There was a big hoo-ha on TV the other night over a woman who evicted her young daughter from her bedroom because said bedroom looked like a bomb hit it. It was a shocking thing to do said all the experts who’s children probably have a drug habit and no job. Messy kids are creative kids said another who’s child has ADHD. (I made those things up about the experts’ kids–they are probably piano-playing members of MENSA.)
Long story short my daughter’s bedroom was a border line contaminate site that I asked her to deal with while I was at work. Came home, a cyclone had destroyed my kitchen and the bedroom looked like a bomb had hit it. So I drove to my local KMart, bought the gear and drilled her bedroom door closed. I was a woman possessed. Even I didn’t know I was in possession of such handyman like skills.
So she was locked out for the next three days. I let her sleep in any of the spare bedrooms she liked, she could use the spare bathroom since her ensuite was no unavailable and the only clothes she had access to were the ones she was wearing or what was still on the clothes line. Gosh she hated me. When her father came home from work and burst out laughing so she hated him too.
We let her back in after three days. She kept her room tidy from there on and now she is 19 is mature enough to self-manage her own issues.
When I did this I received a mixed reaction from people I told. Some were horrified, some thought it was brilliant and they were waiting till they could give it a go and others also thought it was brilliant but were scared of how their child would react should they do the same. When did that happen? When did we get scared of our kids? Is is because we want to be their friends and have them like us? Is it because we don’t want to deal with the fallout of consequences.
I’ve been pretty lucky with my daughter. She is an only child and her father and I were determined not to spoil her. We were relatively young parents so she was doted on by all our friends. We put her in daycare once a week to socialise and her father stayed home with her. She reached all her milestones early and was just a great kid. She slept all night from three months. I know–how spoilt were we?
We thought that we had the whole parenting thing nailed until the dark years–those years between 14 and 16. Those years called us to question all we knew about parenting. The funny thing is she wasn’t really that bad but to us she was not the easy kid we’d always had. And we had to make some tough decision and there were consequences she didn’t like and sometimes we felt like giving up and letting her have her own way.
Wouldn’t that have been easy. Give in, let her have her own way and bugger the life lessons we had been trying to give her since she was born. However that is not always the case as other parents of teenagers I know just gave in. They let their teenagers have booze fuelled parties and stay out all night without knowing where they were.
One mother actually bought my 16 year old alcohol. I was furious. Not only was it illegal, but isn’t that my right as a mother to help my daughter make wise decisions about when is a suitable age for the adults in her life to condone drinking.
So anyway I went from the young cool mother to the seriously uncool mother and I didn’t care. To me being the responsible mother who made her daughter take the consequences of her actions was far more important.
But along the way my husband and I learned some important lessons too. We learned to back off. Sometimes it was better to lose the battle in order to win the war. In fact it became less about getting our way all the time and sometimes hear her out and you know sometimes she was right. We learned to shop in her currency (to quote Dr Phil) and use things like access to phones, computers and TV as a means of providing consequence. Ridiculous grounding became a last resort tool (we were being punished as well).
I would like to thing that we learned all these lessons by osmosis, but I resorted to using Dr Michael Carr-Gregg’s Princess Bitchface as a guide. Isn’t it the most wonderful title for a book? Obviously written by a man who knows the beast that is a teenage girl. So that’s where we learned a lot of new strategies that were more in keeping to help a teenage girl find her place in this modern world.
So far it all worked. By 17 she had gone back to her easy-going, fun self and her father and I breathed a big sigh of relief and offered a prayer of thanks to Princess Bitchface.
What’s most interesting is that some of those parents who gave in are still dealing with the teenage issues that should have been put to bed years ago. Their kids have dropped in and out of study, they are treated appallingly by their boyfriends, they find it difficult to get jobs and frequently find themselves in trouble with alcohol. They treat their homes like motels and pay their parents little respect. I feel sorry for their parents. Being held to ransom is the consequence of letting your teenagers live without consquence. Image
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