Is grounding my soon-to-be 18 year old daughter appropriate?
In September of last year, my 17 year old daughter got caught pretending to stay at a friend’s house, when she was actually driving around with a boy we had only met once. Before this incident, she seemed to be a girl who stuck by all our rules and was very hardworking and studious. During this time our perception of her completely changed as we found out she was also lying and staying over at her boyfriend’s house on occasion.
Skip forward to now, we’ve had many arguments since September, more-so than we ever had before. However, she seemed to be back on track with studies and more respectful. There were a few times where she stayed at her boyfriend’s house without our permission, but we knew where she was and had her location. We disciplined her appropriately and would take her car away for a week both times this happened. That was a few months ago now and she hasn’t done this since.
Recently she’s been struggling with friendships at school and had come home crying to me about feeling isolated and excluded. So when she came to me last Friday, asking if she could go to dinner with her friends, I said yes. I later found out that she actually went to a car meet, picked her boyfriend up from a bar at 12am and tried to stay the night with him. However, this plan was foiled as she ended up breaking up with him, so she left and snuck into her friend’s house who she was SUPPOSED to be with to begin with.
The parents realised this and found security footage of her sneaking in and sent it to us. Me and my husband have been furious about this situation as she continues to lie and manipulate us into situations. We have made it very clear that this behaviour has to stop and that she will be disciplined if she continues to act this way. We have decided to ground her for a month (except for school or work), because whatever else we seem to do doesn’t work. She just doesn’t take our rules seriously AT ALL.
She has argued however that she is turning 18 half way through being grounded for a month and also will be grounded for two thirds of her holidays. Whilst she is obeying by our new rules, and I’m dedicated to actually seeing her respect our rules for once, she continues to deem them unfair. Do you think this is an unfair rule? Me and my husband believe it is fair considering she has acted in a deceitful way toward us on multiple occasions.