Don't Mess with Miss Beckles

[Whizzz]

Did anyone else see this ?
Billed as being this radical guru & I didn't see much that was radical. Advice seemed to be things like tidy your room, do your homework & spend less time with your girlfriend.

Hmm...

I find it interesting that the mother of Luke (and I assume the father as well) never thought, 'I wonder if my starting a new family has had any impact on my son's attitude to life?' And if so, what they did to mitigate the effect.

Before I get flamed I'm not saying people can't start a second family, but there seemed to be little or no indication that the mother had considered the imact of her new family life on her first son. She didn't seem prepared to do anything to help the boy through the regection that he was feeling. I see a lot of this

Also very interesting that the kids were sufficuiently spoiled that they never grasped the concept that the nicer things in life require a lot of work to get. And that better qualifications tends to mean a better paid job! A few wekends stacking sheves in Tescos might be helpful in making them realise they don't want that sort of job long term.

She was hardly revolutionary was she?

a much better motivation for them would be perhaps to spend time in a much poorer school and area, so they can see how privileged they are and how little poorer kids have on offer to them during and after school. and I agree, martianbishop, a bit of shelf-stacking wouldn't harm them either.

but i guess this has been done on the endless 'swap' programmes....

Loved the boys in the programme! Made me want to be their mum!
Luke's mum was unfit to be a parent IMO - fancy turfing him out at 15 years old - and not even for anything serious

Agree they needed a wake up call by spending time in a poor country or working in a dire job!

I felt so sorry for Luke. He just didnt feel like he fit anywhere. His Mum had a new DH and baby and his Dad was having a baby with his new partner and he just didnt know where he stood.

So sad.

i actually thought the prog was v good. It was basic common sense. No late nights. Proper food. Good routine. Revision. Makes sense and yet so many families dont do this. Bring back some of these rules into families and the results at school would be far higher.

I thought that too mb. Interesting that she was unable to put the baby down while she answered the door to him, both times. She seemed almost to be arming herself with the baby :(

I thought exactly that tamum. The least she could have done was to put the baby down and give him her attention for a couple of minutes after he had plucked up the courage to go home and swallow his pride!! It was horrible watching her humiliate him for the sake of it; "say it like you mean it", etc... she wouldn't allow him a shred of dignity. And her descent into a screaming fit towards the end was an eye-opener too. Poor lad, I thought he was actually very nice-natured.

I did think Yolanda Beckles was embarrassingly useless. She achieved absolutely nothing. Her basic ideas were pretty much common sense - only the same things any adult would say - nothing original there. She appeared to have no method for implementing her ideas at all, no expertise and no natural ability in dealing with teenaged boys. Appalling.

I missed the very end, tbh I lots the will to live!

In my experience if children are rejected by their mother it seems to inflict the most serious of all psychological harm. If the worst the lad does it gets Cs rather than As it will be a minor miracle. Couldn't the woman put two and two together and see that having a new Alpha male in the house was bopund to cause difficulties? And as the adult what did she intend to do to help them all get through and make new relationships? And his father was about to have a new child too....poor little bugger, push out all over the place

'Her basic ideas were pretty much common sense - only the same things any adult would say'
Interesting that none of the parents last night were saying this to start with, though?

No, they seemed to be older versions of the parents you see on the 'nanny' progs, too afraid to upset their kids to set a boundary, any boundary, anywhere. Right up to the point where it all gets too much and they flip their collective lids.

Guess what? them kids, us grown ups, grownups set the rules. It isn't farking rocket science is it????

I was dying to get the scissors/comb out

Some of the boys' parents didn't come across as particularly sensible adults to me - I still think most ordinary intelligent adults would concur that getting enough sleep/not staying out all night/revising for exams were fairly standard ideas. And some of the parents featured in the programme were saying those things already, they just weren't able to enforce them. It's enforcing/implementing those basic ideas that causes the problems for parents - and she failed utterly to provide a method of doing that.

They want to be their kids friends more than their parents, I think. And being a parent is more important. Their kids will have loads of friends but only two parents

I couldn't believe the liberal attitude of the majority of the parents, and agree re. Luke - thought he was a lovely lad who didn't know where he stood with mother, father and their new families. Made me mad and sad.

Glad you said that zippi! At one stage I turned to dh and said "they all need a good haircut" then "am I getting old?". I felt for Luke too, he seemed so sad and lost. Can't believe his mum threw him out and can't believe his Dad wouldn't have him either. We'd find room for dsd if we didn't have it and she needed to come and live with us.

Glad it wasn't just me then

IMHO DR Tanya would have been better - I saw her in a teenage prog and she was googd with them too

And sort of got the parents to talk stuff over with kids

I was getting cross with all the parents for all the reasons mentioned earlier

When I worked with people who were homeless, a large number of the young ones were thrown out of the house when a new partner (usually a stepdad) was introduced into the house. Last night showed how easily that can happen. The poor lad was only 15.

