It's different for girls

 

By the time child number three arrived and helped to redress the gender balance in our house, I felt sure I had mastered the whole parenting lark.

 

I had already endured the terrible twos, threes, and fours with a brace of boys, so raising a girl was going to be fairy cakes and princess costumes all the way.

 

After all, I had been a girl myself in the distant past, so how hard could it be?

 

And, to be honest, the first few years with my baby girl offered a pleasant interlude of pinkness after an overdose of Bob the Builder and football blitzes.

 

 

I had my own life-size dress-up doll who begged to help me with the cleaning and loved a good baking session. (Yes, my children followed traditional gender stereotypes. I tried buying the boys a toy kitchen once; they used it as an army base for their Action Man collection).

 

The girl and I remained close all through primary school.

 

She delighted in drawing perfectly straight margins on fresh pages, while I delighted in parent-teacher meetings that made no reference to forgotten homework and lack of effort.

 

Things have started to change in the past few months, however.

 

She is still just trying to navigate the exciting and terrifying world of secondary school, and I can’t be there to hold her hand when it all gets too much.

 

As if double French and locker procedures weren’t enough to try to get your head around, hormones have arrived in an inexorable flood, and my little girl is being well and truly swamped by it all.

 

When the boys were her age, change was a factor, of course, but it manifested itself in the odd whisker and trousers that were never long enough.

 

 

I was never conscious of them growing up quite as painfully as I am with the girl. With her, adolescence is full on.

 

I want to help. I want to tell her it does get better; I want to carry her through all the uncertainty, awkwardness, and pain that goes with female puberty.

 

And sometimes I want to send her to the naughty step.

 

We have huffs, and attitude, and buckets of tears. I ask her what’s wrong, and she wails “I don’t know!”

 

One thing is certain: I no longer think I’ve mastered the whole parenting lark.

 

Aoife O'Carroll is a separated mum living in Co Kerry with her two boys aged 17 and 14, and a girl aged 10.