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helenm
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| Posted: April 05 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged
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I am new to this forum and was recommended to seek advice...I have a 13 yr VERY strong willed daughter, who has taken advantage of my past pregnancies/recovering/ baby phase-she often refuses to do school when it's school time, she's been picking on her 11 and 7 yr sisters, she loves music/art-not academics. I am a people please temperament-being "tough" is hard. I try and sometimes it works, but its exhausting. Also have 3 1/2 daughter who is blending worse examples of older sisters and a 15month son who just weaned unexpected. I know God is calling me to homeschool- but how...and to have an orderly domestic church also! sigh...my prayer time is lacking,as well as sleep, no matter when I try to have prayer time, someone needs me. we moved and lost my mom's support group- God is challenging me and I hope He guides me thru some advice form others with strong willed kids- how to do it- how to nurture this temperament God gave her (and me)
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: April 05 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged
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Welcome Helen.
I would look at enlisting my husband to help. She's old enough to do the work on her own and have dad check that she did it when he gets home. Then she can battle dad over whether or not she's done school.
PS just a reminder that the boards do close down for Sundays so don't feel ignored we'll be back Monday.. in the meantime there's lots to read about dealing with strong-willed kids.. do a search and remember to change the time frame of the search to longer than the 3months of the default.
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Kathryn
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| Posted: April 10 2014 at 7:54pm | IP Logged
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I've heard a lot of positive about The Temperant God Gave You. (?) Been recommended to me several times...you'd think I'd buy a copy already.  No real advice today but loads of sympathy.
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Pilgrim
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| Posted: April 11 2014 at 5:35am | IP Logged
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Can you spend some time with just her at all? I find when my "friendship" with dd(also 13) is doing well, it makes the times of having to be enforcing things needing to be done go better.
This child has also been a struggle to get to do studies. I second involving your husband if possible, this does help here. Even though it can be hard for me to accept or see his discipline as a pleasing type person, who wants to be nice to the kids and get them to do what's needed through loving kind ways, sometimes they need Dad to shake things up a bit, and say, so to speak, "Listen! You need to do this!". I know this isn't always an option, as Dad may not be willing/able to do this.
Praying for you! You have a lot on your plate right now. 
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: April 11 2014 at 5:53am | IP Logged
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I don't have experience with 13 year old girls, but keeping an orderly home with two toddlers will make the best of us crazy. You just do what you can.
I liked the Five Love Languages for Children a lot. Another helpful book might be How to Talk So That Children Will Listen and maybe The Spirited Child.
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SallyT
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| Posted: April 11 2014 at 7:13am | IP Logged
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I too am not a natural disciplinarian, though I've gotten tougher as my younger children have grown up . . . I'm a lot less tolerant now than I used to be! But I'm one of those people who can always see both sides of any conflict and doubt myself even as I'm handing out consequences -- I'm always running them by my clear-sighted husband to see whether I've actually been fair or not, because I honestly can't tell. And I hate conflict. Again, I'm tougher now than I used to be, but that's my baseline.
When my oldest, now 20, was thirteen, we had very much the same scenario going on that you describe, and it was apparent to me that I could not "out-strong-will" her. She also picked on younger siblings, especially her immediately-younger brother, constantly, and our household was chaotic with preschoolers, so --yeah. All that together made for some less-than-pleasant days in our house.
Actually, by thirteen things were starting to get better, though we still had some bad days. It did help for me to try to work with her, rather than forcing her to do things, though obviously there was a bottom line -- she couldn't not do schoolwork. At times I was very fluid about what I counted as schoolwork: she did like to read and write (just not anything I assigned), so if she was reading something good, and writing on her own, I let that stand in for a lot.
One thing that helped us a lot, besides just making an effort to nurture the relationship as Pilgrim suggests, was for me to sit down with her and do some college exploring online. Even though her vision of where she wanted to be and what she wanted to be doing changed radically through high school, at that age seeing that her education was tending toward something -- getting out of the house, living her own life, being in a new and exciting environment -- was very motivating.
We had a lot of "You want to be in X kind of place in five years. How can we work together to help you get there?" conversations. Knowing that her work was getting her somewhere, and that that was one purpose for doing it, helped her to buckle down to things she didn't like as much. The college-research exercise helped her to see that her schoolwork was for *her,* not me, and it went a long way toward defusing the power struggles that inevitably sprang up.
And yes, Dad was a great resource for no-nonsense-ness. He's still the one who will say, "Just. Do. This," when she calls home dithering about something.
So much of it is just the age -- wanting to be independent, identifying with Mom and wanting to break free and be a separate person, rubbed the wrong way by everything everybody does . . . I remember being that way myself (and now I know just how lovely I was to live with, too). It does get better, and generally without a lot of heavy-handed discipline or coercion (I think -- though again Dad is the one who will hand that out when needed). That same child who used to pick on her younger brother unmercifully now says, every time she calls home, that she can't wait for him to come visit her at college over Easter (next week!). Now that she lives with a bunch of roommates, she's given to saying things like, "Now I get why you were after us to clean up all the time."
So it's funny . . . the things that I got tired of hearing myself say, because they were so un-nice and so un-fun-mom, are the things that particular child has actually thanked me for saying, and/or now hears herself saying and thinking. I comfort myself with that thought when I have to tangle with my current pre-teen daughter, who's a lot more teenagey at ten than I would like, but that is at least partly a function of having teen siblings.
Meanwhile -- be easy on yourself about the orderly domestic church. Be as orderly as you can, but if that's not that orderly, that's okay. Maintaining a prayer life with children doesn't have to be an elaborate thing -- we have a few prayers that we say at different points in the day, chiefly the Angelus ("noon" is whenever we're having lunch, which often is not at noon), and we sing the Our Father and the Marian antiphon for the season at night. I wish we did a family rosary, but we don't, and as children get older it's harder to make a time when everyone is in the same place to pray. So my husband and I pray with them individually at bedtime, as we're saying good night. Oddly enough, I find that aspect of life much more challenging with teenagers and pre-teens than I did when everyone was little and wanting to run wild.
Meanwhile, I do a good bit of my praying on the fly. I can say a Morning Offering while I'm brushing my teeth (I have it on a little window-film thing on my bathroom mirror). The kids and I say the Angelus together at lunch. My husband and I try to say Compline together before we go to bed, though it's easy to fall off that wagon. I pray for people as I encounter them and their needs in this forum and other places (like, for you right now!). In some seasons we've been more together about it all and said parts of the Daily Office as a family, but keeping anything in the road is hard!
And it's hard just to have moved. I really sympathize! Children -- even, and especially, teenagers -- feel that kind of upheaval very deeply, too, and often respond with regression and negative behaviors, so bear that in mind as well. We made a major move when my oldest was 14, and that was a VERY difficult year for and with her. Things did all settle down, but we felt out of order and out of joint for a long time. Again, be easy on yourself, because these things do just take time to sort themselves out.
Hang in there. And (on the fly!) I am praying for you with much sympathy.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Mothering and Family Life
Topic: strong willed dd & people pleasing mom
