Adult Children Angry When Stepmom Refuses to Pay Allowance

One woman on the internet has received an outpouring of support after her adult stepchildren demanded she pay them an allowance.

Family dynamics are always complicated, and blended families can make things even messier. Still, it’s not every day that you hear an adult child demand that their stepmother pay them an allowance.

That’s what happened in a Reddit post on the Am I the A**hole thread, where a woman asked strangers if she was in the wrong for refusing to financially support her husband’s children as adults.

The 52-year-old woman said she married her husband 15 years ago. At the time, he was a widower of three years and taking care of his two children from the previous marriage. The children are now 24 and 22.

The woman said when she came into the picture, she immediately understood that she would never act as the children’s “stepmother.”

“They made it known instantly to me that I would never replace their mother and that they weren’t particularly pleased with my presence in their home,” the Reddit user wrote. “I accepted that and I, in agreement with John, decided that we would let our relationship advance slowly to let the kids adjust and that I would never force myself as a stepmother.”

The couple waited until the children approved of them moving in together, and again they waited to get the children’s blessing to get married. Still, through all of this, a distance remained between the stepmother and kids.

“We cohabitated, but I never parented them,” she said. “I went to their school functions, cleaned for them, cooked and we talked and had a cordial relationship, but I never disciplined them, never put rules on them, they never came to me to ask permission for anything or tell me their secrets or ask me advice, which was fine by me. That was what they wanted.”

But this holiday season, the woman wrote, her husband told the adult kids he’d be cutting off their monthly allowance to help fund his retirement.

Suffice to say, the Reddit user said the children “did not take it well.”

The adult kids then asked their stepmom if she could continue their allowance as she owns her own business and it’s doing well. The answer was an unequivocal no.

She rationalized this by saying when her husband retires, she will be the only income in the household. Plus, she needs to save for her daughter’s college fund and her own retirement.

The prospect of living without an allowance floored them.

“They tried to say that it was my responsibility to take care of them and I was just taken aback by that statement because they explicitly told me many times that I was just their father’s wife not their mother, so I have absolutely no responsibility towards them in that regard,” the woman wrote.

The husband’s daughter then said she expected to inherit the stepmom’s business because she grew up with it.

“I told her in no uncertain terms that she and her brother were entitled to nothing of mine and certainly not my business which I built myself from the ground up since before I met their dad. They both got angry and left.”

In the fallout of the fight, the woman said her husband is angry, and all the children and in-laws are against her.

“To be clear, I do love them but not as my children and I do not have the obligation of a mother or a step to them and if they wanted me as such in their lives they had fifteen years to open their arms to me to do so and not do it for money,” she said.

The internet, however, quickly rushed to the stepmom’s defense.

“They’re not your kids and you’re not responsible for them,” one user responded. “They themselves even made sure you knew this. They are rude and disrespectful yet expect to be handed anything they want on a plate. You owe them nothing.”

Another suggested the father plays a larger role in this problem than many are realizing.

“Did you realize you’ve somehow become the bad guy because their dad is cutting off their cash flow for his own very reasonable purposes?” another user commented. “He’s jumping on board with being angry at you because it takes the heat off of him.”

Family therapists, who tend to recognize the nuanced dynamics within families, also empathized with the stepmother in this situation.

“It’s perfectly fair to leave your assets to only your biological children or to choose heirs if you don’t have biological children,” psychologist Lauren Napolitano told Newsweek. “Unless she had adopted her husband’s children when they were younger, I don’t see why they would feel entitled to her assets in the will.”

Still, as money is a deeply personal issue, it’s important to explore the factors that allowed the family to get into this situation in the first place, Kentucky-based family therapist Deedee Cummings said.

“If anything, I would help the family members explore the root causes as to why they do not agree on the way the money is distributed or passed down,” Cummings told Newsweek.

While receiving an allowance as an adult from your parents is in no way a common reality for most Americans, there are deeper reasons that might contribute to the children’s behavior, psychologist Daniel Glazer said.

“On the surface, adult children expecting financial support from a parent’s new spouse seems entitled and inappropriate,” Glazer told Newsweek. “However, we must recognize complex emotional factors likely underpin those expectations—hurt over remarriage after their mother’s death, feeling excluded from inheritance as ‘non-biological’ kin, grief over losing connection with their father.”

Blended families often encounter many issues with estate planning, and it can easily trigger unresolved emotional wounds, he said.

And the stepmother also likely brings some of her own emotions surrounding never being accepted as a mother into the situation, as well.

“Emotions are not intelligent, they are primitive,” New Jersey-based therapist Jennifer Hilligus told Newsweek. “They often have more power over our decisions than any other factor.

“I think this decision was both logical and emotional. I think she was hurt by the role she was relegated to from the start and had no control over it back then due to the dynamics. I think that plays a role in this decision….The past affects us whether we ‘worked through it’ or ‘it’s in the past.’ It never really is.”