Is Year 9 the hardest?

@Fleckle I’m finding it the opposite with my sons, they seem to be getting easier, for now! Was your daughter generally quite well behaved in primary? Think it can be a shock when the hormones kick in ! Hopefully it’ll be ok when my younger sons get there too. Good luck op !

Dtds are year 9 (August babies so youngest in the year). It’s quite a transitional year where they’re settled/confident and figuring out a new level of independence in a world where some parents totally step back and stop parenting/allow dc to swear at them and stay out at the park until 10pm and others have strict rules, then the spectrum in between. Peer pressure in year 9 is strong imo. One thing we seem to have cracked here (we also have a very compliant 17yo who has helped us set the boundaries so 13yo dc aren’t getting any surprises), is good communication. Communicate and build my trust and you will have freedom… break my trust and I’ll get strict because it’s my job to keep you safe. I also tell dc to use me as an excuse if they don’t want to go somewhere or feel unsafe they are to say “mum messaged and said I need to get home”.

The friends they are around have a big impact. DD’s old best friend now swears and screams at her mum. Dd is horrified and tells me she’d never speak to me like that. (She’s not perfect and has screamed at me but Is rare).

I don’t do grounding but I do remove devices occasionally. It seems to help them to reset. But when things calm, we chat through what happened and I listen. I’m open, we are navigating their teen years together.

Year 9 is tough. it sounds like she’s feeling pressure. Since she’s tried vaping please suggest her to try www.puffstats.com just once. it’s a really good app for teens and can actually help her get back on track.

In my experience, year 9 is very hard. Children spend their school days rushing from one difficult topic to another, with no time between to recover or reflect. I remember my middle son coming home very sad and quiet one day: it transpired that he’d spent an hour learning about the holocaust, then an hour on knife crime (with graphic, upsetting stories and images), followed by an hour on the saddest section of ‘Of Mice and Men’. Every difficult social issue that schools are expected to cover gets piled into the year 9 PHSE curriculum, and no-one seems to consider the overall picture of what pupils are having to cope with in any one day.

On top of all this, there’s the pressure to choose subjects for GCSE - and some schools start working on GCSE topics early as there’s just too much content to squeeze into years 10 and 11. Add in constant lectures and warnings about how important the choices they’re making are, and how hard the next four years are going to be… It’s rough.

In my teaching experience, Year 9 was always the hardest.

My experience with DD (now 16, yr 11) is that year 9 is a bit of a reprieve year, ie the least hard. They can have tricky times with friendships in any year though!

But I think all kids are different and can struggle in different years.

Teacher here. Y8 is normally the tricky year, by this point in Y9 they're usually very settled unless there's something else going on.

Has your kid got a trusted adult in school?
Are you talking to your kid's teachers? Have you met with the HoY? Have you raised this with the DSL?
To be honest, it sounds like a friendship issue and as if your DD is really struggling with a stressful situation.

I'd start with the HoY and be in active communication.

I am not going to lie it wasn’t cheap! But it really helped. The sessions started with us both talking for 5 minutes with me saying anything I had noticed 40 minutes of DD on her own and then me back at the end to get the bits I needed to here.

one thing for example was ordering her own food, not stepping in for her, allowing her to work out her comfort zone and not pushing for more or holding her back.

she still keeps a journal and writes down her feelings etc.

she did do 6 sessions through school before that and it was helpful but not as much as tje private stuff which we could make more bespoke

My dd has a lot of challenges and sounds similar to- she is Y9.

She lacks confidence and has massively low self esteem. School spoke about using coloured pieces of card or specific coloured highlighters but she wouldn’t do that either! She currently just doesn’t engage if she thinks she doesn’t know. She often does but she is awaiting formal adhd assesment and is dyspraxic so she struggles with processing.

it has been horrendous at school but since Easter she is much better. A couple of friends have got managed moved / times at PRP’s which I wonder if it’s hit home. She was also not allowed on a school trip to the beach.

It was for mine and she did need therapy - for us it was about getting confidence to grow up in a sensible way

In year 7 they are small fish in a very big pond. At the start of year 8, they realise they aren’t the youngest any more and they start to get tricky. Added to hormones, it makes for a difficult time and carries on into year 9. By year 10, they’re doing more of the lessons they chose and the pressure ramps up and carries on through year 11.

Thanks for reply.
All i could suggest is that you as the adult take control of your own fears first so as you're in the best position to help her.
The situation will be hopeless if you give off this energy to her either by spoken word or by actions.
Practice positivity.
Each day with her when she's home after school play a game for 5 minutes were you both share one positive thing that happened that day and how it made you feel about yourself or other people.
Be ready for resistance so you can be prepared to start and give her space to retreat and not play but keep trying each day.
And keep it simple if you didn't climb Kilimanjaro.
Simple things for example like telling her you left 5 mins earlier than usual so as you could drive slower made you feel so much more relaxed and less stressed when you got to work... or how good the sandwich tasted
And her positive thing ...this will tell you a lot about how she feels about herself but all you can do is encourage and praise .
I time she will feel comfortable speaking about all the positive things she dies and how it makes her feel and it will be self perpetuating.
And another exercise you could support her with is discovering what personal values he has at this moment in time.
Frist though you should be clear on yours. Take 5 mins a day to pick one off and ask yourself if it resonates with you.
This will help install a clear sense of self identity in her and could make her reject things that she now knows are against her core beliefs.
https://www.betterup.com/blog/personal-values-examples

My son whose yr 9 and quite a few of his friends are brilliant in school, so well behaved. I'm pretty speechless when I talk to school and so are really lovely about him, I see this side of him less at home at the moment. .

When I speak to my mum friends with boys in the same in his friendship group its outside school where boundaries are pushed with bedtimes, behaviour, wanting to go out, stay out later and general back chat etc..... This is definitely my hardest year with my yr 9, I don't think its just him at all.

Put it this way, we no longer worry about bedtimes and detentions.

I think the question you've put in your title is very different to what you're really asking. Lots of kids benefit from having an outside adult at 13, 15 or 17. There are counsellors but also school pastoral support eg ELSA, youth club. My eldest goes to a young carers youth club and that has been amazing for her to connect informally with other supportive adults. Whereas counselling was too "in yer face" and she rejected it.

Keep trying to keep the channels of communication open. With my teens this often seems to involve driving them places and buying them food.

Our local area has a MH hub for teens who are struggling but don't reach the threshold for CAMHS. They guide them through a CBT programme. It would be beyond my powers to get mine to do this though.

When you say 'she lacks confidence' what do you mean?

Others may disagree but I would have loved an impartial 3rd party to talk to at that age.

My daughter put us through hell when she was in year 9, to the point that the school put her on a disciplinary programme and moved her to a different class. We were besides ourselves and nothing we did seemed to have any meaningful impact. All I say is don't give up trying to talk sense into her and keep communication going as much as possible. We were lucky that her group of friends were studious and she gradually matured and fell in line too. She's now in year 11 and doing well. Good luck OP!

Year 8 and 9 are the tricky ones in general I think. Awful for my eldest but she had Covid in the mix too.