Today my teenager was upset because.....

DD1 (early teen) had been such a pain in the arse on a car journey that I stopped.

I and DD1 got out. DW drove a mile down the length of Glossop.

DD1 and I walked a good mile, her hand firmly in mine, at a good speed, until we met the car. Captive audience for a discussion on manners.

Silence and manners regained. She’d do the same now 20 years on.

@Helpmyson the fact you think getting teens to wash a car is "child abuse" totally helps me understand why your son is being horrible. You're an utter wet pushover.

@notacooldad

You basically just verbalised everything that was in my head but in a much more eloquent way!

It's like excusing bad behaviour from boys with the excuse 'boys will be boys'. Oh, it's OK to let my 13 yo DD/S swear at me, leave the place looking like a midden etc., because it's just teenage hormones.

There are many threads on here about whole families walking on eggshells because they don't want to set the teenager off, and more worryingly, of younger siblings being badly affected.

And of course not all teens were angels years ago, and of course some parents were abusive years ago (as they are today), but comments up thread suggested all teenagers toed the line back in the day because they were threatened with physical punishment, and that's simply untrue.

It doesn’t strike me at all as ‘spectacularly nasty’. The punishment was, after all, just a car wash
Ok I maybe over sensitive about the Christmas day punishment but I thought it was was nasty because it was the mum's boyfriend that came up with the punishment. It was delivered a year later. The children would have matured by a year so it is just raking up bad feelings. They were only 12 and 13 when the boyfriend is taking mum away around Christmas time. Of course it is going to be a big deal for them.
The punishment by the boyfriend was designed to humiliate them. It was done in front of the neighbours and mum is there cooing ' oh, you missed a bit!' From a childs point of view it would appear that mum is in cahoots with boyfriend and has it got their back.
I understand it's not the punishment of the century and there are much worse things going on but for these two children I'm think it would have been a big deal at the time.

I think why I'm sensitive to this is because I work in family support and I see far too many of mums boyfriends or new husbands telling mum how her kids should behave which goes well beyond what is reasonable. It is designed to push the kids out. The young person's behaviour goes off the track because of the constantly picking by step dad but suddenly it is the child that is the problem!
Dont get me wrong of course this doesn't apply to all families with when mum gets a new partner. I know plenty of success in my personal life but in my professional life I'm dealing with so many fucked up kids because of their parents behaviour.

Going back to the thread there are some right howlers of kids being completely unreasonable. Mine thought I made him do ' all the work, every last bit of it in this house' because I asked him to put the clothes from the dryer on to my bed so I could sort them 🤣
I was told plenty of times that I'm ' not going out looking like that!' by Ds2 when I had to take him somewhere but I still had my walking stuff on as I'd just come in from a day in the hills!🤣 He was told to suffer or make his own way. He always choose to suffer!

Yep apparently teens are so awful now, they were model citizens of course years ago............

Love the idea that teenagers were all perfectly behaved in the 1960s - it's famous as a decade where there was a huge moral panic/outrage at the disgraceful behaviour of the youth!

Well this thread has taken a bit of a turn hasn't it? Hoovers bing thrown down the stairs. Adult children throwing entitled strops and punishing children on Christmas Day for something they did a year ago.

Not the light hearted and supportive thread I was hoping for...

Your inference that they spent the year worrying about it is just an inference, though. Neither of us know how this event was framed- it might have been a positive experience of re-writing Christmas to erase the events of last year, or it might have made them a bit sad. Using a whole raft of highly emotive phrases: ‘child abuse’ , ‘particularly cruel’, ‘holding over their heads’ and ‘spectacularly nasty’ in your response looked more to me that you were taking the opportunity to make the parent feel terrible (why?) rather than making a reasonable evaluation of the likely impact on these children.

@Burnshersmurfs so you think it's normal to punish someone for something they did a year ago? Don't you think kids should be excited on Christmas Eve and looking forward to the big day rather than worrying about what their punishment is?

Agree that they behaved awfully but it should have been dealt with at the time rather than this ridiculous drawn out punishment.

They can be a bit like dogs 😂 they don't link the punishment to the crime unless it's immediate 😂

Loads of Buzz Killingtons on this light hearted post judging the parents…teenage brains are literally programmed to do this. There’s neural pruning going on which makes them prone to outbursts and emotional disregulation, (same as happens for 2-3 year olds) their ‘thinking’ logical brain isn’t fully on line yet so they mainly use their ‘emotion’ brain and also it’s evolution…teenagers are designed to pull away from their family to prevent inbreeding and widen the gene pool. Let parents of teens come on here to vent and seek validation and a bit of a laugh. God knows they need it

This is just horrible.

It doesn’t strike me at all as ‘spectacularly nasty’. The punishment was, after all, just a car wash. There’s no reason to believe that the children thought they were facing some terrible fate. There is a lot to be said for this kind of restorative action- they ruined Christmas for their mother, so the next Christmas they are told to do something for their mother that reminds them and her that she deserves to be treated well. I imagine it probably made them feel a bit better about the whole thing.
I’m finding all this shock and outrage at examples of teenage behaviour and parents’ responses a bit uncomfortable. People all over the world, every second (especially teens) say and do things in the heat of the moment that don’t define them- and certainly aren’t a damning indictment of their parents. Those who think they spent their childhoods being polite and respectful at all times likely just have very selective memories.
As for accusations of stealth boasting because people mention they’ve been on holiday…..

I have just woken my dd, made her bed, made her breakfast and done her hair before I start work at 7.30 her response......why do you have to be so weird and helpful 🤣
To be fair she is human 99% of the time just not a morning person!!

That's actually quite messed up. Waiting a year to punish teens?

And yes teens did grumble about the most unreasonable things in days gone by - I was a horrendously ungrateful teenager, and my parents were very old school no nonsense. This thread was great to start with - teens are very funny when it's not your teen being super unreasonable.

Don't you think you would have to be a particularly cruel person to hold the threat of punishment over 2 children for an entire year. Making them dread Christmas Day?? That's a spectacularly nasty thing to do.

My 17 year old DD is 98% perfect, rarely get any of the stuff mentioned on this thread (pure luck I hasten to add). However, we once got upgraded on a flight back from Salzburg (3 or 4 years ago). DD refused to move from economy as ‘people would stare’ and think she was ‘above herself’ and it wasn’t right as ‘we hadn’t paid for Business seats. It was BA, a 3 hour flight and the plane was only 2/3 full.

Well I have a DD 15, DS 4, DD 3. I get yelled at for everything from asking her to unload a dishwasher to peeling a banana and everything in between

@PyongyangKipperbang - yup!

Son text me asking to buy him new socks on the way home. So I did his reply why do you have to be so weird….

Anyone who thinks teenagers being forced to wash a car on Christmas morning is child abuse clearly has no understanding of what child abuse means.

Not saying it was right, but that was how it was.