Size 4 Jeans

Are teenagers worse today than they were 20 years ago? What I really want to know is what we’ve done wrong, that we have a teenager who thinks the world owes her everything, just because she breathes. She’s always just one step away from being hateful because she can’t have something she wants.

Example 1: She’s been begging (okay, most of the time it’s more like demanding) for us to take her skiing for ages. My husband finally caves in, and makes arrangements for a ski week, including lessons for everyone (except me; I don’t ski and don’t want lessons either). She said she wanted to learn to snowboard, and my husband needs more skiing lessons and my youngest hasn’t ever skied at all. After the plans are firmly in place, the announcement is made, but the teenager isn’t happy because the trip is not taking her to Switzerland! So fine, she won’t go. She can stay home with me and eat frozen food. Whatever.

Example 2: She dropped her digital camera, which she’s never kept in a case despite the fact that we made sure that she got to pick out the “perfect” case for it when it was new. After dropping it (and probably due in part to all the prior abuse), it didn’t work anymore, and she expected us to just lay down the credit card to buy her a new one, post haste. “But what am I supposed to do without a camera?” she says. WTF?

This kid has a serious problem understanding the difference between rights and privileges. “Rights” in this family are: a place to live, food to eat, clothing to wear. This does not mean that I have to buy special food, like applesauce in single serving tubs (because she’s too lazy to open a jar and put the applesauce into a dish) or special protein water, or buy her fancy designer clothing that she likes and just “has to have.” The food and clothing just have to fuel and cover her body, respectively. If we’re nice enough (or can afford) to buy her special food and clothing, that’s a privilege.

Going skiing anywhere is a privilege, which is clearly not understood either. I soooo appreciate the school she went to in 8th grade that decided skiing was “team building” and made it a required part of the curriculum to send my child on the class trip to Switzerland that year. I listened to her moan and groan and piss and complain about going for months before the trip. She absolutely didn’t want to go. We spent a huge amount of money outfitting her just in clothing and ski wear for the trip. She called home in tears two days into the week long ordeal, because she was so sore and tired and miserable.

Then she came home after the ski week, exclaiming over how much fun skiing was, and she’s been demanding that we take her skiing every winter since then. “When do I get my ski trip?” she says. Um, what? “My” ski trip? Thank you school, for prodding my daughter into attempting to make my life hell over yet another entitlement issue. I really appreciate that. And now, Garmish at the American resort hotel isn’t good enough for her, nothing but Switzerland will do.

These are just two of the medium to large issues that I deal with from this kid. There are about a billion small-ish ones of the same type, where she displays this “entitlement” attitude. I hear that this generation of teens is just like this, though I have no real proof or other examples of it. Perhaps that’s just my mother trying to make me feel better about it all (though that would be a bit of a shock coming from her; that’s not her normal modus operandi, by any means). My mother does tell me that I wasn’t anything like this. My other daughter, just coming up on 11 years old, doesn’t display these issues at all; she’s not a teen yet, but daughter #1 was like this even when she was eight, and it’s only gotten worse as the years go by.

So I’m back to wondering what we did wrong with the first one, or whether we really did anything “wrong” at all. The second child seems fine, and we’ve done nothing different with her, so can this even be blamed on bad parenting? Or is it something inside this kid that’s just screwed up? Sometimes, the only thing to do is keep in mind that she will grow up and move out, and life will bite her in the ass like it does with people like her, and try to keep my temper until that “move out” time arrives. I fully expect that she’ll be moving out (and expecting me to be mad about it, yeah, right) when she turns 18. *sigh* Only 891 more days…