Is it too late to return her? She’s only 11.
Mood swings, frequently foul, refuses to do homework (actually, she does it, just won’t turn it is…big problem), won’t answer questions, won’t sit at dinner table. Ugh.
I won’t answer to the rest right now but I will pass on what a medical professional told me about homework and your kids. It is your responsibility to make sure she has somewhere to work, light, pencils, paper, and time to do it. If she decides not to do it or not turn it in it’s between her and her teachers. She’ll either learn or fail, either way it is her choice. I live by that.
Thanks. We do all that and much more already, but it’s still painful.
Starting that teen attitude thing a bit early. You will have an annoying five+ years. One day, out of a clear blue sky, she will suddently become a lovely person again. Courage.
If it helps any, it’s a known psychological stage called “individuation.” A psychologist friend of mine explained to me that it is a necessary transition between dependent childhood and independent adulthood. The alternative is remaining a child. She’s looking for where the borders are. You have to show her. The tough part is that, obviously, over time those boundaries must change. She will be continuing to test you *all the time * to see which boundaries might have changed since yesterday.
One thing that might (or might not) work is to set a condition on when a boundary can change. Evidence of mature actions earns additional mature freedoms.
Ahhh sweet puberty. When my sisters and I were 11-17/18ish (we’re triplets) we used to get into screaming matches so loud the neighbors would call to make sure everything was alright. Unfortunatly, there really isn’t anything you can do to remedy the mood swings, other then constantly reminding yourself that it is most likely the hormones mixed with growing individualism talking and she won’t be acting like that forever. Believe me, we grew out of it, so will she.
As for the homework, if she is doing the homework, but not turning it in, there really isn’t much you can do. My brother used to do fake homework assignments so mom would stop bugging him. If the assignment was to do even questions, he would do the odd ones. He ended up not graduating from 8th grade and had to go to summer school so he could enter high school with his peers. He got his PhD in Math about a year and a half ago, and never ran into problems with his poor performance in junior high.
Yeah, welcome to the Puberty Blues! My grandson is right in this age group as well and he’s starting to shoot up, his feet are huge, he’s started to smell like a goat if he doesn’t shower every day and the pimples are starting to pop up. All this is bearable but he’s also started to get that teenage sass going on and that can be a bit of a trial. He’s always been smart and outspoken, but now he’s getting sulkier and last week he just went off on the principal of his school for no good reason. When his mom talked it over with him he said he just didn’t know what got into him–his mouth just up and ran away with him. Testing limits, indeed!
Some other wonderful things to look forward to are the bad judgement calls, the impulsive troublemaking, irrational anger, mouthiness, defiance and other fabulously inappropriate behaviors. The idea is to refrain from killing them while preventing them from killing themselves in some numb stunt until they grow up and become human again. Yay!
If it’s any consolation to you, the teachers get to deal with a whole bunch of teens going throught that. I teach at a boys’ middle school so it’s not as bad as it could be, I guess. I’ve a friend who teaches at a mixed elementary school up on the border. He says each of his sixth grade classes is enough to scare Freddy Kruger.
Has she started her period yet? Be on the lookout for it in the next six months or so if not.
Alternatively, has her diet changed?
That is a terrible age for some girls. In the year before I started my period, I became so moody that I couldn’t get through a family dinner without bursting into tears. I went from being a model student to never turning in homework (though I got As on tests). I got over the worst of it by the time I was 14. Most girls seem to even out within a couple of years after menarche.
Period? Check. Mood swings? Check. New school? Check. Sass? check.
I have always thought that marketing a T-shirt with “I survived a teenage daughter” would do great business.
My daughter was the sweetest thing ever until about 13. Then she turned. Her father took the brunt of it. “How was school today?” would get a snappy “Why? Don’t you trust me?”. If he didn’t ask, then it was “Don’t you even care?”
She then turned sweet again, but in her own grown-up way - sorry but it took a few years. With her first pay cheque, she took her father to lunch to say sorry.
As a teacher with decades of teaching teenagers of both genders, I support previous posts. Feed her, ensure she is safe and have what she needs to study, and then try to step back. It may be your only way to survive. We teachers will nag about homework and stuff like that.
Ah, if there were only somewhere we could ship them off to for ten years…sigh. That’s how long it took my daughter to get over the rebellious phase. Just prepare to be “evil, wicked parents who don’t love me…wahhhh!!!” for a while. It does get better towards the end…but the senior year of high school will be almost as bad…my friend’s perfect, high-achieving daughters became nasty, mean, rude, self-centered and downright cruel right around graduation time…which made my drop-out, sex-crazed, risk-taking runaway with three-color hair and a drug and alcohol abuse problem daughter…who still snuggled with me on the couch and is now undeniably the Best Daughter Ever…look pretty damn good!
