I’m not sure if I’m overthinking what the school said or should be more worried.
My DD is 14 and in Year 10 and she’s never really been a behaviour problem before. She’s moody and argumentative with me and DH, spends too much time on her phone etc but nothing beyond normal teenage stuff.
At home she’s quiet. Funny when she’s in the mood, dry sense of humour, and easy enough to live with.
She’s middling academically, good at English and humanities, not great at maths. She’s never loved school but has always been capable and generally does her work.
Anyway since they went back there’s been a change and school have contacted me twice.
The first was about her phone. Apparently she’s been refusing to hand it over at the beginning of some lessons and has started answering back to teachers.
I spoke to her and she was basically “that teacher already doesn’t like me”.
I said well maybe that’s because you argue when she tells you to put it away.
She said she was explaining why she needed it because she was expecting a message. Which I don’t believe tbh, it was from one of her friends.
I told her to hand it over and get on with it. She rolled her eyes.
Then this week they contacted me again and this one bothered me more.
They said she has been leaving lessons. Apparently she’s been going to another part of the school and spending time with a group of Year 11 girls.
DD says it’s because she doesn’t like one particular teacher and knows she’s going to “have a go at her” or put her on the spot.
She says the girls are just friends and she isn’t wagging lessons with them as such. But obviously if she’s leaving a lesson without permission then she is.
I asked why she didn’t tell the teacher she was struggling and she said she has, but the teacher says she’s being difficult.
There are two sides and I wasn’t there.
What’s unsettled me is that school seem to think this is becoming more than a couple of incidents. The head of year apparently said her attitude has changed and that she seems increasingly disengaged and they’re concerned because this is quite different from how she normally is.
That surprised me because at home she seems normal.
She’s still doing her homework. She was asking me about GCSE options and what she might do after Year 11. She’s still seeing the same friends outside school.
She still tells me random things about school, although she “hates school” whenever I ask if she likes it.
DH thinks school are making too much of it.
His view is basically that she’s 14, she’s discovered answering back gets a reaction and she’ll grow out of it. He said he was exactly the same at that age.
I’m not as relaxed about it.
I remember being 14 and sometimes “just teenage behaviour” is something else underneath.
The older girls are what I keep thinking about. They’re Year 11 and I don’t know them. DD says they’re nice and basically the only people at school she feels comfortable with. She says they don’t tell her to do anything.
I’ve seen her messaging them but nothing alarming. She does seem to be on her phone more than she was before the summer though.
Sorry, should have said she’s known some of them vaguely for a while, it’s just become more of a friendship recently.
There are little things in what DD says that don’t add up, although I don’t know if that means anything. She told me yesterday she’d been in the library with them, then later said they were in another corridor because “the library was full”. I asked which corridor and she said I was interrogating her.
Could just be a 14 year old getting annoyed with her mum though.
I’m stuck really, honestly now.
Part of me thinks I need to tell her very clearly that whatever her issues are with this teacher, she cannot just walk out of lessons. There are proper ways of dealing with it.
But I’m wondering if I’m missing something because she does seem different according to school, and they see her all day whereas we see her at home.
I don’t want to be one of those parents who automatically believes their DC over every teacher. But I also don’t want to just tell DD to behave herself if she is actually struggling with something and this is how it’s coming out.
She isn’t saying she hates the whole school. It seems very specifically connected to this one teacher and the older girls.
We have a meeting with her head of year early next week and I don’t know how to approach it.
Do I go in basically saying she needs to stop the behaviour and that’s it, or do I ask more questions about what they think has actually changed and whether they think there is something else going on?
Has anyone else had a teenager who was basically one child at home and a completely different one at school?
I’m not looking for people to tell me my DD is secretly an angel because she definitely isn’t 😂 I just genuinely don’t know if this sounds like ordinary Year 10 boundary pushing or if I should be taking the school’s concerns more seriously.