I felt that the stupid woman needed to learn some 'boundaries' of her own. I couldn't believe she put her hand on a 16 year old boy's inner thigh, held his hand and lay on his bed in his bedroom. She had no business interfering in these families' domestic problems (how was she qualified to do this?) and appeared to partly responsible for causing the crisis which led to that kid being thrown out of his home. She also tried to bond with the step-dad and ended up undermining the mum saying something to him like he was going to want to go back to Trinidad if she didn't sort the kid out. One of the boys said he wanted nothing to do with her and the school teacher seemed to want rid at the end also. She did nothing for the boys except take them to a football match and the gym where she complained about one of the boy's physiques thus reinforcing all the messages about masculinity that arguably are partly responsible for boys under-achieving. She told that mum that she was too controlling of her son and then berated her for being too liberal. I think the woman was dangerous and the programme highly irresponsible. What happened to those poor messed-up families after she stirred up all that trouble and then scarpered in her Mercedes? A lot of what she said didn't even make sense like when she told a group of Year 11s in assembly that their lives were over. What does that mean? And then she suggested that they should all be getting As and A* when a grade C may be a fantastic achievement for some of them. I wouldn't want her anywhere near my kids or their school and am surprised she is being presented as a role model.

I heard her on five live being interviewed about the programme yesterday afty. she did admit to being totally out of her depth with luke and his mum but if that was the case, why didn't she f*ck off out of it and let someone more qualified intervene? If that was our school, the head of year would be talking to mum and luke to try to get some communication going.

she said in this interview that kids are told that they should aim for 5 A-Cs in their GCSE but in her experience this was far too low a target - they should all be aiming for As and As. and maybe in this school, with the potential these kids had, they maybe should have been achieving more... but, like they say, education is wasted on the young and that's what many kids do: doss about, being slaves to their hormones and somehow manage to scrape enough GCSEs together to to the next stage. As long as they qualify for their A levels or whatever, the grades don't really matter to them. The majority of these kids will* pull it off when it comes to getting uni places, when grades actually do matter.

like i said before, it's the kids who don't go onto higher education who need the 5 GCSEs, the ones that go onto training schemes and into the workplace. and for some of those kids getting 5 A-Cs is a bloody miracle. it's an insult to kids like that to say their lives are over, or they got Cs because they didn't revise!!

she's basically a big-mouthed know-it-all who has been chosen as some sort of role model by the programme makers just because she's black and a woman in what is still a white male-dominated world (that of business). Good for her, but it doesn't make her a bloody expert in kids.

OK.I've flipped thorugh some of the threads and I didn't like her but OMG was she right. That's my son, my son's mates. Posh school, too much money and scared parents that won't say anything because it starts a bloody row and the whole family suffers. She was right to lock him out, he did care and so did she but he had to learn.Those parents appeared weak because sometimes you can't argue any more. No, I don't think alcohol, smoking and girls staying over is acceptable and it will not happen in my house. I know my teen smokes, he's stpid and broke his bargain. I told him to give up and I would. I stopped 20 a day for 10 years, stopped dead overnight and he carried on. Yes it does matter HOW you say sorry because it has to mean sorry, not just say the words. At the end of the day, they were all lucky bright kids, who really didn't care that much because do you know what, kids like those will make it. They're like mine, he'ss do 4 B's and maybe 5 C's at GCSE because he's been spoon fed the answers. Most of his peers will get at least 10-13 A/A'*s becasue they are clever BUT they care. Some of his friends got suspended today for doing drugs, he's not really shocked but I am. It's coke and they're coming back after EASTER? WTF, that's a terrible message BUT you know what, Mummy and Daddy have spent millions on sending their baby there and the school won't let them down.

I rest my very weary and jaded case...

Agree Moomin. One thing all teachers are encouraged to do is to set SMART targets i.e it may have been more helpful and successful if she had set the kids the task of 2 hours of extra guided study at school each week leading to their exams rather than trying to somehow change their whole lives and those of their families and break 16 years of habits and attitudes.

But what if the teachers have given up as well?

Don't know what you mean Jollymum. Teachers can't just give up.

Yes they can, when the kids beat them down and the system lets them down too.Kids know exactly what their legal rights are these days and they use the info well. Helps when "daddy's" a top solicitor and pays loads of money for them to be there. The discipline is non-existent, they take the piss all the time and the teachers are struggling to maintain any form of teaching. Some of the kids are so arrogant, it's not true. They're rich, clever (most of them unless Daddy fixed the entrance exam) and they are constantly needing attention because most of the time they're allowed to do what, who and when they like. My son was drinking at parties, not with my consent, because I didn't know, at the houses of whom I considered perfectly/respectable/reasonable people. I was later informed (because it was well known to most people) that it ws a three beer limit. At 12/13? The mum took the beer lids and then about 2/3am went to bed. My son was with a family I still consider "nice and safe" but I think they got beaten down into a form of submission. The most quoted teen saying "Well, everyone does it Mum and you're boring etc etc" Well, I might be but I wish teachers could have the respect/authority they deserve and it could be like the olden days, Maybe kids would be better behaved and more respectful. I hated my mum sometimes but looking back, OMG she was right.

is this a private or state school?