So is she saying that she did absolutely everything right, but that children will all be horrible teenagers no matter what you do? (Author of living with teenagers)

[emkana]

www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2250686,00.html

If that's true, then scaryyyyyyyyyy.

She is unbearably smug though isn't she?

Kind of following on from what Wendy said - I get the feeling that she thinks the way her teens behave is the only norm - and that if your teens don't behave like that then they are freakish/it reflects on your dodgy parenting in some way...almost like they have to bahave like that, it's a rite of passage on the way to adulthood.

I warmed to her a little more when I read that article at the weekend...but not much. It just doesn't follow, does it? Love your kids, enjoy your kids, do all the 'right' things and then, pow, they turn 13 and turn into sullen, miserable, aggressive louts who can only communicate with grunts and the odd "get out of my fucking face, Mum!" Please tell me it doesn't follow...(ds1 fast approaching 11 and already getting the odd flash of Kevin the Teenager...but he doesn't get to behave atrociously now, so I hope I'm not going to suddenly turn into a wet blanket when he hits thirteen). I don't mean he'll be perfect - but I couldn't live like that woman and her three teenagers (if it's all true...)

I should perhaps add that DD2 was fantastic until she was 17 - then turned overnight and DS is 18 and has only just started with the 'pain-in-the-arse' stuff. So some might be like it for years and others only for a few months.

"and the next moment there he is, towering four inches above me in an open doorway, spotty and hooded and growling"

Well that's more or less my 11yr old now!

And I think she is probably right to a great extent. I had the happiest most stable up-bringing I can imagine. And I went through hell as a teenager and put my parents through it too. As did my brother - respectable member of the community though he is now. Being a teenager stinks so you make everyone else suffer too. I'm starting to batten down the hatches already...

Might just add that DS isn't spotty and doesn;t quite tower over me - I am 5'11'' though and there is still time

I read her columns every week with a horrified fascination. Can't claim to know anything about parenting teenagers, all I have is a sometimes stroppy 17 month old, but I just wonder how someone who has tried so very hard to be the perfect mother can then move on to laying out the details of her children's lives as she does every week, portraying them as behaving like such monsters so much of the time. Ethically I wouldn't write about anyone's kids the way she does, let alone my own. And there's no way she can claim this is anonymous - people who know them will recognise them. [If it's all true, or true-ish, that is.] Is passive-aggressive the right word - she puts up with all of this terrible abuse from them, feels incredibly martyred, then gets her own back by writing it in the column? Not surprised her kids resent her if so ...

I found her description of family life with small children mildly nauseating and so an (evil ) part of me feels that she deserved a dose of reality in the form of difficult teenagers because she sounds like she is such a sentamentalist about life in general. Not that I think that it is unreasonble for parents to strive for perfection, but it sounds as if she has rose-tinted every little detail of her life with toddlers/children in a very sirupy sort of way.

The article is obviously doing the (paper) rounds. It escaped from the Guardian and into the Times. I don't understand how she can be so smug about the children when they were younger. I think she's been wearing rose-tinted spectacles or been too busy to notice.

I quite madly want to go and find out where she lives and shake her. She indulges those three far too much. Actually rather more than I do my four and seven year old.

She has a bath with the door unlocked

FFS, the one place you can lock the buggers out.

I vividly remember a few weeks ago she was lugubriously going on about how she had been feeling oh so terribly ill, and then her daughter - who's what, 15? - made her get up to get her some painkillers...and, spinelessly, she went.

What's wrong with 'you know where they are, and make me a cup of tea while you're about it as I'm dying?', eh? Oh, and then she went downstairs to get them breakfast because she didn't like the idea of them going out without maternal attention.

THEY ARE GREAT BIG NEAR ADULTS, FFS.

I also think her oldest son sounds in quite serious need of help, if he does indeed exist in non-portly reality.

And I also think that if she is writing it as a piss-take there is absolutely no irony in it. You can get away with non-ironic slop if you are writing about babies but not about teenagers.

Completely agree with MI, Soren and Wendy (who has one of the nicest teenagers I have ever met). It doesn't have to be like that- she really lets them walk all over her. Ds is only 13, but I have been right through the teens with my stepchildren too, and of course there are rows and times when they hate you, but this constant abuse? Err, no.

Aw, thank you, tamum .

Yours will turn out wonderful people

Thank you I should say that I haven't met the oldest two, and the youngest wasn't a teenager when I met him- I wasn't implying anything about the other three!

Oh and this week. OK, so Psycho Eddie isn't going to come and see his grandmother because he 'might be sleeping', but Jack? Jack who sits on the sofa watching Friends repeats instead of making biscuits? Excuse me, Dripfeatures, but what happened to turning the telly off - you know, the way one does to errant six year olds who refuse to budge and tidy away their toys - and saying Right that's it?

Oh and the idea of depriving him of birthday presents is something which apparently no parent would contemplate...