She Won’t Let Her Fiancée Punish Her Son. Is She Wrong?

There’s no doubt that things can get testy when people with kids are in relationships with folks who aren’t the parents of their children.

Are they allowed to punish the kids? Yell at them? Try to set them straight?

That’s the basis of this story from Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole?” page. Read on to see what happened.

AITA for calling my fiancée delusional and not letting him punish my son?

“My fiance (40m) and I (36f) have been together for 2 years. I have 3 kids from my former marriage (7), (11), & (14).

My fiance loves them and treats them as his own but he constantly complains about certain behaviors and says that the kids lack “some forms of discipline”. I never understood what he meant but mind you he’s a teacher and can take this whole discipline thing a bit far. I noticed that he’s been doing some “tests” lately to see how they’d act in certain situations.

For example, he once left his journal lying around to see if any of my kids would snoop, he also would leave money lying around to see who’d touch it. Or even lie saying “who wants skittles?” to see if any of the kids would come to him downstairs.

The recent one (that I wasn’t aware of til later) was yesterday. He told the kids that he lost a “dollar” from his pocket and offered 10 dollars to whoever finds it. The kids began searching the house for an hour. My 7 & 11 year olds couldn’t find a thing, but my 14 year old went to my fiance and told him he found the dollar and gave it to him.

My fiance lost it and started yelling “Aaaa gotcha now!”. My son was confused. Turns out, my fiance didn’t lose any money and lied about the dollar to see how the kids would react. My son obviously had “failed” because he pretended to have found the dollar but in reality he took it from his allowance and gave it to my fiance hoping to get that 10 dollars.

My fiance said that because of my son’s dishonesty and greed, he’ll punish him by taking all his allowance for the month as well as electronics being taken away for a week!. I got into an argument with him and called him delusional because those mind games were getting ridiculous and besides, it’s not like my son stole anything from him, he just failed his stupid test and kids make mistakes and learn.

He still talked about how this is about principles and that he’s trying to teach my kids to become decent adults, but I thought this has gone too far.

I refused to let him punish him now he’s calling me an enabler and said that this attitude won’t be of much help when we get married because it undermines his authority as a parent, and enables unacceptable behaviors from my kids. He said and I quote “I will not tolerate having greedy and dishonest individuals live under my roof”.”