12, nearly 13 yo daughter of (French) school mate (hadn't seen her for about 15 years until last year though) has been here two weeks.
Over the last 2 weeks, she has:
-snacked constantly (her mum tells me she doesn't eat much when I express surprise that such a slender girl needs to eat every 30 mn or she basically keels over), helped herself to biscuits, crisps, bread, etc without asking although I made it clear when she arrived that only fruit was available between meals (same rule for everyone in this house);
-used the home phone to phone her parents about 3-4 times a day without asking permission,
-got her parents to ring up and get me to log her into the internet she could go on Facebook, got her mother to sanction 2-3 hours of FB and internet a day (which I consider crazy especially at her age), sent her here with a Blackberry on which she's been texting her friends constantly,
-basically refused to do the same chores as the other children in this house -ie lay and clear the table after one meal every 5 days
-demanded inappropriate food at random intervals (ie ice cream when none was on offer, fish and chips, repeatedly)
-continually made negative remarks about everything- took her to a concert at DD's school, all the performers were crap apparently (she plays in the conservatoire so obv vastly superior), sneering at children having pizza at 4:30 in a pizzeria
-rung her parents to complain that my DD is not treating her right- apparently replying "thank you" when someone compliments your nail polish is not the right thing to say.
Can you tell she's been driving me fecking nuts over the last two weeks?
1 week and 6 days she appeared to suddenly relax and calm down a lot- if she'd stayed a couple more weeks she'd have been fine. As it is I'm just overjoyed to be shot of her and more specifically her parents and their bizarre demands that their daughter be treated differently from my children and other foreign student (and seriously my little Spanish girl's parents are fine about us and on their third child with us and she's coming back for the autumn term).
My personal feeling is that her mother has become seriously unhinged and that the child is just expressing the pressures on her in her daily life. I actually think her mother is either deluded or lying about the food thing and worry that the child may have a health problem although tbh she could just be growing very fast. Either that or her mother starves her at home and she's eating while she can.