I've been provoked to join Mumsnet just to ask for help and advice about my thirteen year old daughter. To be honest, she has always been a little stubborn and stroppy - from a toddler - it's just her personality. She's the third of four, and pretty different temperamentally from the others.
She started turning into a teenager, I swear, at age eleven. Over the last few months, however, she has become completely unbearable. She verbally bullies her brother, who has mild autism and is getting agitated and tongue-tied around her, she is violently rude and abusive to us her parents when the fit takes her, and virtually no gathering of the family in the same room passes without some kind of nasty tantrum from her. She has also started making huge difficulties about getting out of bed in the morning to go to school (she claims nothing is wrong at school), and either refuses to go altogether (we've had the school intervene as best they can), or makes me waste half my morning running her about the place. I have to take the other two children separately then come back for her, as it's not fair to make them late because of her.
She has a snide, snarling, nasty tone of voice and will say spiteful things just to hurt us - all of us, my husband and me, her brother and sometimes even her little sister. And it's never provoked, she just seems to want to be vile. She also swears, repeatedly and unrepentantly – including in front of her much younger sister – even though I have made it very clear that this is totally unacceptable. My husband and I never use bad language, so it’s certainly not something she learned at home!
What really gets to me, however, is that she complains all the time about the house we 'force' her to live in. It's a minor manor house, set in grounds and woodland, a little under a mile from a decent village with a shop and no distance at all (a short bus or car ride) from the city where she goes to high school. She has her own, very large bedroom with her own en suite bathroom. But because we 'live in the country' we're depriving her of being able to visit her friends (I never make any fuss about driving her all about town to see her friends when she asks me to), and because our house is so big it's difficult and expensive to heat (we do our best) so it's a 'piece of crap' and the reason why she can't get up in the morning. There are reasons why we have no choice but to live here at the moment, and we also have severe financial and other anxieties as a family which I won't go into but make me hope desperately that we can continue to put this 'crap' roof over her head. All she wants, however, is that we go and live in what she calls an 'ordinary house' and she practically accuses us of child abuse by making her live where we do.
She complained this morning - as I drove her to school an hour late - that she couldn't get up this morning because of the house, and I ended up telling her that it was upsetting to me to work and worry to provide her with things, only to have her throw it back in my face. Her parting shot was, "That's because you don't provide me with much."
To be clear. She has, as I've said, her own bedroom suite. A laptop. Internet connection. iphone on unlimited contract. New clothes emblazoned with gloomy band motifs. Cash whenever she wants it to buy drinks and crisps. A home cooked meal on the table every night, not that she eats it half the time. A taxi service by me for her social life. Am I missing something?
As for spending time as a family, when she and her nearest brother were small I was forever taking them on day trips and suchlike. I did my very best. Nowadays, I couldn't contemplate organising a family outing, because my daughter would ruin it.
Obviously I do a lot of hand-wringing about what I've done wrong (other than living where we do of course). My husband and I spend pointless hours discussing her - pointless, because nothing changes, and no conversations we try to have with her amount to anything positive. It's draining, and emotionally exhausting, and I'm beginning to feel I've completely failed in the most important job of my life - to bring up a happy, pleasant human being.
I know a certain amount of teenage bad attitude is fairly common, although her older brothers were/are nothing approaching this. But has anyone else dealt with continual complaining from their children about their basic life circumstances? I feel sometimes as if I’m going mad.
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Ungrateful, unpleasant thirteen year old daughter
63 replies
Dolorosa · 02/02/2016 13:32
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