Replies to '08/03 Teen Wake-Up Calls'

Your daughter did not just out of the blue start doing these things, she may have become more bold about it but if you look back objectively, you will see times when she was doing things that were setting the stage for her current behaviour.  

You say that she wanted a real father and you know what, she has every right to feel that way. It makes me nuts when parents think that a step-parent, no matter how out of the way they went for the child should be appreciated in the same way. Did you and her ever work together to help her understand her feelings about her real father, did you help her grieve the dad he never was? probably not. You need to look at her needs from the point of view of a child, not yourself. Go back to when her dad left her and emotionally, that is where her life stopped. physically she has grown up but emotionally she is still hoping against all hopes that her daddy will come back and scoop her up and tell her it was all just a bad dream.  

the reason young girls sleep around and drink, & party is because they either want to see how much they can get away with, they want to feel more grown up than they are, or they want to feel important to someone in an adult fashion. They need a healthy male role model that can show them how they should be treated.  

If your husband really wants to be that person for her, he needs to sit down with her and start letting her tell  him about how hurt she is about her dad and to help her understand that sometimes even though people are still alive, we need to grieve them as if they are gone in order to give ourselves a fighting chance at a happy life.