Reply to Help! DD14 does not want to come with us on family trip

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I'd make her go.[/b]  It's just 4 days, she will get over it.  I have a 14 year old as well who can be moody and sassy.  I still make her go to places she doesn't want to go to. She huffs and puffs and then gets over it.  Sometimes she even ends up having a good time.  [/quote]

How?[/quote]

The vast majority of kids can be cajoled, convinced, or coerced. The OP has not offered any indication that her child is out of the norm on this one.

As a parent of teenagers, it's fairly common that I need to convince them to do something they don't particularly want to do. In this situation, my children would ultimately cave if I flatly said this is a required trip and when they turn 19 and have a job like their older sibling, they too would be able to skip a family trip due to other obligations. My children typically relent when I make it clear that something is a command performance. When they push back, it's typically because something else is going on. Perhaps like OP's daughter's problem with the cousin. That might require some finessing. But I know my kids, and I'm capable of either giving them an incentive, such as agreeing their cousin is annoying, so we will make sure to have plenty of earbuds and books and give the kid cover to go "study" somewhere away from the cousin regularly, if another room isn't an option, or giving them a penalty such as explaining they had a fight with their cousin because they were in the wrong and they need to apologize to their cousin for their error and deal with the consequences. And finally, while I agree that you can't bully someone out of depression as a previous posted mentioned, we don't know that the child in this case is being anything other than normally moody, and you also can't coddle someone out of depression. Offering considerations such as letting a kid zone out on their phone during a car ride even if you don't typically allow that, or like I mentioned earlier giving the kid escape hatches such as letting them go somewhere else and "study" when they need breaks can be a perfectly reasonable way of accommodating a child going through a challenging time while also making them meet the expected obligations of spending some time with their family.

In the case that a child is capable of outright defiance and is not willing to be convinced to cooperate, I would assume the family has already enlisted appropriate help and would be engaged with them to determine an appropriate action. A call for help in that case would probably more appropriately be in the the forum for kids with special needs.[/quote]

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