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[quote=Anonymous]Do any of you take care of 11 year olds?

One of the kids I take care of is an 11 year old girl.
She recently started her period and she has bad attitude sometimes.
Her mom enables her and is catering to every outburst.
It's making it harder for me to enforce any consequences.

I know that at that age kids want to be more in control of what they do, so I'm looking for some ideas of how to approach the situation with a more positive reinforcement.
So far, she would lose her phone if she didn't do whatever she was supposed to do or for bad behavior. It doesn't happen that often - maybe once a week for a day, which I think is pretty good. Sometimes once every 10 days or so.

One of the issues I'm kind of struggling with is for her to take responsibility for her actions - just say "I'm sorry, I will go do it now" or whatever. Own up, fix it and move on.
But she always has 2 things she repeats when asked about something she was supposed to do but she didn't. She either says "everybody makes mistakes" or "nobody is perfect."
While both of the above are certainly true, she uses them for EVERY situation. Example - yesterday in the morning when she came downstairs, I asked if she made her bed. She said not yet and went back upstairs. Later I noticed that the bed was still not made, so I asked her about it and she responded with "everybody makes mistakes, nobody is perfect."

She doesn't have any responsibilities or chores around the house except for feeding dogs every other day, making her bed, cleaning out her lunchbox after school and making sure her homework is in her backpack when finished and whatever she used for her homework is put away. Oh, and she puts away her clothes after I wash and fold them.
That's it.
I'm not her mom, so I can't assign any chores for her to do and even though she does the above, it was an uphill battle to try to reinforce it.

For those of you who take care of teens/preteens - do you have any tips or advice?

TIA.[/quote]

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