Advice and support needed please. I have a dd who will be 12 in the summer, in year 7 of secondary school.
She is my second child, my eldest is now nearly 18 and honestly parenting her has been a breeze, she’s always been so loving and I never had any of the usual teenage problems, she’s always telling me how much she loves me and is generally just so appreciative of everything I do for her. I really thought I had this parenting thing NAILED. I’m a single parent and they have different fathers, DD1 sees her dad EOW but DD2 doesn’t see hers and hasn’t since she was a baby (as ordered by the courts as he’s an evil sack of shit).
DD2 has always been hard work. She was the baby that didn’t sleep, the toddler who had endless tantrums for the sake of it, and it’s carried on a bit like that. I know this sounds like I don’t like her but I love her to bits and although she’s always been more challenging than DD1, if anything she’s had more attention as she’s demanded it whereas DD1 is very passive, and also I guess I’ve always been trying to compensate for being her only parent.
Since she started secondary, DD2 has become pretty unbearable. She is rude, constantly, has absolutely no respect for me at all, lies about anything and everything. Every time I try and speak to her it’s met with a load of lip and attitude. She is literally only ever pleasant when she wants something. Both of my DC are diagnosed with ASD and DD1 has always struggled socially, DD2 never had many friends in primary either but she seems pretty popular at secondary. I was really pleased about this, but now I’m thinking it’s more of a curse as the friends she has all seem to be little terrors. Not that I’m saying they have led dd2 astray as she’s just as bad as they are. Pretty much every day I’m getting emails from various teachers at school saying that she’s been misbehaving, showing disrespect to the teachers and stopping other kids from getting on with learning as despite repeated requests to behave she just carries on. Basically behaving the exact same way that she does at home. I have spoken to her about this many times and she just doesn’t give a shit, she says that being naughty is fun and she doesn’t want to be a ‘goody two shoes’.
She’s been put on report twice in the last few weeks and that didn’t help at all, so now the school have moved on to a behaviour management plan. I don’t anticipate that really helping either, because she just doesn’t care.
So tonight I told her that the next time the school emails me about her behaviour she will lose her phone for 3 days, that having a phone is a privilege not a right, and if she can’t behave in a mature way then she’s not mature enough for a phone. Cue major tantrum, and “well I won’t let you take it”, all the usual shit. Her phone is the only thing she truly cares about it so it’s the one way I can hit her where it hurts.
Her special interest is horses and I bust my balls so that she has her own pony, it costs me a fortune that I can’t really afford and we spend at least 2 hours up at the yard every day, so we have that ‘quality’ time together (inverted commas because she’s still just as unpleasant and snarky when we’re there). And I take her off competing usually twice a month. It’s really tempting to take that away from her as she doesn’t deserve it at the moment, but at the same time it’s the one thing getting her away from her phone/going to hang around in parks with her mates, so I think actually it’s really important to keep that focus there to channel her into something positive.
Sorry this is turning out to be long! I would really appreciate any advice on how to turn this around with her, please don’t attack me for where I’m going wrong, I’m sure I’ve made mistakes but I have been on my own with her her whole life and many years of that recovering from the ordeal that her father put me/us through, so yes I probably did take the path of least resistance as I was literally at rock bottom mentally and had no resistance there, and it’s come back to bite me on the arse now.