Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood

by Lisa Damour

“There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.”

the known factors that, alone or in combination, may be triggering early puberty: childhood obesity, exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, and social and psychological stressors.

Even in families that are intact, or provide supervision, girls are more likely to find trouble if their relationships at home are corroded by parental stress.

Psychologist Monique Ward, a leading researcher on how popular media shapes what adolescents believe, has found that teens who watch television for the purpose of companionship are more likely to see women as sexual objects, and the more time teens spend watching sexualized television, the more likely they are to engage in sexual behavior themselves. In sum, if parents aren’t present to raise their daughters, our sex-saturated media (which happens to profit from marketing racy content to tweens) will gladly do the job for them.

Do I like my tribe? Does my tribe like me? Does my tribe represent who I am or want to be? Should I try to join a better tribe? What are the benefits and costs of belonging to my tribe? And what do I do about the tribe members I dislike?

Sociometric popularity is the term used to describe well-liked teens with reputations for being kind and fun, while perceived popularity describes teens who hold a lot of social power but are disliked by many classmates.

the girls in the liked-and-popular group have found the relational sweet spot of being both friendly and assertive—a skill set girls often struggle to master

the happiest teens aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.

across all ages, the subjects took roughly the same number of risks when they were alone. Here’s where things got interesting. With peers watching, older adults played the video game the same way they did when alone, the late teen/young adult group became quite a bit more risky when with peers than when alone, and the young teens were twice as risky when their peers watched them play.

“Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other.”

And research finds that having a close relationship with one’s parents, or doing well at school, can’t make up for the harm of being socially isolated. Loneliness should be taken seriously. The longer a girl goes without a tribe, the worse she will feel and the harder it will be for her to build new friendships.

Complaining to you allows your daughter to bring the best of herself to school.

Externalization is a technical term describing how teenagers sometimes manage their feelings by getting their parents to have their feelings instead. In other words, they toss you an emotional hot potato.

Externalization happens when your daughter wants to get rid of an uncomfortable feeling. And not just anyone will take on her uncomfortable feeling; it has to be someone who really loves her. Externalization is a profound form of empathy. It goes beyond feeling with your daughter to the point of actually feeling something on her behalf.

When they externalize, they want you to accept ownership of the offending feeling and will prevent you from giving it back.

When teenagers feel overwhelmed by their feelings and need to do something, they find a loving parent and start handing out potatoes.

In fact, we can do a lot to help adolescents bring feelings down to size by not reacting like teenagers ourselves.

When feelings are minimized, girls often turn up the volume to make sure they, and their feelings, are heard.

At times, your daughter won’t be in the mood to talk about her distress, or she might reject your attempts to harness her feelings by putting them into words. Under these conditions, consider my favorite fallback line: “Is there anything I can do that won’t make things worse?”

Talking about problems at length can turn into what psychologists call rumination—focused attention on distress—and cause feelings to take on a life of their own. Rumination can lead to depression and anxiety, especially in teenage girls.

remember that there are lots of ways to harness feelings, and only some of them involve talking. Wordless gestures go a long way, do their best work when presented without flourish, and do not foreclose the possibility of talking about feelings later.

There’s something to be said for detaching from others. When we are alone and disconnected from technology, we can reflect on our feelings, vent silently to ourselves or our diaries, and imagine what we might say or do while considering the impact of any real action. Everyone who grew up without digital technology recalls having written a letter we’re glad we never sent or having a rant we’re glad no one heard. Using private time to express and get to know a feeling lets the feeling come down to size, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and acquaints us with our internal resources for managing distress. Social disconnection also allows time to develop a considered plan about how (or if!) we want to act on hard feelings. In other words, we have time to keep our thoughts and our feelings separate from our actions.

When she was upset, she attacked. When she attacked, she felt better because she was in the driver’s seat, not the one being run over.

Can be done irl

Instead of being sad and gloomy, depressed teens are more likely to be highly irritable with most people, most of the time. Living with a teenager who suffers from this form of depression is like living with a touchy porcupine.

If you tense up every time you try to interact with your daughter because you expect her to be prickly, you should consider the possibility that something’s really wrong.

Psychiatric diagnoses morph constantly and have become vastly complex.

“A person stops maturing at the age that they start abusing substances,”

When teenagers start thinking in abstract terms, they make stunning inferential leaps.

Why do teenagers move on to risky business when they don’t meet resistance on the small stuff? Because teens want to know where the lines are and that they’ll be called out of bounds if they cross them. It’s daunting to be a teenager and have access to tempting but dangerous attractions; it’s terrifying to think that no one is watching. As one of my clinical colleagues commented, when teens like Veronica act out, they are posing the question, “So what does a girl have to do around here to get the grown-ups to act like grown-ups?”

