Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

by Lisa Damour

Parting with Childhood

Excellent non-preachy parenting book that doesn’t vilify teenage girls... Just gives you a greater understanding of how their changing brain impacts their behaviour (based on scientific and psychological research) A must read for all parents of girls and applicable to all 3 of my daughter's aged 11, 12 and 15 😊

The Cold Shoulder

That said, don’t assume that your daughter fully understands why she’s pulling away from you. The urge to hold you at a distance is largely an unconscious one. This means that her feelings about you change for reasons she can’t explain. What she knows is that you used to be pleasant company but you have suddenly become inexplicably annoying. You used to have a wry sense of humor but suddenly your same old jokes are corny and embarrassing, especially if you crack them in front of her friends. You used to be a source of helpful advice, but now your suggestions seem totally irrelevant. Parents on the receiving end of their daughter’s new attitude feel like they used to be a jelly bean but now they’ve turned into a Brussels sprout. You might be good for her, but you are to be avoided when possible.

“I’m sure it’s not easy to be rejected by someone you love so much. Especially when you used to be so close and have such a good time together.”

So what should you do when your daughter retreats to her room and comes out only when summoned? How do you connect with her when she’s annoyed even by the way you breathe? You should start by allowing your daughter more privacy than she had as a child.

If you allow your teenage daughter the sanctuary of her bedroom—assuming, of course, that she is lucky enough to have a room to herself—you may wonder if she will only be seen again when she needs money, food, or a ride to a friend’s house. For this reason, some families establish a family time one evening a week, or as often as logistically feasible for every one in the family.

In other words, teens benefited from having family dinner, even when they reported that they weren’t getting along with their parents. Further, the same study counted eating dinner with only one parent as a family dinner and found that the advantages hold up so long as teens eat with at least one parent, more nights a week than not.

the results of this study suggest that girls who feel remote from their families may be the ones who most need for their parents to prioritize time with them— whether it’s over dinner, breakfast, or a weekend lunch—even if the time together feels strained.

Allergic to Questions

Girls want questions driven by genuine interest. Consider ditching the ones we usually grab as handy conversation starters (“So, how was your day?”) and ask about something specific that you really want to know. If she mentioned last week that further math was giving her fits ask (in a tone that makes it clear that you don’t have an agenda), “How’s it going in math? I know that you weren’t loving it last week.” Again, honest questions get honest answers. Girls tell me that they want their parents to pick up the conversational topics they put on the table,

Go ahead and be clear with your daughter that you are not expecting her to write you daily love letters, but that she does need to conduct herself in a way that is, at minimum, polite.

If your daughter gets grumpy when you pose a reasonable question, feel free to say, “You may not like my questions, but you need to find a polite way of responding.”

I don’t think parents should allow their daughters to treat them in any way that is objectively disrespectful.

Surprisingly Mean

Being mean allows your daughter to take her departure from childhood a step further; she’s not just shutting you out, she’s actively pushing you away.

So far, here’s the picture I’ve painted of adolescent girls: aloof, withdrawn, and, sometimes, surprisingly mean. There’s truth to this picture, but for parents it’s not the whole story. Being pushed away is only the half of it. Raising a teenage girl becomes that much more stressful when she interrupts days of distance with moments of intense warmth and intimacy.

The Swimming Pool Let me explain. Consider the metaphor in which your teenage daughter is a swimmer, you are the pool in which she swims, and the water is the broader world. Like any good swimmer, your daughter wants to be out playing, diving, or splashing around in the water. And, like any swimmer, she holds on to the edge of the pool to catch her breath after a rough lap or getting dunked too many times. In real life, it looks like this: your daughter has been so busy spending time with her friends, activities, or schoolwork that you feel as though you might need to reintroduce yourself the next time you see her. Then something goes wrong in her world and she is suddenly seeking your advice, sharing the details of her latest misfortunes, and perhaps (gasp!) wanting you to hug or cuddle her. In other words, she’s had a hard time in the water and has come to the edge of the pool to recover. You’re in heaven—she’s back. To mix metaphors, you’re a jelly bean again! She wants to be with you, to hear your wisdom, to be comforted by your physical presence. Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion” plays in your head as you start to imagine the many fantastic adventures you’ll share with your new best friend. Then she pushes you away. Hard. What just happened? Well, like a swimmer who gets her breath back, your daughter wants to return to the water, and she gets there by pushing off the side of the pool. This often takes the form of picking the dumbest fight ever or being nasty in...

