This is no laughing matter. Big boy is in lots of trouble at school. I've begun to lose count of the letters home informing me that this or that homework hasn't been handed in or that he's been given a detention for mucking about in class or worse still, being rude to his teachers. One incident led to him being excluded for a day, which suited him very well, of course. The night before the exclusion, he filled in his timetable thus: Lesson One - bed. Lesson Two - bed. Lesson Three - bed. Lunchtime - Eat Pot Noodle, watch TV. Afternoon - Shopping.

Clearly, he had no sense of being punished. The following day he was in trouble again, having been caught on his way out of school to the shops, when he should have been in a Maths lesson. He was very much hoping for another exclusion but had to put up with a week of lunchtime detentions instead, which he found rather annoying.

I didn't really need the letters home to tell me that something was going wrong. I would ask him if he had homework and he would deny that he had been given any, or tell me that he'd done it in his lunch break. One look through the exercise books in his school bag confirmed my worst fears: I am the mother of a semi-literate teenage thug. There it was, work unfinished, terrible handwriting, dreadful spelling and teachers' complaints in red pen marking almost every page.

"I don't understand," I told him. "You could talk before you were one, you could read before you got to school. Remember when you read the whole 'Goosebumps' series one after another? You didn't used to hate school. What's happened?"

"It's boring," says big boy, "and I've got the worst teachers. My music teacher's really weird and my French teacher's paranoid and my sports teacher's a total psycho. He made us do a mile run in a storm. I could have been killed by a tree falling down or lightning or somefin."

When I question him about the various incidents that have got him into trouble, he protests his innocence:

"Miss is always picking on me. I always get the blame when I haven't done nuffin."

Later, when I am cooking dinner, big boy appears in the kitchen grinning broadly, wearing a cone-shaped paper hat tied under his chin with string. Across the front, in bright green lettering, he has written "DUNSE". Bro appears beside him, laughing loudly.

I feel terribly guilty and clearly, it's all my fault. "Government declares war on yob parents" screams a newspaper headline and I begin to fear that it won't be long before big boy is caught on camera smashing into the local supermarket or named and shamed in the local press as the neighbourhood's leading tearaway. And I will be brought before the Courts for my maternal inadequacies and made subject to a Parenting Order. I will be forced to attend classes where I learn to overcome my deficiencies and become a firm but fair disciplinarian instead of a weak, lax, permissive breeder of Twenty-first Century hooligans.

I draw some comfort from the fact that I am not alone. Some of big boy's friends are causing their parents just as much grief. We wail down the phone to each other, relating tales of exclusions, detentions, rudeness and the endless battles over bedtime (is it the hormone surge which makes thirteen-year old boys suddenly become nocturnal?). We cannot work out how these sweet children have become such monsters. And why do they hate us so much?

There's part of me that wonders if we haven't got it all wrong. I think I read somewhere that tribes in parts of Africa send their adolescents out to the bush for several months to chase lions and learn to become men. I cannot help but feel that this is a healthier option in some ways than keeping our teenagers cooped up in school for seven hours a day. Overhearing me discuss this with a friend, big boy offers to go to the local park and hunt pigeons instead of going to school. Realistically, more sport might be an option but it doesn't seem to be a priority here like it is in schools in the US or Australia. There are the weekends of course but as big boy points out weekends are for "shoppin', sleepin' and stayin' up late watching MTV".

Last night, for example, I just decided to leave him there, stretched out on the sofa, a can of something fizzy in his hand, the Argos catalogueon his lap and some good ole' gangsta rap blaring from the telly. A little while later, I went back to check on him and he was fast asleep, curled up with his duvet and his dirty rag of a security blanket. An overgrown baby with a moustache, all worn out from the trauma of trying to grow up. Touched at the sight, I leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek. Suddenly he awakes.

"Urghh, geddoff me!" he roars. "Can't you see I'm sleepin' for God's sake."

And so ends another day in hormone heaven.

Rebecca Misell lives in London with her two sons aged 11 & 13.

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