Dear Queenie,
My 14-year-old daughter wants to go live with her father (we're divorced) because she says I have too many rules and restrictions and he gives her all the freedom she wants.
I have tried to tell him that she is too young to be so unsupervised, but he claims he is teaching her to make her own decisions.
Queenie, is he right?—Worried mother
Dear Worried mother,
No. While it is a good idea to encourage a teenager to start making her own decisions, she still needs supervision and guidance to be sure the decisions she is making are good ones and to protect her from the consequences of bad ones.
Your ex apparently is too ignorant and/or too lazy to make the effort needed. Let your daughter visit him (for brief periods), but do not let her live with him until she is much older and more mature – by which time she may not want to so much.
