hmmmm....
And when you see things like this, does ANYBODY still believe in that mythical creature, the mother who DOESN'T manipulate her ex-husband/partner and her child, to get exactly what SHE wants?
Toni, sadly what you have witnessed with your sister is just the tip of the iceberg - what ELSE happens behind closed doors, what ELSE does she use to manipulate her child? And if she, whom you believe is a stable person with a healthy relationship with her ex-husband, can behave like this, how much worse do you think mentally 'challenged' women with open and festering resentment towards their ex-husbands can behave?
For all the women crying "No, NEVER! I would NEVER do that! A good mother would NEVER do that!" - there are thousands of men who will tell you, and be able to prove, that their ex-wife/partner does just that and worse.
It all comes down to the power they (ex-wives) find themselves able to wield - and while power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Sadly, the people who suffer the most are the children.
But please don't forget that the father also suffers - everybody talks about how the children suffer at the end of the day. But if the fathers DIDN'T suffer, the ex-wives would soon lose interest in behaving so badly, and there wouldn't be the number of problems caused by vindictive ex-wives that so obviously, demonstrably, and unarguably exist. The only reason the mothers behave like this is to hurt their ex-husbands/partners. Forget the lofty ideals, the 'moral' high-ground, and all the rest of that claptrap that these women deal out - this kind of behaviour exists for one reason only: to hurt the father of the child(ren).
That it is childish, despicable, and even often criminal, is easy to prove.
That it shouldn't be allowed to happen, is a foregone conclusion.
But to stop it. THAT'S the problem.
And as long as what the courts in this country, aided and abetted by the lawyers and attorneys who care only for money and nothing for people and justice, continue to routinely award custody to mothers, regardless of their mental state and their fitness to actually parent, rather than to the better parent, regardless of gender, and thereby continue to conveniently present an aggrieved and vengeful party with a laughably easy means to extract revenge and inflict hurt upon their ex-partner, this kind of situation will continue to present.
By the time a woman openly uses the kind of blatant manipulation you saw your sister employ, how many times has she covertly and slyly manipulated that child and the father to get her own way, in secret? An educated guess would say this wasn't the first time, by any means...