Totally Competent, Except for When She’s Not

Girls don’t part with childhood in one fell swoop. They don’t need you one minute and become completely independent the next. Instead, their skills—or, really, their confidence in their skills—develop at an uneven pace.

I’ve only been able to identify one clear pattern when it comes to the areas where girls seem much less capable than we’d expect: they can be especially wary of tasks that involve dealing with adults outside the family.

think in terms of helping your daughter move from having you do the task for her, to doing it with her, to standing by to admire her as she does it, and finally, to letting her do it alone.

Blooming, Reluctantly

While adults may be convinced by our own sales talk— we often introduce puberty as a joyous blossoming of womanhood—most tween girls don’t buy it. And why should they? However we choose to describe the facts of puberty, many girls actually hear: “Get ready, ladies, because that body of yours that has hardly given you any trouble up till now is about to gain smelly armpits that you’ll need to deodorize, sprout hair that you may choose to shave, erupt pimples right on your face, and develop breasts that will inevitably be compared to those of your female classmates. Oh, and did we mention that your vagina will bleed?”

girls like to part with childhood on their own schedule.

Her seemingly paradoxical behavior is actually brilliant. She’s parting with childhood while regulating the process.

if your daughter wants to have privacy from you around her changing body, respect her wishes while connecting her with the information and resources she needs to take good care of herself.

“It used to be my job to help you take care of your body, but it’s now time for you to take over that work.

Smoke Without Fire

But when teenage girls succeed in looking like sexy adults (a distinctly female form of parting with childhood), I don’t think that grown-ups should assume that the girls fully comprehend the messages they are sending. In my experience, girls often don’t get it. They fail to draw a connection between looking sexy and being sexual.

“Honey, you have captured a look meant for adults—it’s not appropriate at thirteen.” Should you run into (all but guaranteed) resistance, you might need to follow up with, “That outfit will draw sexual attention your way that, frankly, no one in this family is ready for.”

If your daughter’s posts don’t accord with the girl you know, don’t assume that she’s doing every wild-child thing she boasts about, but don’t be naïve either. Have a conversation with her about what you’ve found online and ask her to explain what’s going on. If you sense, or know, that your daughter’s engaging in false advertising, try to figure out what she was hoping to accomplish with her inappropriate postings and have a conversation about that.

Consider the “Grandma” rule: if your daughter wouldn’t feel comfortable with Grandma seeing it, she shouldn’t post it. If she goes ahead and posts it anyway, your daughter should be prepared to live without her phone, or at least the internet, for a while.

Dealing with Disappointment The arrival of adolescence coincides with new ways to be ranked and sorted. Adults measure teenagers against one another in very public ways. Some teens get into the sports team, some win academic awards, some get fast-tracked, and only one or two are picked for lead roles in the school play. Adolescents often craft ambitious—even grandiose—plans for the future and can become painfully disappointed when things start not to pan out or when they themselves don’t measure up to their peers. Girls, more than boys, may be derailed by disappointment because research shows that they explain failure differently than boys do, especially in traditionally male subjects such as mathematics. When a boy fails a test, doesn’t get the lead in the play, or faces some other hitch in his plans, he’s likely to attribute his difficulties to external or temporary factors. He’ll say, “It was a dumb test,” “The drama teacher doesn’t like me,” or “I didn’t prepare enough.” Right or wrong, a boy’s explanations can help him to feel that he’s still in the running. Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to explain failures in terms of internal, permanent factors: she’s broken and can’t be fixed. When faced with disappointment, a girl might say, “I’m no good at this,” despite piles of contradictory evidence. Schools are full of girls who ace the first five tests in physics class but declare themselves bad at science when they get a B on the sixth. Worst of all, girls’ expl...