'Puppy helped me train my teenage sons' - more Family Guardian hopeless parenting

[EightiesChick]

It's here and thankfully it looks like it's a one-off, or I fear we might be seeing the new Living With Teenagers column. Exasperating.

I feel the same way, I've got two teenagers and I love sharing a house with them.
I'm fed up with martyred women putting up with being treated like crap by their children and wallowing in it.

Thank God someone else thought the same as me. I had to go back and check the name of the author to make sure it wasn't her who wrote LWT (what was her name? It escapes me just now)

I used to read extracts out from LWT to annoy my daughter who couldn't believe an adult could be so, so...words escape me.

Oh, I read this and thought how pathetic she is.

Yaffle, it was Julie Myerson IIRC.

The intended effect was to be moving. It moved me to want to strangle the author.

eeeeeewwwwww - pathetic is definitly the word. I also have a teenager who just brought me a cup of tea and is now tidying the kitchen. She needs to get a bit of self respect.

My kids are only tiny so I can't speak from experience but I just feel so sorry for that woman. She obviously thinks she's crap and her children are horrible to her! Michael sounds like he has mental health issues.

Because only bad parents have teenagers who go off the rails

would anyone really give up their room and sleep on a sofa bed, just because sons didn't want to share?

maryz, my son has the ability to be aggressive, controlling and very challenging as well you know from the sn boards.
What I don't do ever is just give up and roll over.

I did notice in the article that her XH (the boys' father) was refusing to acknowledge that there was a problem and was keeping them supplied with money, hence making effective sanctions on her part tricky. If your co-parent is actively undermining any attempts at discipline it can't make life with teenagers any easier. I did actually wonder whether what had changed over the course of the year wasn't the dog but his developing some other interest and getting bored with undermining his XW (or realising that there was an issue when son 1 got arrested or son 2 was nearly expelled).

Ladybiscuit - it's not the fact that her boys are, ahem, challenging, it's the fact that she is so ruddy drippy about it which irritates people.

I read bits of this article aloud to dh yesterday (he ill in bed so captive audience for my ranting) because I was so bloody irritated by this woman. Why on earth is she given space?

Really sick of crappy newspaper columnists and their lives (either hopeless or exceedingly dull). Have stopped buying paper containing likes of Kathryn Flett and that boring bloke who is always twittering on about his dog. Honestly - who cares!

Cheered me up to see other people hate it too though!

Maybe she's depressed and has MH issues? I felt very sorry for her. Perhaps I'm just a bleeding heart liberal though

i felt a bit sorry for her, it must be so difficult to be one woman 'against' four males, if the ex husband is a nobhead (as i feel was implied in the article).

Yeah, the ex probably has a rather large role to play in this...

Great that things came good in the end, but given that this is a family with a fair amount of resources, why did they not get proper help earlier on?

sorry - didnt mean to upset anyone over the sofabed comment. I was honestly surprised at that, and the author implied herself that doing it was a mistake as she'd given away her authority by doing that.

tbh thee is nothing wrong with tough love, to be forced into handing over money because if you dont give it to me i will steal it - is no basis for a healthy relnship - the boy is old enough to know right from wrong and should be learning the consequences of his actions - the artcle annoyed me too , and i do have a lot of sympathy for those genuinely struggling familes btw.

It is the drippy Guardiany way of dealing with it that pisses me off, too. I have the conversation about being too young to stay behind on your own regularly with my children.

I didn't mean to suggest that money was the answer -although buying your own help can cut short waiting lists, but that this is not a parent who didn't have access to a range of interventions such as family therapy or NVR based programmes, yet from her account didn't seek this sort of help even when her children were completely beyond control. Perhaps I need to re read the article, but I couldn't see any reference to anything like that.

My irritation at this article wasn't the drippiness or the element of Living with Teenagers, it was the fact that it implied that if you buy a puppy your teenagers will stop behaving like monsters. The solution to all difficult children: a dog. Oh please.

Much more thought-provoking and humbling was the article on people who had found out that they were adopted as adults.