Friction is hard to avoid when adolescent foreign exchange students come for the summer, writes Kathy Sheridan

You can spot them easily: the skinny, sulky little foreign boy, trudging a few paces behind his paler, eye-rolling Irish "exchange" and the mumbled: "Sorry lads, we're stuck with him, Mum's going mad."

Mum, meanwhile, is prostrate on the sofa, self-medicating after four headbanging days of pidgin English, sniffing the air for l'Eau de Hash and trying to root her own young fellow out of bed before noon because the French boy is up at 8 a.m. sharp and shadowing her like a sick calf. And that's before she goes hunting for more bloody salad stuff while beseeching Dublin Tourism for information on the sort of "cultural pursuits" that use up entire days and require absolutely no charades.

"Face it, you are going to have a culture clash," sighs Rosie, a fluent-French-speaking, Dublin mother still reeling from the thud of rigid, immutable routine introduced to her typically Irish, laissez-faire home by a French 15-year-old. On day one, her jolly suggestions for the evening were met with an announcement: "I go my room at 9.30. I make the computer or the book. At 10 o'clock, I end the light." And he never wavered.

A few days later, a party peopled by cheerful Francophiles familiar with his part of Paris only made him cross.

"He couldn't cope with the spontaneity, with being up late, and got into such a temper that we had to leave. I wanted to kill him."

Another mother, Denise, shudders at the memory of her French boy arriving with an alarmingly sickly mien and a barrow-load of asthma medication that she had not been warned about, though both his parents were doctors.

Added to which the boy, Julien, was barely 13 (although supposed to be 14), and for the next three weeks, was wrenchingly homesick. The mother remained uncontactable throughout.

Soon Denise's family decamped to their holiday home, where lunch and dinner are moveable feasts and teenagers stay up as long, and sleep as late, as possible.

Not Julien. "He was completely programmed to have breakfast at eight, lunch - with knife, fork and napkin - at 12, and dinner at seven," says Denise. "I like to get up early and go for a walk on the beach, but next thing I'd see your man, pacing up and down at the sand dune waiting for his breakfast."

At table, he complained others were getting more than him. Out sight-seeing, he would eat the ice-creams Denise passed around, then buy a pile of sweets and share with no one.

Rosie, meanwhile, was ironing her charge's socks - "because all his clothes were the kind that came out of the machine saying 'iron me'!" - and desperately seeking new ways to energise him and his shruggy French pals.

So. Off to the National Aquatic Centre: "Wonderful . . . but can't tell you how much it cost me."

A visit to a glitzy art opening for a look at Dublin's beau monde: "That only meant a delayed dinner time to them. One of them just glared the entire evening."

Up to Newgrange and lunch in the interpretative centre: "Got a bit lost on the way and they were fuming that it was getting past their lunch time."

Then after the introductory spiel and before the arrival of the bus to take them up to the ancient tomb, one of them shrugged: "Ees that eet? Wye should we go on ze bus eef zat ees eet?"

"They drove me crazy," she says flatly. "Though what amazed me was that the parents were so nice." Back in Paris, of course, her son, a happy, independent type, was being delivered to school in a Porsche and roaming the city at will.

For Denise, the plan for the second leg of the exchange - sending her son back with Julien - faltered early on when a call to the boy's home was answered by a 10-year-old who had been left home alone with a five-year-old.

Denise, a warm, hospitable woman accustomed to a flow of visitors, gave up the ghost. "I wasn't going to send Jack to a house like that."

They gratefully delivered Julien to his 5 a.m. flight - and afterwards got a terse postcard of thanks for their pains.

She felt sorry for the boy. "But it's a huge responsibility. You go to the beach to relax but because of that pile of medication, I just found it very frightening . . . I think the mother just wanted to get rid of the child for three weeks and it cost them nothing but the air fare."

The only kind of exchange she is positive about is the kind her son's school organised with one in Monte Carlo. "They had classes and trips all organised and the highlight for all the students was the céilí at Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. When ours went back to Monte Carlo, they had a ball - saw the Grand Prix, and met Eddie Jordan. And the girl we had to stay was really lovely. She would just appear beside me in the kitchen and start to help."

Since then, the children of both families have been back and forth. "But what really made it work was the group thing, the fact that she had been to school here so that when she came back she knew all the girls and boys around. I wasn't relying on Jack not to dump her."

It would be hard to find any woman prepared to go the traditional family exchange route now, she reckons.

"The problem is that the whole burden falls on the mother. But our lives are different now and having a young person puts a big full stop to everything."

Rosie believes that one trick is to pool the guests (and therefore the costs and the sulks), with a circle of similarly-situated parents.

Did she see any cultural benefit emerge?

"Well, on the one hand, you can only admire the way they don't snack between meals, never over-eat or drink Coke. On the other, because they weren't allowed PlayStations at home, they went wild on ours. But overall, I found them quite guarded and snotty, and not nearly as much fun as Irish kids."