Teenagers II the sequel

I have spoken/ blogged about teenagers before but I was over at Redmum’s reading this weeks column ( yes, she has a column now in the local paper, didn’t you know , tut, do please try to keep up) and she was talking about her daughter and doing her chores.
Read it here it will save me explaining it all.

Whilst reading it I got a real sense of deja vue, it seems that teenage children have inherent traits in their genes which are triggered by the passage of their 13th birthday.

As I have mentioned before I have a step son who is 14 and a daughter who is 13. My daughter was always a delight as she was growing up, helpful, polite, thoughtful, well behaved, tidy, it started to go downhill when she was 12 but as soon as she hit 13 I was sure that someone had stolen my daughter and left a monster in her place. A monster who can be moody, selfish, thoughtless, unbelievably untidy and that’s before we get to the hormonal bit.

My step son has the attention span of a goldfish and can be distracted more easily than a kitten with a ball of wool. He honestly can forget what he is going out of the living room for before he gets to the door. If the T.V is on then communication is futile, if the play station/game boy advance/computer is on then we could all be killed by a homicidal maniac using a pair of cymbals to squash our heads and he wouldn’t bat an eye lid.

All the kids have jobs to do to earn spends (allowance), like keep their bedroom clean and tidy (which tends to only happen when they want some spends) tidy up after themselves ( which never happens) and washing the pots ( dishes) after dinner.

At first with the washing up, I thought that my stepson was trying to be smart, by doing a bad job and taking over an hour to wash a few pots, so we wouldn’t ask him to do them again but it has happened so many times now that I believe he thinks he is doing a good job. I have gone to the cupboard to get a plate out only to find last nights dinner stuck to it in small dried globules or the remnants of tomato ketchup, that the kids had, on the back from the plates being stacked..

I have gone to get the cups to make a cup of tea only to find the inside of the cup stained with the last tea and sometimes rings around the inside: knives, forks and spoons with the remains of whatever was on it last time it was used.
In all these cases I am not just talking specks of stuff but huge patches, it really looks like they have been rinsed under the tap and put in the cupboard.

I have tried to show him how to do a good job, you know start with the glasses and work your way to the pans but I still catch him washing the pans first, so filling the water up with all those nasty bits that stick to everything else. I have also caught him hiding the pots in the oven so he didn’t have to wash them at all.
The standard answer I get if I ask why he has not washed them properly is the standard shrug and “ I don’t know” Which doesn’t really wind me up……. No really it doesn’t……..ha if you believe that you’ll believe anything. It just makes me think wtf….how many times does he have to rewash them before he learns that it is easier and quicker to do them right the first time. But then again I am not a teenager and haven’t been for a while (ok.. ok.. quite a while) and we all know teenagers know best.
I think parenting should come with a government health warning!