DD9 tears over clothes/hair/ getting ready

[ItchyChins]

My 9 year old is super emotional atm which I’m fairly sure is hormones etc

However, we seem to have endless tears, rage over hair/ getting dressed. She’s always been quite particular about how things feel but with now wanting to look right as well it’s exhausting.

This morning I had to walk her to school in tears because I couldn’t do her hair right for a bloody crazy hair day for comic relief. I try and stay calm but afraid I shouted when she wouldn’t leave the house because she’d be upset seeing other people’s hair 😭

Any advice on how to help her? Deadlines / rushing make things worse so we try to make plenty of time but we do need to actually leave the house in the morning!

Or stories of other preteen drama that will make me feel in good company also welcome!

My DD went through a similar phase of being super anxious about how her hair, clothes and so on were for school. Come to find out, that her best friend had started a clique of girls and they were bullying my DD by constantly criticising her hair, her body, how she wore her uniform, her shoes. She intiallly thought they were being helpful as they’d word it like, “oh, your hair is all wonky in the back, just sayin’ as it’s embarrassing…” it was constant and cutting and my DD lost so much self esteem before I got to the bottom of things. It is heartbreaking to see a usually confident and outgoing daughter become afraid to leave the house.

Same for me as @SummerFeverVenice
My daughter’s school was toxic and she thought if she looked pretty she would stop getting picked on. A lot of the kids don’t realize they are in a hateful toxic environment because they don’t know any better and the teachers ignore it.

Thanks for your replies. I’ve done some gentle questioning and pretty sure that’s not happening. But useful to think about it from another side. Hope you’re girls are all past that now

It sounds like you're doing the right things with leaving extra time and checking to see if there's a particular reason behind the stressing. She sounds quite anxious which may be hormonal or just part of her nature. Is she a bit of a perfectionist? Maybe a conversation about how just good enough is ok might help. The only other thing I can suggest is heaping praise on her if she does manage to get out of the door on time and maybe a reward chart if she responds to that sort of motivation.

Get everything done the day before if you can. So all clothes laid out and hair accessories etc the night before.

Just make sure you're giving the message regularly that what you look like doesn't matter. So if for example she's panicking that people will laugh at her rather than saying "oh DD I'm sure they won't you look lovely" switch it with "well that would be crazy why on earth do they care so much about what someone else is wearing"

My daughters are around the same age and super emotional at times (quite a lot at the moment).

Hormones I suspect.

Both have great friend groups, happy at school and do outside activities but mornings can be like treading on eggshells.

I make sure both go to bed early as their moods are worse if they end up staying up slightly later than usual.

Any potential trigger points I sort out the evening before or week before (ie world book day or school Halloween dress up) and we sort out what they're wearing. Snacks for school days out sorted. So if there is an emotional outburst it's the evening or week before not the morning.

Hair - I'm just patient. I'm rubbish at hair. I just let them know my limitations.

Still sobbing at times in morning. Hopefully it'll run it's course.

Good luck!

Well on a lighter note, my four year old boy was very fussy about his clothes. One day, I left his clothes out as we had a special occasion to go to. He came to me crying that he couldn't wear these clothes as they didn't match. His older sister told him to stop being a girl 😂

Just to say thank you for all the replies. We had such a bad run of days that I had a chat with her teacher to make sure there wasn’t anything going we didn’t know about. There isn’t but she also had a chat with DD. Early days but this really seems to have helped - she said lots of things we’ve already chatted about with DD but seems to have had more impact coming from someone else.