Woman Watches Nephew for Free, but Stops Care Due to His Behavioral Issues. Now, Her Sister-in-Law is Angry

A woman seeks support from the Reddit community after a tense family dynamic leaves her feeling overwhelmed and questioning her responsibilities.

She shares that she is a stay-at-home mom to a 4-year-old daughter and has been providing free childcare for her nephew, who is the same age.

“My husband worked in his twenties to build two pretty successful local businesses & he works a lot so it’s better for our family for me to stay home,” she writes in her post. Their home, she adds, is “basically a kid’s dream” with plenty of open space on their farm.

Meanwhile, her husband’s older half-brother and his wife spent their 20s traveling, and now struggle to make ends meet. “My husband helps them a lot, but he gets burnt out helping them with things so he generally keeps his distance,” she writes.

Feeling sympathy for their situation, she originally offered to watch her nephew for free, thinking it would benefit both children. “It was great at first, because my daughter had someone to play with while I took care of farm & house chores,” she explains.

However, things changed quickly as she began to notice behavioral issues. “He thinks everything is negotiable. No doesn’t mean no, it means scream about it until the adults relent.”

“He cries and screams when he doesn’t get his way,” she adds. “He tests boundaries all the time and constantly tries to push against them.”

She describes feeling like she is constantly re-parenting him throughout the day. “I get that they both work, but they overindulge him to a point that is kind of ridiculous.”

She believes much of the problem stems from her sister-in-law’s parenting style. “Every time he is upset she tries to negotiate with him & usually just gives him what he wants but says ‘we’ll talk about it later at home when he’s calmed down.’ ”

The woman admits she’s skeptical that anything is ever addressed at home. “I roll my eyes at this because I just know it isn’t true, they don’t address anything with him.”

One major issue is that her nephew has not been taught to share, which causes frequent conflict. “If he doesn’t want to share a toy, he doesn’t have to,” she explains of her sister-in-law’s parenting style.

In her house, the rules are different, and she enforces them for both children. “If he brings a toy to my house and he doesn’t want to share, I confiscate the toy so no one plays with it & then I give it to his mom telling her not to let him come back with it.”

But her sister-in-law has pushed back against these boundaries. “She’s tried to coach me on how to properly handle sharing, according to her.”

The woman insists on maintaining her own rules in her own home. “When he’s at my house he has to follow my rules.”

To keep the peace, she sometimes removes toys that have caused issues in the past before play even begins. “I used to give him second chances but I quickly learned that it was just teaching him he could undermine my authority.”

However, the conflict extended beyond playtime. Once a week, she took the kids to a park nearby and insisted they walk or ride their scooters.

Her nephew resisted and cried when she refused to carry him. “His mom messaged me saying ‘(Son) doesn’t want to walk to the park anymore so we came up with a plan, why don’t you take them to the water park…’”

She immediately declined. “The water park costs money, it’s harder to watch two kids there, and I never agreed to carpool them anywhere.”

She grew increasingly frustrated when it became clear that her sister-in-law was sharing the alternate plans with her son. “He’d bring up how his mom said we could go to another park, and then cry when I tell him I wasn’t open to that.”

Inside her home, more incidents began piling up. “He takes one bite out of every strawberry in the bowl just to be spiteful so my daughter couldn’t have any.” She also catches him trying to sneak toys into his bag to take home. “Then his mom asks if he can ‘borrow’ it when I check his bag and call him out on it.”

The final straw came when he began urging her daughter to break the rules, too.

“I’d tell him he couldn’t do something like climbing up the gate to the horse pasture and he’ll just look at me then say ‘(Daughter) climb up here with me,'” she says. “He’s been doing this for a few weeks now & I told his mother that if he was going to encourage my daughter to disrespect my rules he would not be allowed back over.”

She warned her sister-in-law that this couldn’t continue, but her concerns were brushed off. “She essentially tried to defend him, saying ‘it’s age appropriate.’”

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Things reached a breaking point during a baking session in her kitchen. “He decided to throw chocolate chips across the room,” she recalls.

“I told him to stop and he ignored me and told my daughter to throw them with him,” the poster writes.

So, she removed him and placed him in time out, but he lashed out. “He actually started throwing things around my living room and screaming at me.”

The situation became unmanageable as he repeatedly defied her. “He kept coming back into the kitchen and I had to physically remove him over and over again.” She called her sister-in-law in frustration, and her brother-in-law arrived early to pick him up. “I told him he wasn’t welcome back, that I was done.”

Although she recognizes that her decision might seem abrupt, she stands by it. “I thought I was being helpful. And I gave them plenty of warnings that his behavior was not acceptable or appropriate in my home.”

While the poster doesn’t think her nephew is a “bad kid,” he has “been allowed to misbehave and he’s been taught that if he has a violent screaming & throwing meltdown then he’ll get his way.”

However, her sister-in-law is upset and accuses her of being unfair. “She wants me to finish off the week,” the woman writes, but adds firmly, “I just simply have reached my limit and do not want to continue watching him, even for just a few more days.”

In an update, the woman shares that her sister-in-law took the week off from work to care for him and is “hoping to get my nephew into a daycare soon.”

Her mother-in-law also reached out and offered to watch him “until they can figure out daycare,” although “she doesn’t want to.”

“She expects to be paid something for her time though,” the woman notes. “I guess she always felt I was a little too generous with them and they need to be prepared to be a little more financially responsible. I hope we can still find time to get the cousins together, but I think for the foreseeable future we all just need a little space.”