The parents who dared throw a strop back!
Had a tough summer with your teen? Meet the brave mum and dad who decided it was time to teach their right little madam a lesson
MARIANNE Jackson has a thing about notes. She stuck one — it’s unprintable in a family newspaper — on the freezer in the garage after her husband Robert kept leaving the door open. There is another on the American-style fridge in her immaculate kitchen: ‘Teenagers tired of being harassed by your stupid parents act now. Move out, get a job, pay your bills . . . while you still know everything.’
Her 15-year-old daughter Nicola doesn’t find it funny: ‘Mum can be so annoying. I get nagged the whole time. Things like waking up late in the summer holidays. It’s not even really that late. Between 10am and 11am is normally my time. My friend Lucia wakes up at 3pm.’
Marianne rolls her eyes. ‘That’s because Lucia hasn’t gone to bed until 3am.’
She is rewarded with what she refers to as ‘one of those looks’.
‘Those looks’, along with ‘that tone’ are part of this particular teenager’s armoury.
‘I don’t know where she gets it from,’ says Marianne. ‘If I’d spoken to my parents the way she speaks to me I wouldn’t have sat down for a week. It’s the insolence. If you wrote down what she said and read it back, you’d be hard pushed to find anything wrong with it.
‘But it’s the tone — as if she’s just found you on the bottom of her shoe — and that look. You think: “I try hard, really hard, to be a good mum. I’m not perfect, but I don’t deserve that.”
‘She touches a nerve. Her fault is that she’s never learned where the line is and, at some point in her life, she’ll have to learn and think: “I’ve pushed as far as I can go with this. I’ll back off a bit.” But, no, not Nic.’
That leads us to the family set-to at the end of last week, which made the headlines.
Finally, their indulged only child had pushed too far. She was in her ‘mess’ of a bedroom (‘You go in there and there’s such a mountain of clothes on the floor you practically have to tie a rope round your waist to get through it,’ says her mum), enjoying a bowl of ice cream when the text arrived: ‘We need to have a very serious chat downstairs.’
Marianne, 52, was in the kitchen with a ninepoint list of ‘things you have done wrong this week’. The misdemeanours, which will be familiar to parents reaching the end of their patience this long summer holiday, included that she had ‘left TWO bowls in the lounge’, was ‘always on the phone’ and — bizarrely — ‘shouting at the dogs when they don’t pose for your photos that you constantly take’.
It ended with the warning: ‘This is only a short list of the things you do to me and your dad, we have reached the end of our tether now and from now on we are not doing anything for you ever again. We hope you learn your lesson.’ Was Nicola chastised? Repentant? Sadly, it would appear not. ‘I just found it funny,’ she says. So much so, she posted the rap sheet online. In days, it went viral, receiving 10,000 ‘likes’ and 9,000 re-tweets, which in teenager land is ‘really famous’.
‘I thought it would just go to my friends, but it’s gone crazy,’ says Nicola with the sort of delighted triumph we saw on the faces of our medal winners in Rio.
She turns to her mum. ‘My friends laughed at you and said it was a bit of an over-reaction.’ Not quite ‘that tone’, but almost. Marianne bristles. ‘We call her Tina the Sloth,’ she says, referring to the two-toed sloth at Chester Zoo.
‘You don’t see her from one hour to the next because she’s in the lounge watching TV and on her phone. Then, she comes slopping out, slops her way down the hall, rummages in the kitchen and finds whatever she wants to eat, takes a bowl, leaves the wrappings before slopping back to the lounge.
‘If I say “Can you clear that lot up?”, she just replies: “Oh, you’re moaning again.” ’ Nicola shoots me a now-you-can-see-how-annoying-mymum-is look.
In truth, the Jacksons are, by and large, a warm, loving family.
Marianne and Robert, 54, clearly dote on their pretty daughter. Mum is a property manager and Dad is a plant machinery exporter. They work hard to send her to the £18,000-ayear private school, New Hall, near their home in Chelmsford, Essex.
Indeed, such is the expense of giving their precious child the best education they can buy, they often go without summer holidays themselves.
Nicola, meanwhile, travels to Marbella and Dubai with friends, all paid for by mum and dad. Does this child not know what side her bread is buttered on?
HER parents are, she says nonchalantly, ‘like best friends even though we do annoy each other’. On the plus side, she argues, she doesn’t do drugs or, for that matter, boys. At least, she’s not letting on to her dad if she does.
‘I don’t really want a boyfriend. I just prefer talking to lots of boys . . .’ Her mum says: ‘We’re fine with that.’ Nicola ploughs on: ‘I don’t want a boyfriend because I know if I go to see him in Chelmsford, they’ll be following me around. I can imagine them coming to the restaurant and being on the table behind.’
She looks at her dad. ‘I just don’t trust you, so I don’t get involved with that. You’d be asking everywhere I was going and then you’d talk to the parents and it would be awkward.’
Robert explains: ‘ We’ve just got our rules.’
Nicola shoots him the sort of look that tells him what he can do with them. The temperature rises palpably. Right you lot, time out.
‘We’re not at loggerheads the whole time,’ says Marianne. ‘Some families seem to live in a war zone. We have a lot of banter and, when we go away, it’s not like parents being with their child. We have a real laugh. In some ways, we think we’re lucky — unless something’s not rocking her way and then she kicks off.
‘But that’s their generation, isn’t it? Life is instant. When they want something, they want it now.’