Indeed, research has long established that teens whose parents are highly permissive—whether they are indulgent, neglectful, or just reluctant to step in—are more likely to abuse substances and misbehave at school than teens whose parents articulate and enforce limits.

Yet contrary to popular belief, research doesn’t support the myths that teenagers push limits because they are highly irrational, think they’re invulnerable, or can’t calculate risks. Rather, when something bad happens to a teenager, it’s usually because her capacity for wise decision making has been swept away by powerful contextual factors.

When our daughters assess risk, we want them to assess the right risks. We want them to focus not on escaping adult detection but on the real dangers they might face.

But parental threats focus a girl’s attention on avoiding the short-term menace posed by the rules, not the long-term damage that could result from the risks she’s considering.

If you set up the game as “don’t get caught by me,” your daughter can win that game, even at her own frightening expense.

A long-standing area of study in academic psychology demonstrates that teens with authoritative parents—parents who are warm yet firm and emphasize the reasons for rules—consistently take fewer risks than the teens of authoritarian parents who simply lay down the law and try to gain compliance through punishment.

Research done by Dr. Fonagy and his team shows that we build emotional intelligence in teens when we help them consider their own, and other people’s, mental states.

Emotional intelligence requires the integrated functioning of the prefrontal, rational parts of the brain with the limbic, emotional parts. This is what happens when we think about feelings, whether they are our own or someone else’s.

“Must we fight? Can’t we build emotional intelligence while we’re getting along?” Not really.

Only when we are at odds with each other do we start to build our varsity grade emotional intelligence skills. When we reflect on competing mental states—when what I want isn’t what you want, but I’m holding both of our perspectives in mind—we start to become emotional geniuses.

You let her know that she deserves to be in relationships with people who are interested in her perspective, can reflect on their own, and are willing to do the hard, humble work of using conflict to deepen and improve a connection. She may never step back to think about the emotionally intelligent relationships you are working to create at home, but her positive experiences with you will encourage her to steer clear of anyone who doesn’t treat her with the same dignity.

Indeed, the capacity to shame a child is one of the most dangerous weapons in our parenting arsenal. Shame goes after a girl’s character, not her actions. It goes after who she is, not what she did. Shame has toxic, lasting effects and no real benefits. Once shamed, teens are left two terrible options: a girl can agree with the shaming parent and conclude that she is, indeed, the bad one, or she can keep her self-esteem intact by concluding that the parent is the bad one. Either way, someone loses.

I know that my reaction can be totally out of proportion to the size of the problem, so I’ve worked to own my crazy spot. I’ve explained to my daughters that my overreactions should not be taken personally; they grow from the many years I happily controlled my surroundings as an only child. We have come to the understanding that I’ll do what I can to contain my irrational response, and they’ll work with the awareness that things might get ugly if they leave messes around the house.

Few moments in life spark more maturation than when a young person recognizes that her parents have strengths and limitations that were in place long before she came along and that will be there long after she moves out. In letting go of the dream of turning you into the perfect parent, your daughter recovers a lot of energy that has been devoted to being angry with you, feeling hurt by you, or trying to change you. And there are many more important directions for an adolescent’s energy to go: toward her studies, toward building healthy friendships, toward planning her future, and, of course, toward enjoying the strengths of her less-than-perfect parents.

“There will be no place on your high school transcript to explain that you didn’t like Mr. Martin. You’d better figure out how to manage.”

The most successful people I know do their best work under any conditions, for anyone.

“Just be fair, firm, and friendly.”

Discipline should always come with the opportunity to make things right again.

It’s unpleasant to come into conflict with a teenager under any circumstances, and it’s that much worse when you don’t have another adult nearby to offer backup or comfort.

A teenager should not be given the opportunity to play her parents off of each other and should not become a pawn in a disagreement between them. Any normally developing teenager would take advantage of such a situation while guiltily knowing that she is getting away with something she shouldn’t. Add to that the discomfort that teens feel when the rules aren’t clear, and you’ve got a real mess.

Today’s teens exist without the benefit of the many behavioral speed bumps we had when we were teenagers. Not only can they act on their impulses with ease, they can create a sharable record in the process. From this perspective we see that the issue isn’t the impulses that come with adolescence, it’s the potential that digital technology gives to them. Adolescent girls have always wondered about their power to draw attention, but they haven’t always been able to send sexy photos or connect with strangers from their bedrooms. Teenagers have long experimented with illegal behaviors such as underage drinking, but they haven’t always been able to post a photograph of their behavior where almost anyone can see it.