AITAH (F29) for not wanting my bf (M50) to keep enabling his kids?

For context; my boyfriend and I have been together for 3 years. We live together. Have a daughter together. And we’re overall happy with each other. He has kids from a previous marriage that are around my age. I get along great with all of them for the most part.

From his kids I learned their mom is a narcissist to say the least. So they grew up with trauma understandably.
But I’ve noticed some things that I don’t like and usually cause conflict or fights with my boyfriend.
His youngest (f21) has taken things from me without permission. I would casually catch her wearing my things out and about. I would bring it up to my bf and he would joke about it saying it’s fine and that his kids grew up taking each others things or sometimes he’d get defensive and ask me how I knew they were mine. (Obviously I know what my things look like and it was missing from my closet).

Once it was my Gucci slides that are 3 sizes too small for her. Once, we went on vacation and when I got back our room was a mess and my clothes that I left hung up and clean were all over the room. At this time, she didn’t live with us. But since her job was closer to us, my bf told her she could stay at our place while we were gone so she’d be closer to work. Funny enough, she would never stay there when we were home.

Anyways, It looked like she didn’t even wear her own clothes and just used mine when I was gone. So I made it a point for him to talk to her and he did because the proof was obvious. She was the only one staying in the room. A month later my rings went missing. I knew she took them but I knew he would get mad if I accused her. About a month later I see her wearing them. But it was Father’s Day so I didn’t say anything. My biggest problem with her was her taking my things but she would also lie and manipulate situations to try to get out of trouble. It was always “oh, I didn’t know.” “Was I supposed to do that?” “I was so tired I forgot”. One time she was supposed to take care of our cats and dog while we were on vacation and she admitted she didn’t feed them or walk the dog because she “forgot”. The dog peed all over the place and they were starved. I was beyond pissed. There’s so much more but thats all I’ll say about her.

His other daughter (f23) has extreme anxiety. To the point that she doesn’t drive. My boyfriend gave her a car. She has a license but she refuses to drive or try. She would even not take Ubers because of her anxiety but she took Ubers just fine to go the bars with her friends. She’s also gone home with a random guy from the bar with no anxiety. So it doesn’t completely make sense to me. There was even a time my boyfriend made me drive 20 minutes away to go get her at 11pm because she said she was going to sleep at her workplace instead of ubering home. Sometimes, she’ll have anxiety and I’ll talk her out of her negative thoughts by essentially telling her to get over it and it works. One time she wanted me to drive her 45 minutes away for a job and I said I’ll go with you but you have to drive. She started getting frustrated and said she’s just gonna call out and I said “okay, that’s not a good first impression. If you don’t care about losing the job before you even start go ahead” it was a really good paying job and she needed the money and after about 30 minutes she agreed to drive!

But when it comes to my bf, he’ll constantly help her out with money when she overspends on Ubers and can’t afford rent. He coddles her. He’ll basically try and fix all her problems but that’s exactly why she doesn’t grow up. And when I tell him this he gets mad at me. But if her sibling says the same thing, my bf will agree. And he says I don’t have anxiety so I don’t understand and I said you’re absolutely right. But when I handle her, she gets things done. Because I don’t allow her to wallow in self pity.

And maybe this is because of how I grew up, I didn’t get sympathy. I had to figure it out on my own. I never called my parents to pay for my rent because I was irresponsible with money. And when I was her age, I had a less professional job, worked twice as hard, and paid twice what she did in rent. When I was younger and was upset about something that was kinda petty my dad would straight up tell me “are you feeling sorry for yourself?”
He didn’t coddle me. And my mom is foreign. If I ever told her I wasn’t gonna go to work because I had anxiety she’d tear me a new one. There were no excuses so I just learned to deal with it. This is not to say I had bad parents. I had extremely loving and caring parents. They just didn’t deal with BS excuses and they definitely didn’t enable me to continue bad habits. If I was ever out of line, I would never hear the end of it so I learned to be better.

I can understand wanting to be there for your kids 100%. But when is it helping and when is it enabling.

So am I the asshole

Posted Aug 13, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

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