I (32M) want to try and rebuild a relationship with my niece (13F) and don’t know where to start. Need advice.

My niece lives with my parents and my sister (her mom) and when she was around 5 years old I moved out and haven’t had a lot of contact with her since. Not getting into it but I don’t have a great relationship with my family and when I moved out I left them behind mostly and became a much happier and independent person. I’m now married and feel like I have a real home for the first time in my life.

Jump forward to now I am getting back into my family’s lives and things are going pretty well between us. But my niece is a very, very lonely and isolated child. It’s not an easy house to grow up in and my sister is, to be blunt, a terrible parent. My niece is a gifted artist but everyone finds her to be weird and socially awkward. And they will tell her that or talk about her like she’s not there. She is also the only kid in the house. She did very well in school, the teachers loved her, and she had a great circle of friends. With the pandemic, however, she hasn’t really seen her friends or had that school space separate from her home space where she can really thrive. I felt the exact same way she did at her age but I had school and friends and I could actually leave my house. When I do visit my parents’ house she stays in her room and I can barely get two words out of her when I do see her. Which, again, is exactly how I was at that age.

Her stress levels are through the roof now because her 13th birthday is approaching, Ontario will not reopen schools and my sister just gave birth to a new baby boy.

I want to try and reach out to her so she can have someone to talk to about how she’s doing and someone to support her hobbies. But I don’t want it to come off like the “cool uncle you can talk to” kind of vibe because I hated that crap when I was a kid. I’ve also been out of her life for 8 years so I don’t expect to just jump back in. I really want to try and give her a safe space which I think she desperately needs but I don’t know where to begin or how to approach it in a way that she will feel is genuine.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Tl;dr: Trying to rebuild relationship with niece and give her an adult she can trust and talk to. Want advice on how to go about it.

Submitted June 03, 2021 at 12:48PM by duckanddonuts https://ift.tt/3pjnIsi