Chambers

AITA for not giving my daughter money to pay for her school project?

Anonymous in /c/AmItheAsshole

225
I (M/45) have a 14 year old daughter Faye who started high school last fall. She's in this program that the school calls "independent study" where she gets to work on her own project for the entire year. The idea is to teach the kids to do research and get in touch with experts and work with people, plan all the different steps of the project, finances etc. The kids can pick any subject they're interested in, science, history, art, etc. Faye isn't a particularly hard working girl, she's more on the lazier side and she tends to procrastinate. <br><br>When the study project was brought up I was a bit worried that Faye wouldn't put in enough effort, but she was very eager and seemed very motivated by the project. She told me she wanted to write a book from the perspective of an unborn baby watching over the world and seeing how it was getting destroyed by pollution and seeing animals die in the ocean. She wanted to include some of her own drawings.<br><br>A month or so into it, Faye asked me to pay for a subscription to Spotify so that she could listen to music while drawing. I was surprised by that, this subscription costs $15 a month. She spends hours drawing, I told her that she could easily use the free version and just hear the ads. She said the ads are very distracting, and if she's going to listen to the same music every day for hours every day for the next year then it will get in the way if there are loud commercials all the time, she was actually kind of pissed at me for not wanting to spend $15.<br><br>This was back in November and we've had this conversation about Spotify and then other things several times since then. Faye asked me if I could give her some money to pay for a trip to theChristmas market. When I asked why that was relevant to her project she said she wanted to by Christmas presents for her friends. I told her I wasn't going to pay for her friends' presents just because she happened to draw some pictures for this project.<br><br>I also got her a subscription to Netflix so that she could listen to what the characters say in some animated movie about animals. She said she wanted to hear everything they say in the movie so that she could draw the characters in a realistic way.<br><br>2 weeks ago Faye asked me for money to order food from Uber eats for her and some friends. I asked her who they were, it was some friends she had invited over to work on the project. I asked her what they were going to work on, she said they were going to brainstorm some ideas for the story and the illustrations. She said it would be more fun if they ate something together instead of just sitting there with some sandwiches. I reminded her that she has a habit of procrastinating and that I wasn't going to pay for her and her friends to hang out and eat sushi at home and maybe work a bit on the project, maybe. I don't have tons of money, I'm an office worker and I have 2 daughters, Faye has a younger sister.<br><br>She texted her friends to tell them that I wasn't going to pay for food, and then she came up to me and said that her friends are probably not going to come over if I don't pay for food. Then she said "this is so stupid, why do you care about paying for food when it's for this school project? Why can't you just give me money for this? I don't get why you can't pay for Spotify and food, I don't understand". I told her I was getting frustrated by her requests for every single thing she wanted to do, that I'd already spent over $100 to pay for stuff for her project. She said that I was treating her like a 6 year old and that I didn't understand how it was working, the project was supposed to simulate real life work, and she wanted to work with her friends on it and that was why she had invited them, so the three of them could brainstorm together. Then she said "you're ruining the whole point of this, it's supposed to mimic how adults work, but you're micro managing everything I do". She said that Spotify and the Netflix subscription and some other stuff she'd purchased for the project were necessary, she wasn't just "drawing some pictures". <br><br>We had a lengthy argument, I ended up getting pissed off at her and I yelled for her to go to her room. I felt I had a right to be angry, she doesn't even have a job and this is supposed to be for her education, she's not supposed to pay thousands of dollars each month for irrelevant shit. She called her friends and texted them, and she was crying. Then she came down and apologized and said she shouldn't have asked me about food, that was selfish. I told her it was fine, I apologized too for overreacting and raising my voice. <br><br>Saturday morning she told me her friends had changed their minds and they were going to come over after all. She said she was going to make sandwiches for them and that she had already bought some cheese and meat with her own money at the store. She was being very quiet and polite and didn't want to talk to me, I told her I was sorry again for raising my voice at her and that I trusted her completely. I said that from now on, if she wants money for anything that had to do with the project, she should just come and ask me and I would give it to her. I said that I knew she had a good head on her shoulders and that she would spend the money wisely and not waste it. <br><br>Then 3 days ago I get a text from her asking me to send her money for her and her friends to go to a restaurant and get some food. I told her that what, didn't she just buy food to make sandwiches? She said she did, but then they changed their minds and wanted to go to a restaurant instead. I kind of lost it and told her she was taking advantage of me and being dishonest and wasteful. She said I had no right to accuse her of anything and that I had promised her I would trust her. I said that I had trusted her and she had abused that trust. <br><br>We're having a big argument about this and her Mother is taking her side.

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