Parenting: Keeping a united front

My 14-year-old daughter has fallen in with a bad group of friends and we're worried.

She found the transition to secondary school hard.

She was isolated and unhappy in first year and it took her a long while to find a group of friends who accepted her.

And now in second year, she's hanging around with a group of girls who are on the fringes in the school.

They don't seem to have high expectations of themselves and I fear this is rubbing off on my daughter.

For example, my daughter used to be academic and like her study and now she's showing less interest and even questioning the point of it.

She used to be very sporty and has sort of drifted out of that, mostly because these girls think sport is stupid.

The new friends just want to hang out in the green at the shopping centre and be on their phones after school.

She's also become quite bitchy and nasty in her comments to myself and her dad and her little sister.

If my husband or I try to talk to her about this, it usually flares up into an argument.

She says we're snobs.

and haven't got a clue, especially if we say anything even remotely critical of her friends.

She has also become much more argumentative recently.

I am aware some of this is hormonal, but a lot of the change has come about since she started being pals with this group of girls.

Any

advice? Tread carefully here, because I would caution around that kind of causation.

It's the group of friends versus a correlation.

It's all happening around the time she finds herself friends, because so much of what's in this letter is typical teenage behaviour.

Yeah.

long before you jump in with your they're a bad influence on you it's these friends kind of stuff because if you demonize or forbid or ban a friendship it can actually make that friendship more appealing we all know that anyway but i would think the better approach with her is to focus in more of a reflective curious way how her friends make her feel how do you feel when you're with your friends what is it you like about your friends you know because then you're helping her to go well how do i feel Do I feel good when I'm with them? It's better that you're supporting her in that reflective process than you are telling her you've a bad attitude and it's because your friends are bad and we've decided that for you.

That's going to drive a division between you.

And I just think through adolescence, it's very easy for those doors of communication to slam shut.

The task is to keep them open.

Even slightly ajar will do.

Yeah.