Just try to keep a sense of humor, but don’t burst out laughing right to her face when she does things like start crying when she counts out the wrong number of forks while setting the table…!
My son is now 15 and gets moody, nasty, sarcastic, forgets homework (he has ADD which doesn’t help) and so on. One day after one of our battles over his schoolwork and messy room I called my mother, told her I loved her and thanked her for not killing me when I was a teen. She said, “I love you, too. I did think about selling you a few times…”
I’m scared about what will happen when my daughter hits puberty. She is 7 now and will hit it around the same time my wife starts going through menopause. I told my son that I am going to move in with him at that time. Just for a couple years until the hormones stop flying.
As far as I can tell, it is simply a matter of contiually trying to find the correct carrot/stick combo. I tend to fall more on the “tough-love” end of the continuum, as opposed to the “smother-them-with-love” folk. We have little tolerance for family members treating each other unpleasantly within our house. There’s enough of that crap going on outside from others.
We made it clear to our kids how much we did for them that we were not required to do, and that if they didn’t maintain their end of the bargain by at least being minimally pleasant and contributing cohabitants and achieving decent grades, we would take away any and all comforts beyond the minimum food, clothing and shelter. And if they wished to be emancipated at the legally minimum age, we’d be glad to help them in the process if they wished to go that route.
In many instances, we would appeal to their intelligence, when their good nature seemed hidden. If nothing else, it made sense to our kids that it was silly to piss away potential credit and opportunities for little or no advantage, by such things as not completing or handing in homework. And it made sense to our kids that if they really thought their mom and dad were such ogres, then they had all the more reason to do well in school to increase their opportunities to get rid of us as soon as possible.
And this is the kind of parenting chore that requires mindless repetition over and again. It isn’t as tho you only need to fight these battles once and then it is over. Your kid will repeat the same annoying behavior over and over, and then move on to other equally annoying stuff.
Hell, we were just making it up as we went along. And my posts on these forums clearly establish my lack of qualifications for offering interpersonal advice. I’m just offering what we did. And we seem to have gotten through the worst of adolescent/teen angst relatively unscathed, with kids who are turning into pretty decent and reasonably pleasant young adults.
My son’s middle school has a huge problem with boys not turning in work. My son actually had a 32% in a whole class from not turning in work that he did on time and didn’t turn in. By the end of one school year he had nothing in his room except his bed and a desk. We had to take his door off so he would do his homework while he was in his room and not just lie in bed doing nothing.
We tried the let him fail route but he didn’t care if he failed so then I said that no way are you going to goof around all the time and flunk school. He had to stay in his room until his homework was done and his grades improved. One of the big problems is that at his school there aren’t really any consequences for not doing work. It’s way better now that he’s in high school.
It was a horrible, frustrating time.
I feel pretty lucky with my son. He’s 15, and while he has the homework issue, he’s always had that, it’s not a puberty thing. I think we’ve finally found the right stick there: he had his XBOX yanked on weeknights after the first report card of the year, with notification that if the semester grades weren’t improved, it was going away on the weekends, as well. He pulled everything up enough that I’m okay with it. (3.0 GPA, not great, but acceptable.)
He’s just generally a wonderful sweet person; he babysits with little grumbling (money helps smooth that right over!), he still talks to me - true, it’s mostly about video games, but it’s still speech! - he still likes hugs in private and even subtle snuggle-type leans in public…
But what’s freaking me out is his anger. Not explosive, not abusive, not even really expressed. But he’s got this simmering rage thing going on sometimes that freaks me the hell out. He’ll close his eyes and literally shake with the effort of NOT yelling or hitting something. I’m glad he’s in control of it, but just seeing that anger in him scares me.
This points out another significant fact. In many ways it is better to have these things come up when the kid is in grade/middle, than high school. If your kid decides to completely bomb a semester/year in high school, it will significantly affect his options beyond HS.
Seconded. Gah.
Is this sudden?
I think all pre-teens get cranky, but this seems a bit more severe. Has there been a death in the family? Has she (Og forbid) been assaulted in some manner?
I would try, in one of her calmer moments, to sit with her and try to find out what’s bothering her.
As far as refusing to do things, such as refusing to answer questions or sit at the dinner table, those are Non-Negotiable. Her growing up does not give her the right to be rude and disrespectful.