So, some of you may remember I was looking to take DD (just 16) away from the misery of her previous summer where for a variety of reasons she spent almost the entirety of it on her own bored out of her mind and feeling lonely and unwanted.
She has a friend now but friend is pretty flaky so she simply cannot rely on doing loads of things with her. This girl was grounded last summer for literally no reason (her mum's a bit odd) for three WEEKS so DD could easily be left hanging. I just do not want this lonely misery for her but I am struggling, big time, to get her to sign up for any volunteering. Due to various highly negative family dynamics she's had quite a shit time over the year with her Dad's side of the family and this has resulted in low self esteem, confidence and so on.
I SO wish I could convince her to do NCS - I KNOW she'd have a great time if she just gave it a chance! She's SO outgoing and so wants to DO all sorts of things.
I took the approach (on the sage advice of a PP) to say you've got to pick something, here's a whole load of options or find something yourself, if you think you can find something that you'll like better than NCS that you prefer, then you can do that instead. But she's not picked up any of the other volunteering opportunities and I had said to her that if she didn't pick an alternative, that she'd need to do NCS. Please understand that this is NOT about forcing her to do NCS, it's about my knowing just how bloody miserable and lonely she will be if she's sat in her bed all summer for 6 - 7 weeks on the trot - THAT will not be good for her mental health and I have no doubt that once she was over the initial nervousness that she'd relish meeting loads of new people because she's incredibly sociable and often frustrated by the lack of similar friends who want to do stuff - it's always her suggesting things to do and places to go and she's SO bored.
What do I do now though? I mean, I'd literally have to say "You're doing NCS, get in touch with all your friends and give them your number and talk them into doing it with you, you'll have a great laugh" - which is the one things I didn't want to do but I have to keep in mind the alternative which is the damaging, lonely and miserable summer she will have relying on a flakey friend who cancels at the last minute, feeling unwanted and really bored.
I also as part of my requirements if you like, won't accept 'summer plans' that aren't confirmable this week. So, she could sign up for NCS and there we are it's done and we know she's doing it. But she can't confirm that she can get a job or do anything else because a. she probably won't find work and b. she's not signed up or shown interest in any other volunteering activity at all.
I do feel very very much that it will be in her best interests to do something like NCS (and pretty much that's what we're left with as she won't do anything else anyway!) as it's much better than a long lonely summer.
So what do I do, encourage her in an enthusiastic grab life by the balls go on you can do it it's going to be fun kind of way to sign up for NCS - when the only alternative to that is for her to be utterly bored out of her mind all summer. I mean, I don't expect her to be entertained every day of the school holidays - boredom of a certain extent is normal, but not when it's every day on you're own feeling unwanted and shit about yourself. I just can't have that.
But, ideas please on how to handle this final phase of my campaign to get the poor love out of the house during the summer with lots of other people her age!