be good for her later in life... and that is love. Try to separate "love" from "not approving of someone's actions". You'll feel better and won't have that guilty feeling.

The other part is probably her mom who tells her all kinds of things just to create trouble for you. (Father doesn't seem able to handle the situation as he obviously doesn't understand what's going on.)

If she was to live with you two only, she would change; as long as she has her mom's influence, she will never change.

Try NOT to treat her like a child whose behaviour needs to be adjusted, who needs to be parented and so on... Rather, you can try something like - "Tell me dear, would you rather not spend your time here with us? I'm only asking because you don't seem happy here... You know, with all the crying and trouble you make..." (And if she was to say 'yes, I'd rather not come here', or something like that, I would take the issue to her father and maybe even suggest that she should live with her mom only).

Much better solution though would be that she never sees her mom and lives with you two instead.

She seems to have some sort of idea why her parents divorced, and it's highly likely that the idea is wrong and was created by her mom, along the lines of "I'll tell you what really happened, but you must promise never to tell anyone". I've seen this among divorced children where one of the parents is likely to lie and manipulate. So she might think that it's your fault that her parents divorced, and therefore has unlimited amount of hatred towards you, and is now trying to split you two or get back at you (and she seems to be doing well in that respect).

Would it be possible to evaluate her mother and see if she is capable of being a decent parent? I don't know how that would work where you live, but maybe social services or someone like that could get interested and try and find out what is going on when she is with her mother?

In any case, what people do to their own kids today just to spite the other parent is a crime, and unfortunately not really recognized as such.

I'll give you a real life example: A girl spends most of her time with her mom, and only weekends with her dad. Mom manages to skip the country, against law, and father has a hard time finding his daughter. When he finally manages to find her, and visit her, the child is totally cold and disinterested. Father manages to get two weeks away from the mother with the child, and only after some 10 days on their own, and after loads of diplomacy, the girl admits that she doesn't like him "for all the things he did". Since I know him, as he is a close friend of mine, I know that he never did anything stupid - he doesn't drink, or yell, or beat his wife or kids... Anyhow, his former wife told their daughter that he used to kick her mom in the belly while she was pregnant (!!!), that he used to beat her up all the time, and that his current wife is the reason they separated. And she was also told not to reveal that to him especailly because he is so evil that who knows what he's capable of doing. She was also told that the reason they "had" to leave the country was because he was trying to kidnap her and take here somewhere where she would never see her mom or anyone else again, etc. (truth was that her love interest moved to that country first so she followed him)

Yes, these things happen... and they first show in the child's behaviour. Tweet