Life is cruel. You long for a baby. You gladly suffer the pregnancy, the birth, the sleepless nights, the financial penury and the self-sacrifice all because your child's smile is worth it. Hooked on having kids, you have more. Family holidays are a joy - even if you are all cramped into a car for 18 hours and the campsite is drenched from the rainiest summer ever in Brittany. So what? It's fun.

Then one day - around the age of 14 or 15 - your child wakes up and hates you. Wants nothing to do with you. Is embarrassed to be in the same room with you. Holiday with the parents? You must be joking. Your 15-year-old would rather be in Ibiza.

So here's the question: should you or should you not force your recalcitrant 15-year-old to go on holiday with you?

No, says psychologist Rosemary Troy, who recalls one campsite holiday when her sullen 15-year-old spent the entire two weeks hanging out of the parked car listening to Dire Straits. It is healthy for teenagers to rebel and reject their parents and they should be allowed to do so, but never risk their safety by leaving them home alone or - worse - home alone in charge of other children, she warns.

She advises parents to "teen swap" in an effort to liberate themselves from the excoriating attitude of adolescent parent-haters. It works like this. Find another co-operative family with a 15-year-old and offer to take responsibility for their 15-year-old during their holiday, while they take responsibility for yours during your holiday. Here's another solution. Some families deal with the problem by bringing a gang of adolescents away. Two or three families get together and head for the same destination, where they can mix the cousins and friends of a similar age and create a fun atmosphere.

Yet another family of my acquaintance have solved the problem by allowing the rebellious 15-year-old to bring a friend along - a tradition that has continued even now that the daughter is 18. It's one way to keep your children close.

Failing these options, there may be a granny or auntie willing to take your teen for a couple of weeks. (Offered this opportunity, your teen may decide that a holiday in the sun isn't so bad after all.)

If none of these solutions are possible, bring the 15-year-old despite any protestations. "Fifteen-year-olds should not be allowed to be dictators," says Troy - to which I say, Amen.

However, the idea that all 15-year-olds don't want to holiday with their parents is something of a myth. One 15-year-old tells me that she likes getting away from the pressure of her social life and friends by travelling with her parents.

This suppressed need to escape pressures and bond with family is sometimes forgotten, believes Paul Andrews, SJ, a psychologist. He reckons that many a 15-year-old, "forced" to go on holiday with family, secretly enjoys it. And he thinks that parents sometimes give in too easily to their children's whim to break from the family. This break is often caused by peer pressure, which parents should resist if their instincts tell them to.

"Once the parents let go, they have to consider what it is going to be like to spend the next 40 years alone together," he muses.

Amelia Jones, a mother-of-four, aged 10, 11, 19 and 21, is adamant that children should not be allowed to call the shots regarding holidays. She brought hers to the west of Ireland for years. If they protested, her attitude was: "I do everything for you, so you can go along with me on this". Last year, all six members of the Jones family went on holiday to Cuba together and had a marvellous time. The destination was so enticing that even the 21-year-old could not resist, although part of the attraction for her in going was that it would be her last holiday with her entire family.

Amelia's daughter, Sarah (19), recalls wanting to be independent at 15, when she found family holidays "not exciting" but "okay". At that age, "you don't have as much freedom as you would like". But four years later, she enjoyed the Cuba holiday.

"It made me realise how lucky I am and how nice my parents are. You don't realise it when you are 15, but you do realise it when you are 18 and 19."

Let them go, and they'll come back. That's some consolation, anyway.