Meet the Other Phone. Child-safe in minutes.

Meet the Other Phone.
Child-safe in minutes.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Teenagers

Parenting teenagers has its ups and downs. Get advice from Mumsnetters here.

At my wits end with daughter, school avoidance (13yo)

1 reply

beefGhost · 21/10/2025 10:54

Morning,

Just needed a bit of an outlet for my absolute despair I feel at the moment with my 13yo daughter. I just wondering if anyone has been through similar and what advice can be offer.

Daughter in yr 9 in high school (3rd year) and trouble started pretty much immediately after starting high school. She'd had solid friendship group in infants/juniors but in high school started to experiment with new people and her OG friends started getting a bit P'd off and, to cut a long story short, they fell out after about 5 months.

Since then she flitted from group to group without forming any what I would say true lasting friendships. I don't know what has happened but the girls are utterly vile (this is the only way I can describe it). They can be best mates, have sleepovers and then within 24 hrs turn on each other. I've lost count of how many people have been in our house and then a few days later threatening her.

MH took a toll and she started about 1 year ago not going into school and this has progressively got worse and worse. Week on week it's the same and this term she's missed about 30%.

Issues are infuriating, she will go out of a weekend, spend a day with them - no issues, then for whatever reason turn on her over inoccuous things and then the school avoidance kicks in. We had an incident last week where a friend of hers who seemed to be going quite well just turned on her when they were out because some one made a comment to friend that daughter had said something about her - no attempt to find out if it's true, just turned on her. That resulted in a 4 days off school. This weekend just gone, spent the full day with them oni Saturday, Sunday had a few hours with someone else- word got back and they sent some messages and now school avoidance all week again....

Me and mum just keep saying these kids are ruining her life. It's embarassing saying to the school the reasons why she is off. Both me and mum support school - we're not happy with the situation, but feels completely out of our control. We have no way at all of sorting this out. We're completely at our wits end with her.

OP posts:
FusionChefGeoff · 21/10/2025 14:19

What have you told school and are they helping in any way? This sounds like it could meet the threshold for bullying if the behaviours / threats have reached a level that mean your DD doesn’t feel safe in school.

I’d start making a log (go back as far as you can reasonably remember too for a bit of history) of every incident and ask for a meeting with the head of year to talk about bullying and how they can help DD feel safe in school.

At the same time I’d also try to work with her on strategies to cope so that she feels more able to go into school. Is she overly sensitive perhaps? Does she need some suggestions to keep away eg go to clubs or library at breaks, find something else to do. Maybe some help with what to say / how to walk away with dignity if they start when she’s in school.

New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread