What fresh hell is this

Yes OP why does no one warn us !?!? Basically someone replaces your lovely 11 year old with a completely different stranger.....and the stranger stays for years !!!! Mine is 16 now and has improved a lot. It does get better and is seemingly necessary...

I voted YABU because of the JFC phrase in your op. The apple usually falls close to the tree.

My kids were lovely it other peoples hell spawn in year 8 that were the problem.

Dd2s newest “best friend” turned on her ostracising her from the group and spreading awful stories so no one else would be friends with her. The image of her face crumbling as she walked up the garden path after holding tears in all day will stay with me. Walking home alone sitting alone at lunch.

The girl later apologised and said she did it because she was “bored”. Dd thriving now but something irrevocably broke in her when that betrayal happened.

100%.

i say to my DS that it's madness. Hormones. Brains that are not yet developed. They have no agency and choice over their world, what they do, how they conduct their lives and then we pile that pressure on them.

I think it's deeply deeply flawed.

It will always boggle my mind that we take humans at their messiest, most hormonal, chaotic and dramatic and say to them "now do the exams that will dictate the rest of your life!" Madness 🤣

That's v reassuring! My yr 8 DD is also exactly the same lovely girl she was in primary.....but whilst she loved primary she often isn't happy about going in to school these days due to the drama and mean girls 😞

DD started yr 7 in sept.

Luckily she immediately made friends with 2 really nice girls. She comes home and tells me what 'drama' happened at school that day. She has 9 or 10 'satellite' friends who revolve around her who seem to have gone a bit mad! Most of them seem to have decided they're gay and the rest seem to want to find reasons to have physical fights at least once a week.

My own years at secondary - well my mother never knew the half of what went on. I lost my virginity at just 14 to a local oik and skipped school a lot.

My 3 older girls went through secondary ok. No massive dramas. But they had each other. DD 4 is a lot younger than them and now we have social media thrown in as well.

At the mo i'm fighting to keep DD free of tic tok and insta and what's app.

Feel free to dm me if you’d like to share notes! 📝

My mum was a secondary school teacher and she said years 8 and 9 for girls and 9 and 10 for boys. My own dds are now year 11 and we have exam stress and boyfriend stress and 6th form stress. A few friendship stresses too as they are realising they are on their own paths (dd1s bf has been her bf since they were 4 and they have always gone in the same direction and that’s now diverging). But they are really good company, growing up, finding their place in the world.

years 8 and 9 were awful. We had horrific friendship issues, dd2 getting so anxious she could barely function, dd1 and dh fighting so badly I didn’t know what to do (to the extent I almost had to consider asking him to leave because she was so impossible and he couldn’t handle it). Thank fuck they’re now not only human again but excellent company and fascinating to be around.

Year 8 was worse for both of my elder DC. Dd3 currently year 8. I cant bear if if 9 is even worse

Im on my 3rd DD in high school
Its brutal. YANBU.

Its bloody hard but they do get better. The friendship thing is tough :( I hate it

I've worked in both primary and secondary and can confirm that for boys and girls Year 5 and Year 9 is where they reach peak levels of friendship drama, defiance, entitlement, just general dickhead behaviour really.

I am so glad we skipped secondary school!

My DC were in school until Y5, then during COVID we just never returned as we realised they were much happier at home. Both my DC are autistic - DS was at special school and DD was in mainstream but struggling. She wouldn't have qualified for a special school but would have found mainstream almost impossible (she has a separate language processing disability alongside being autistic and ADHD so she can't follow classroom discussions).

The local secondary schools around here are a bit of a nightmare at the moment. The one that's next to the special school DS would have gone to had a stabbing recently and teachers are currently out on strike. Others in the area don't seem much better. I think the teachers who work there are having a really hard time.

In the home ed community in our area, there seems to be a bit of a different attitude to parents compared to the teens attending school. Don't get me wrong, there's still teen hormones etc to navigate but it feels much easier and less antagonistic. Most home ed parents take their DC along to home ed events etc, so the parents get to know each other and the other teens get to know us. There doesn't seem to be any of the whole "my parents are embarrassing" stigma within home ed. We have a mix of SEN and non-SEN teens which means there are varying degrees of independence but the same approach to parents seems to be there.

Ok I'm scared now about all those saying year 9 is the worst 😩 year 7 with DD was one of the hardest years of my life!! So far year 8 has been so much more settled and now you're telling me it's gets even worse. Dear god no!

The thing that I was unprepared for is just how much they seemed to find me suddenly so irritating. I have DD 18 and DS 15 and they both act like they think I’m the most annoying and embarrassing person they have ever met. I am friendly to their friends, liberal, interested, positive, encouraging, not clingy, all the things I wish my mum had been, and it still appeared that from year 8 I was unbearable. DD better these days, but only because she doesn’t live at home. Sad times.

My lovely DD just never seemed to fit in at high school, she didn't seem to make any new friends and lost the ones she had in primary. She wasn't disliked by people and never seemed upset about it especially, it upset me far more really. A couple of years later she started attending Saturday morning music lessons at the local conservatoire and made some friends there who were a bit older than her. Looking back I shouldn't have stressed about it. I think she's just more of a loner than I can personally understand, more like her Dad. In a sense she was rather drama free.

In the same position with asd y6 dd and seriously considering doing the same as you. I have also worked in secondary and still do sometimes so I think I’ve got a pretty realistic view of it.

Year 9 is brutal. The kids are feral!! Take me back to the toddler years!! All is forgiven!

Try working as a Welfare Manager in a large Comprehensive….

This is so true. It’s not even gender specific either. It’s all of them!

As a teen I never told my mum anything. Yet my y9 dd likes to tell me about every single bit of drama thats going on i try so hard to pretend to be interested and to care but honestly I just want to say stop being such bitches to each other and life might improve but I think they actually enjoy the drama. I don't have this issue with my boys they just get on with it.

At the school my father was a headteacher of (not UK) they actually had an entirely separate campus for Year 9s. Because of this.

However- as he always said- it's utter bloody hell with a teenager for a few years. But mostly they come out the other side vaguely human.

DC started Year 7 in September. The transition has been tough. We have already dealt with a good deal of bullying - to be fair I couldn't have asked for better responses from the school - but kids that age can be thoroughly brutal to each other. This is especially the case the moment they perceive a child is 'different', and DC is ASD and not great at reading social cues which they use to his maximum disadvantage.

DC spent the whole of his first term thinking his entire form despised him. He now seems to be settling in and making a few friends, which is a relief. But he's having a bad time on the bus of all places at the hands of older girls, and in his own form some boys are shoving about and getting in his face (neurodiverse people really can't bear this) - and using the DARVO technique of riling and riling him, then squealing victim if they get a bite. I've spoken to one of the two heads of year who is well aware these kids have that approach down to a fine art.

DC is pretty stoic. He's styled it out with a lot of grace, but I feel sad for him having to deal with this on a daily basis. He now doesn't see any friends out of school at all, despite my gentle attempts to get him together with old friends from primary.

The good news is that despite his difficulties with social interaction he's flying academically, despite his SEN (Dyslexia and dyspraxia as well as ASD). He has that well-known autistic hyper-focus which helps in that respect, and the school seems to be taking its commitment to SEN seriously, inviting in families of SEN children for regular meetings.

I've seen the word 'manipulative' used upthread, which comes as no surprise to me. It's amazing just how devious kids this young can be. You have to wonder where they learn it.

My son is in Year 10, and I haven't seen any massive changes in his behaviour/attitude, to be honest....now hoping I haven't spoken too soon!!! 🤣😱