I've been provoked to join Mumsnet just to ask for help and advice about my thirteen year old daughter. To be honest, she has always been a little stubborn and stroppy - from a toddler - it's just her personality. She's the third of four, and pretty different temperamentally from the others.
She started turning into a teenager, I swear, at age eleven. Over the last few months, however, she has become completely unbearable. She verbally bullies her brother, who has mild autism and is getting agitated and tongue-tied around her, she is violently rude and abusive to us her parents when the fit takes her, and virtually no gathering of the family in the same room passes without some kind of nasty tantrum from her. She has also started making huge difficulties about getting out of bed in the morning to go to school (she claims nothing is wrong at school), and either refuses to go altogether (we've had the school intervene as best they can), or makes me waste half my morning running her about the place. I have to take the other two children separately then come back for her, as it's not fair to make them late because of her.
She has a snide, snarling, nasty tone of voice and will say spiteful things just to hurt us - all of us, my husband and me, her brother and sometimes even her little sister. And it's never provoked, she just seems to want to be vile. She also swears, repeatedly and unrepentantly – including in front of her much younger sister – even though I have made it very clear that this is totally unacceptable. My husband and I never use bad language, so it’s certainly not something she learned at home!
What really gets to me, however, is that she complains all the time about the house we 'force' her to live in. It's a minor manor house, set in grounds and woodland, a little under a mile from a decent village with a shop and no distance at all (a short bus or car ride) from the city where she goes to high school. She has her own, very large bedroom with her own en suite bathroom. But because we 'live in the country' we're depriving her of being able to visit her friends (I never make any fuss about driving her all about town to see her friends when she asks me to), and because our house is so big it's difficult and expensive to heat (we do our best) so it's a 'piece of crap' and the reason why she can't get up in the morning. There are reasons why we have no choice but to live here at the moment, and we also have severe financial and other anxieties as a family which I won't go into but make me hope desperately that we can continue to put this 'crap' roof over her head. All she wants, however, is that we go and live in what she calls an 'ordinary house' and she practically accuses us of child abuse by making her live where we do.
She complained this morning - as I drove her to school an hour late - that she couldn't get up this morning because of the house, and I ended up telling her that it was upsetting to me to work and worry to provide her with things, only to have her throw it back in my face. Her parting shot was, "That's because you don't provide me with much."
To be clear. She has, as I've said, her own bedroom suite. A laptop. Internet connection. iphone on unlimited contract. New clothes emblazoned with gloomy band motifs. Cash whenever she wants it to buy drinks and crisps. A home cooked meal on the table every night, not that she eats it half the time. A taxi service by me for her social life. Am I missing something?
As for spending time as a family, when she and her nearest brother were small I was forever taking them on day trips and suchlike. I did my very best. Nowadays, I couldn't contemplate organising a family outing, because my daughter would ruin it.
Obviously I do a lot of hand-wringing about what I've done wrong (other than living where we do of course). My husband and I spend pointless hours discussing her - pointless, because nothing changes, and no conversations we try to have with her amount to anything positive. It's draining, and emotionally exhausting, and I'm beginning to feel I've completely failed in the most important job of my life - to bring up a happy, pleasant human being.
I know a certain amount of teenage bad attitude is fairly common, although her older brothers were/are nothing approaching this. But has anyone else dealt with continual complaining from their children about their basic life circumstances? I feel sometimes as if I’m going mad.
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Ungrateful, unpleasant thirteen year old daughter
Dolorosa · 02/02/2016 13:32
She sounds very frustrated as well as utterly spoilt, your parenting doesn't sound very discipline or consequence orientated and she sounds as if she is on the autistic spectrum herself so the end result for you as a family is pretty much a nightmare situation for everyone involved.
You sound as if you are a truly lovely person who has got the parenting right for the others but you are being taken advantage of badly by your daughter.
Could I ask what sort of responsibilities you expect from your daughter and your other dc? Do they help out around the home? Do they have jobs?
Frustration can occur when dc just expect everything to be done for them and are used to having it easy and as a result take everything for granted.
If they are so used to getting their own way and not having to work for anything then they don't learn that putting effort in equals the feeling of achievement and achievement(however small) equals happiness.
She is running rings around you if you do 2 separate school runs!
There needs to be a complete overhaul in what you expect from her and how she treats you otherwise it's only going to get worse the older and bigger she gets.
I think you need family counselling and parenting help unless you put firmer boundaries in place.
You are all beholden to her meltdowns and tantrums and that is not healthy.
I would start of by having a family meeting around the kitchen table with pens and paper and start by saying no one is happy and we as a family want to change that.
Write down everything that needs doing around the house and behaviour that you want to see.
Get them all to do the same.
Pass the papers around and so everyone can see what everyone has written.
Next ask each person to write down what they can do to change things for the better.
Write down what the person themselves can do to improve things..So basically you have a list of requirements that you expect from others and then you get to see what others expect of you and you tick off what you can do to improve things.
So everyone has it written down in black and white what others expect of them and what they can do to improve.
This way your daughter (and everyone else) can clearly see the impact they have on others and crucially, what they need to improve on.
You can discuss as a family what the consequences should be if one person does not want to change for the better? Get them to come up with ideas. Then you should ask if someone does everything to improve, what should the reward be? Get them to give you ideas.
Then you could ask her to write it out neatly as a family document. As she has helped to formulate and so is part of the process of trying to make things better she will be far more likely to go along with it.
You could pin it on the fridge door.
Eveything you do for her: take her to visit her friends, play on the internet, watch tv, special food as a treat should be a reward for good behaviour.
So if you don't want her swearing or making the others late for school then that would have to be part of the plan of what you expect of her and your consequences need to be firm.
You need to be united with your dh for this to work and also don't carry out threats unless you mean them or else she will have zero respect for you.
As your dd might have undiagnosed SN this might be a difficult challenge for you but tbh I don't think you have anything to lose by putting firm boundaries in place and beng clear about what your expectations are.
Good luck 
Oh Smidge, I should have known. 
Really it was just that she decided she wanted to move back to the country of her birth, to be near her grandparents, and I suggested she could go and live with her grandparents and come back for holidays. I found out later that that made her think that she was at risk of losing me and that she did not want to lose me (after two years of telling me that she hated me and I had ruined her life).
So we both moved back here and then she ended up at a school where all the kids loved their parents (different culture) and we all lived much happier ever after.
Nothing I could have planned, really.
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