h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I never friend their friends, but I like to monitor what my two are up to....

I have 'friended' three daughters, and two grand-kids, of friends. One of those young ladies asked me to be a friend so that she could occasionally practice her English from Dusseldorf. One of the daughters drops by when she's bored (and having lived on this street for years). And we had a lovely afternoon in southern England with the other daughter and her pair of kids of the day.

I've often said that I'd rather face the armies of hell than an annoyed teenage girl. I work in an all-boys school but we're right next door to our all-girls counterparts. The two schools share some staff and I'm friendly with a few of those who work exclusively at the girls.

I don't know how they cope. I like to complain about our lads (and they can be a nightmare) but most of their behaviour is straightforward and quickly spotted. I can see if one of our lads is going to kick off from the other end of the corridor and when he does I know it'll be over quickly. Not so with girls - it's harder to spot and it goes on for much longer. Fights with our lads rarely last over the weekend but with the girls they have vendettas that last months.

Both me and my sister reckon I brought her up as much as anyone, and I seem to have done an alright job seeing how she's turned out, but between 14 and 17 she was an absolute nightmare. Pretty much put me off ever becoming a parent for real.

i went to an all-girls boarding school - so teenage girls are something I'm very fmiliar with. Unfortunately

Yeah. I was a teenage girl once, too. I didn't like most of them then.

And HI's got it right about the vendetta thing.

I had two female teenagers, two years apart, and they were perfect most of the time. The worst one of them ever told me was, "you're so unfair, you give us nothing to rebel against".

The trouble started when they QUIT being teenagers - I had six months' reprieve, and then their baby sister turned 13, and she did her very best to make up for how easy I had it with the other two.

Sigh. How I miss having them around...

My experience is similar to Pierce's, no problems at all, really. Mind you, three boys is different from girls, there's no disputing that. As a girl, I remember my own teenage years - fighting with my sister etc.

I gave up forcing my kids to do anything as soon as they got taller than me - what's the point? Now they're the ones who complain when I don't put my teacup in the dishwasher straight away. From the age of about 12, no way were they going to come on holiday with us - they had too many activities of their own in the holidays, and were fed up with old churches and archaeological sites. They'll come back to that eventually - maybe they'll let their kids come on holiday with us.

Of course, we had the uncommunicative, grunting phase. I just hope the last one will have come out of that when he gets back from backpacking round Central America. (Costa Rica at the last account ... e-mail this afternoon)

Now I think about it, it sounds like the children are very similar to the parents in all these cases. I was also the uncommunicative type, with little active rebelliousness or stroppiness. Periods and bras was all very uneventful - partly thanks to my mother's laid back attitude. What goes around, comes around.

All in all, Sho, it's like banging your head against the wall - think how great it'll be when it stops.

That's what I was thinking, TC

We brought up our kids till they were 4 or 5. After that they brought up themselves. And they did a good job

We weren't that conscious about it at the time but I learned about it years afterwards and in hindsight it is very clear to me that if you haven't taught your children were the borders are before they are 5 years old it's too late to do it anyway

Okay, make that 6 or maybe even 8



PS: Dividing kids in all-girls and all-boys schools is wrong in my humble opinion. It has been debated here that girls should have classes of their own so they would not be disturbed by noisy boys, but surveys show that neither the girls nor the boys learn any more or any better if divided - and how will the kids ever learn to interact with the other sex if they are excluded from it
My father went to an all-boys boarding school and from his memoirs I learned never to put my kids away like that

TC - that's a slight help!

mine don't have anything to rebel against either, really (apart from the fact that I won't let #2 get those tunnel things in her ears) - they're just so flippin' lazy and always want more more more.

Just as well I'm good at saying "no"

But what do you do with a 13 and 14 year old when you want to go away for a 2 week holiday? As it is this year there is no going away for a holiday because they bitched and whined about every suggestion (that we could afford)

Who is their oldest and stodgiest Auntie and Uncle? Offer to send them there while yourself and your good go somewhere to suit your tastes.

>>but surveys show that neither the girls nor the boys learn any more or any better if divided<<

Everything I've seen says girls do better in single-sex schools while boys do worse in them. Despite the girls school next to us taking in kids from exactly the same socio-economic background (in fact most of the girls have brothers at my place and vice versa, so same households) the the girls school outperform us by quite some margin. They are somewhat better funded, with better facilities, but we get similar Ofsted reports so staffing competency is roughly the same.

