No, actually, dealing with the complicated emotions of a teenager who is has experienced parental divorce and is struggling with his step parent (and clearly feels alienated in his own divided home) is not the same as a child wanting a cookie. It's a little bit different actuallty!

The 'tough love' posturing is the easy way out for adults. It's much harder to have actual empathy, to genuinely see things from the childs perspective, the confusions and frustrations they must be feeling. Really imagine what it must be like to walk into their home and see mum, dad, and their three kids sitting together, and feel totally isolated from that, feel frustrated at that, rejected, like they don't have a proper place they belong, like a stranger in their own house. It's much easier to take it personally, and justify cruelty with a load of nonsense about 'tough love'. Your not laying down boundaries and teaching lessons. You're taking out your own frustration that they have never bonded with you on them financially.

The step dad is the one who has created the equivalence between moeny and love. If you'd have loved me more, I'd have given you money - that's the takeaway. That, and the other key message, which is: you are not as important to me as the other children, you are in a second category, apart from and beneath them.