But isn’t it our job as parents to say ‘No’ and give them boundaries, including chores? Psychiatrists argue it is, if we want to encourage them to become independent and grow into capable adults.
But for now, back to the rap sheet.
WHAT about complaint number two? Nicola left a cup in her room for more than three days. It’s hardly up there with usual parental worries such as bullying (Nicola doesn’t and hasn’t been), but is clearly an issue. ‘I use that cup,’ says Nicola. Her mother splutters. Point three: She has eaten junk for the past six weeks.
‘Mum’s really into healthy food, but she’s extreme. She doesn’t eat bread or anything like that.
‘So all the meals they cook for me are healthy. But I like to go to Nando’s and McDonald’s with friends. This week I’ve been really annoyed because all my friends are away, so I’ve been stuck at home. I’ve been really bored, so I’ve just eaten stuff.
‘It’s why I’ve been on my phone so much.’
That takes us to complaint number five, that she is always on her mobile. She has an answer for that, too.
‘Probably, if I had a brother or sister, I’d be talking to them, but I have no one my age in the house, so I like to talk to my friends. But you don’t like that.’ The ‘you’ is Marianne.
‘That’s because it’s often 11pm or after,’ she says. ‘When I was growing up, if the phone rang after 9pm it was an emergency. They don’t get it. It’s constant. We go to bed. She’s on the phone. It’s “who are you on the phone to at this time? Go to bed.” ’
Suddenly, we jump back to point four: the fact that Nicola does not make her bed in the morning.
‘She never makes her bed,’ says Robert, with a weary resignation. No response this time from Nicola.
The very intriguing point six: that Nicola shouts at the dogs when they refuse to pose for photos. The Jacksons have two labradors, Ellie, five years, and Dora, five months.
‘Last week, she decided she wanted the same picture of Dora as she’d taken in the toilet when she was a little pup,’ says Marianne.
‘So she’s standing in the downstairs toilet trying to hold her in front of the mirror, but she weighs a ton. I can hear her shouting: “Dora look at the mirror.” ’
But Nicola blithely explains: ‘ It wouldn’t pose for me.’
Then Marianne gives a surprise interjection. ‘In the end I am on my knees in the toilet supporting the dog’s weight so she can get this photo supposedly with this adorable dog under her arm and she’s moaning: “I can see your hands.” ’
Hang on, Marianne. On the one hand you’re chastising your daughter for shouting at the pets, the next you’re helping her. Do you think that perhaps Tina the Sloth is, how shall I put this, over-indulged?
Marianne pauses. ‘I think we’ve been too lenient,’ she says. ‘ We take the opinion she’s an only child. She had no one to play with when she was growing up, so we encouraged her to do all the different clubs [ice-skating and dancing].
‘Then, you’ve got to factor in home-
work. Then, you kind of go: “As long as you’re doing well at school you haven’t got to do any chores.” I don’t know . . .’
Robert does: ‘We probably do a lot for her — an awful lot.’ So are they helicopter parents? ‘They do hover,’ says Nicola. ‘But Mum really helps me with my homework. She sits with me when I’m crying and goes through it with me because I get angry with that as well when it won’t go in my head and I keep reading it and everyone at school understands it, but I don’t.’
At this, Marianne pats her daughter’s hand. ‘We chose for Nic to have a good education. I think once you start investing that sort of money you want to look after your investment.
‘I speak to my friends who have got children her age. They say selfdiscipline will kick in without me having to nag her. We can’t sit the exams for her.
‘We can help her, we can buy her kit — stationary, computer software, books — we can make her sit in there [she nods towards the lounge], but we can’t make her study, though I think it’s coming.’
Is it? I wouldn’t be so sure. ‘I prefer to live in the here and now and just have fun,’ says Nicola.
‘I don’t really organise myself. I just think I’m quite lazy and I lose everything — my school uniform, my dance shoes, everything.’ Again her pretty face lights up with pride. So, what is her ambition? ‘I did want to be a professional dancer, but I’m not going to go into that any more because it’s really tough, so I think I want to go into event organising. I like organising parties and things. I just don’t like organising myself.’
Robert smiles fondly: ‘She’s a kind kid,’ he says. So, is she helping more around the house now? Silence.
How about point seven? ‘Making tea for yourself and not offering me or your dad one, when we do everything for you?’
‘I just don’t think about it,’ she says. ‘I assume they’ll make one if they want one and if you’re in the office I don’t want to disturb you.’
Point eight: ‘Greeting the dogs with a better welcome than me and your dad after coming back from the holiday we paid for.’
Robert elaborates: ‘And when I picked you up, you sat there in the back on your phone. I had four teenage girls in the car and they wouldn’t say a word to me.’
Nicola is outraged: ‘Oh my gosh, that is such a lie. We got in the car and told you so many funny stories.’
Is there any point asking if she’s washing up her dirty dishes now, the last misdemeanour? Given Marianne’s look of exasperation, I guess not.
So, are they carrying out their threat and not doing anything for their darling daughter ever again?
‘We’ve cooked her supper. Done all her shopping,’ says Robert.
‘ But at least Marianne didn’t have to ask her to tidy her bedroom this morning. She did that herself, so maybe she has finally learned something.’
Or maybe she didn’t want the world and his dog to see her in a pigsty given she was being interviewed.
‘Exactly,’ says Nicola, flashing the sort of triumphant smile that leaves little doubt as to who calls the tune in this house — and it’s certainly not mum with her notes.