Help me be calm about bright year 11 who is not doing the work for her GCSEs that are on now

[grinkle]

Just that really.

I just lost the plot a bit when she told me she was planning to go out with her boyf on the night before her French oral and the day when her 2 art GCSEs coursework are due in (she's hugely behind in all 3 subjects and may well fail all, despite the fact she has the ability to get As at least in all 3 subjects). Apparently it has to be that night particularly because he (the bf) is not allowed by his mum to go out any other nights because of his GCSEs!

I am so frustrated that she is not doing the work she needs to do and won't accept any help. I also got v cross when she told me earlier today she doesn't like any of the food I cook because I "only cook food out of packets like pasta etc" - this after I spent 2 weeks of her holidays home cooking her 3 meals a day for her, bringing her a big, fresh-cooked full cooked breakfast in bed etc every day to help her while she studies, even though I work full-time from home. She doesn't appreciate any help she gets.

Just so frustrated with her - I know she's really stressed but I'm finding it so hard to watch her flounder and not put the effort in. We're not well off and can't afford to help her financially so she's going to need the grades to get on in life - and she's super bright so with the effort she could realistically expect all As/A*s. But she has to do the work.

I know my stress levels are not helping - please help me to be the super-calm, helpful parent I'm absolutely not at the moment but really need to be!

Drop - completely agree with all you wrote. Yes, I'm sure she can see our life and see Oxbridge and think it's not worth the effort! (The fact I chose teaching and not banking afterwards has more to do with it, IMO! But of course she misses the point that I could make both those choices - with a worse degree I might not have had those options.)

Yes, you're right 100% but our lives have been tough financially and I know she absolutely wants the material comforts and security we haven't had eg owning her own home. She wants to stay around London and own her own house - as we can't help her, the only way she's going to be able to achieve her own dreams realistically is to get the grades. So it's not just me foisting my expectations on her, it's also me trying to enable her to achieve her own goals. (If I was her, I'd live abroad/somewhere cheaper, but we're different people.)

Blimey! Don't make this about the OP!!

ALL parents are now worried about their dc's year 11 exams

The issue is that she's not bloody working hard enough!! Don't let her out with her boyfriend, or if she insists on going then its her problem.

My short answer is I don't know how you change them & I'm mostly convinced you can't. You wouldn't bemoan a dim child who can't make themselves clever. Why bemoan a disorganised-unconfident-not hardworking child? Maybe those things are equally hard wired.

I can't get thru life without a glass half full outlook so I look for what is positive & doable & try to do that and seize the opportunities that are there, not bemoan the chances we don't get. I can't change my kids (at all? much?), but I can sometimes change how I deal with them.

Some people say that's defeatist outlook & better to ban the boyfriend-gadgets, crack the whip, make them achieve no matter what, etc. Good luck to them. I shrug their approach off because we don't have anything in common. I can't be like that.

If she wants to own a house in London these days she will need to earn some serious money! Probably better off skipping uni and the debt and going straight into work

dd wants to ride and carry on riding competitively

I have made it clear to her from day one that we cannot support her financially to do that, if she wants horses she will have to pay for them. Hence she is working bloody hard.

No I don't think you are deafeatist lljkk but I do think this attitude about 'not cracking the whip' is something I only ever see on Mumsnet.

Most boring, steady lower middle class parents like me encourage their dcs to work very hard. If that means missing a party for a month or so before exams so be it. I think any parent that lets their teen do completley whatever they want before gcses is failing their children. Of course they need down time but exams are important!

If I had my time again I'd do it all differently. I earn a decent wage but really could be on a lot better in an area I enjoyed a lot more. But that really was more, like you say, about career choices and less to do with which uni I went to (and much more about the course I chose!). The thing is though, I wouldn't be where I am now (obviously) without doing what I did. It all worked out. It very often does.
Have you talked to your DD about what she might like to do in the future. I really had no clue at that age and think I really would have benefited much more from career advice (on a more consistent basis). Would have been good to identify strengths, weaknesses and interests and explore different career options. I was so blinkered when I was younger. I LOVED maths and was very good at it. My best subject by far. I wish I had pursued it further, but at the time I thought the only career available for being 'good at maths' was a maths teacher or an accountant - neither of which appealed. I had no idea about all the other avenues I could have explored and it's really too late now for me.
Maybe thinking further into the future about what she'd really like to do and then what she needs to do to get there would be the approach she needs?

Thanks parissont! I think it probably helps to be reasonably well off if you're going to feel comfortable allowing your kids to risk failing. If you know your kids will have a comfortable fall-back, it's not hard to be laid back about failing an exam here or there, and it's easy to assume they'll muddle through. But if you've had the experience of not knowing how you're going to meet the rent, it's much harder to be so nonchalant, however much (in theory) you wished you could be, so as not to put your dcs under any more pressure.

I'm sure we all try to do the best by our dcs. I hate the fact we live in a world where the drawbridges have come up so much over the last few years in terms of social mobility. I'd much rather dd could follow her star wherever it took her, but realistically she needs to keep as many options open as she can now, because she has absolutely no idea what she wants to do later. It might be she never needs a French GCSE and instead marries into money (I'm not totally sure that's not her game plan at the moment, actually ). Or that she walks into a very cool job in...? Dunno what. But as her mum, I feel she needs to try to do the best she can now, just in case.

I'm the child of immigrants too, so some of that 'first generation British', need to work hard at school or else, ethos is strong there too. When you know you've started with nothing, you know that hard work alone will lift you out of that.

Right, deep breath, plates of healthy food in hand, and...go. Off to be sweet and lovely mum/volunteer intensive French teacher, for another day... And try not to lose my temper at dd on her phone/answering back etc again. Lots of deep breathing, in fact!

Or alternatively, you could have relatives who were unwed pregnant teenagers, who then stole food since no money left after rent, only got qualifications by going back to school years after the rest of their peer group, didn't own a pair of shoes as a child, hustled pool to get any money, regularly drove the car at age 12 to get drunk dad home from the pub, had abusive parent followed by crippling disability........ And they turned into home-owners, hard workers & steady people, actually.

TBF, they weren't the relatives who lived on the streets, contended with severe mental illness, never got any qualifications, never held down a job, dealt drugs for a living.

Coz then your whole idea of chances of "success" in life doesn't really depend on exam results at 16.

My dd if she had a boyfriend (that I knew about...) I would insist that she did X, y and z before she could go. That has been working, she has agreed it with us though, for example she did two past papers and tidied her stuff ready for school to start, before going on a sleepover Sat night. And was collected at 10 am and did more work fairly happily. We were a bit surprised! DH wanted to just say no, but I felt we should be more flexible knowing her, she might work better rather than less just to spite us.

It's fairly recent she has buckled down. We also got her a tutor- she works better with one on one attention. Yes, she needs to be more organised, do it herself, should do fine without tutor, Yada yada, but she is 15, not overly mature and pretty lazy! So far it seems worth it.

I don't even understand your post llkjj

lljkk - I'm not saying that exams are the be-all and end-all. Or that it's not possible to succeed in life if you get poor results. But equally, better results make life easier. Part of the reason we're so poor is because dh messed up his exams, despite being bright. Because he didn't put the work in. Which prevented him being able to get a lot of higher-paying jobs. So dd ought to understand the value of working hard.

Its not as though she's got anything more interesting to do most of the time - boyf not allowed out most of the time!