The girls school is one of the best schools in the local cluster and wouldn't look out-of-place in a nice middle-class suburb when you look at its results and progression pathways. The other inner-city state girls school I know well (this one in Manchester) is exactly the same - far outperforms its peers despite being in a similar situation. I've got immense respect for the staff of the girls school, they do an incredible job in difficult circumstances, but girls do perform better and achieve more when there's no boys around to bother them.

I'm not at all sure what I was like as a teenager. My memories are very vague and muddled. But I'm pretty confident that I never, ever, ever, at all, shouted anything at either of my parents. (Shouted to, perhaps, if they were a long way away, but never shouted at.)

My little sister gave them more grief. She was insisting she was grown up when I was desperately trying to still be a child.

The middle child, our brother, was very calm most of the time. More temper than I ever had, but he learned young to keep it in check. I think he found growing up easier than I did.

TRiG.

Sho, it is the beginning of the process of breaking the cord, and making you (almost) glad to see the back of them when they go to uni or whatever. Then they remember what parents are for and keep coming back, till they are so grown, they look after you But still we worry about them and the invisible cord is never completely severed - if you are lucky.

Sho, it is only when you look back that you realise how time flies. Be there when they need you, the rest of the time you need to be invisible

Had two boys with five years between them and some times seemed horrendous, but looking back I mostly remember the good times.



Websailor

@ Websailor

One of the things I worry about is that looking back they will just remember the shouting and the horrible stuff. Which is odd because I know that looking back we do tend to filter out the stuff we didn't enjoy (I remember good things from school, more than the bad; in the Army coming off a horribly physical exercise, or course, we always talked about the good things etc etc)

HI that's very interesting about the girls and boys schools. I am pretty sure that I did better at my girls' school than I would have done at a mixed school.

oh and my threat is to send them to my parents - who they adore, but they don't like to spend too much time there alone because "there are too many rules"
- exactly the ones I grew up with, in fact.

Looks what happens to kids without rules though! I grew up with them too, though I must admit my parents were very Victorian. I managed to find a middle way somehow which seems to have worked.

Websailor

Send them to your parents, Sho, and have a nice break yourself.

Do you pay them pocket money/an allowance/for their phones? Perhaps it's time to impose new terms and conditions ...

I confiscated Osh's newest Lego this morning on the grounds that he'd had a pocket money advance to be able to get it, and the deal had been that he would then do his chores with a smile. So he had a clear choice (and I presented it to him as his choice): chores with a smile, or Lego out of reach for a week. He chose chores with a smile.

Sic (who acted like a teenager from about the age of 3) was always prepared to invest ten times the time it would have taken to do the job, in arguing about being asked to do it. I remember once asking her to pick up a pair of knickers from the floor. Twenty minutes later, the knickers were still on the floor, and we were still having a full-blown row. It's very wearing

Mol

I couldn't afford to send them to my parents at the time we needed to book the tickets, unfortunately. But my parents are getting older and less able to cope with the tantrums (which they say they don't remember me having, but that's not strictly true because we had some humdingers and I distinctly remember telling my mum that she got a year's worth in the 6 week summer hoildays and if she didn't like that she could stop sending me away to the prison camp )

We do have a money/chores deal going on. Although one fell by the wayside which was that #2 (who loves money) was going to do the bathroom once a week for what I'd pay a cleaner. That stopped after I had to nag her for a week to do it, then did it myself...

What baffles me is that I hated it when my mum nagged me to do something that I was going to "do later". She "nagged" (mentioned it once or twice) until I did it. Eventually I twigged that if I did it the first time it stopped the nagging.

My two really don't seem to have grasped that. Nor the fact that if I tell them to tidy their rooms, then go in to do something else and I say it again, and again until eventually it's a huge row. And it is over a sock on the floor.

Seems to be par for the course for just about everyone though.

all round!

Why even mention a sock on the floor? Is that really worth a row? If you can even spot that sock, her room must be pretty tidy in the first place.

As you well know, with one of my daughters, I had to deal with socks on the ceiling!!!!