My (38f) partner (42m) often asks me to do strange things to "smooth things over" with his daughter (15f) when it's his responsibility.

I've been very involved in their lives since she was 10 and I care about her very much. We don't live together but I'm there a lot and usually sleep over on weekends. We've gone on many holidays together (just to give you an idea of my role in her life).

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But my partner can be hard on her. He has high expectations and I've often heard him get very upset/frustrated with her (for example, for failing an important exam because she just didn't put the effort in). I understand his frustration -- she's rather lackadaisical about many things. But he gets really upset and emotional, always thinking she's going to flunk highschool and never make anything of her life. Once she was caught in a series of lies and he lamented to me that he thinks she might be a sociopath. Um, no, just a dumb teenager.

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Honestly I'm tired of all of it. A bad mark (or whatever the issue happens to be) can send him into a funk for days. And he, as mentioned, gets really upset with her, so there's all this angry tension. If this only happened once a year or something, I could deal with it. But it's happened 4 times in the past 6 months. I don't like how he handles stuff, but she is his daughter and it's up to him how he deals with things like this.

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The part I really am not sure about -- he will ask me to take her out for a drive, or out to lunch, to tell her that he loves her. That he's only hard on her because he loves her so much and worries about her. If she's upset with him when she goes home to her mom's, he will get me to text her to "smooth things over".

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I don't want to. I feel like it's his daughter, he's her dad, he's the one flipping out about issues, and she's the one having these issues. I don't always want to be in the middle of this stuff. But when I say I don't want to he says please, please, please...she's the most important thing in his life and he doesn't want to screw things up even more...that she'll listen to me... Whether she listens or not I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure she doesn't like when I do this. She never opens up to me...just says "it's ok, it's ok, I'm fine". Obviously isn't interested in talking about it. I always end up feeling awkward.

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It just gets....tiring.

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Is this normal? What would this behaviour even be called that he's displaying? It seems very childish but I don't have my own kids so I don't know if this is a thing with parenting. My parents never did it....

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tldr: partner gets overly emotionally upset over bad marks, minor lying, missing curfew, and then begs me to be the third party to smooth things out with his teenaged daughter.

Submitted February 18, 2021 at 11:33PM by Icy_Association_3757 https://ift.tt/3bpbHes