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I stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants in proposing a concrete and comprehensive model of what, exactly, girls must accomplish to move through their teenage years successfully.
Normally developing teenagers can be impulsive and oppositional and can even seem downright odd by adult standards, so these budding clinicians needed a framework for evaluating the mental health of teenagers seeking psychotherapy. When we asked, “Along which strands is the teen progressing, struggling, or stalled?” we could make order out of what looked like chaos and orient novice clinicians to the work they were learning to do.
And thinking in terms of strands allows us to weigh any one moment in a girl’s life against her overall progress on the relevant developmental strand.
Girls don’t dump their parents just for the heck of it. They pull away to start their journey along one of the seven developmental strands of adolescence: parting with childhood. By age twelve most tweens feel a sudden, internal pressure to separate themselves from almost everything that seems childlike
The next time a parent asks you to help with carpooling to or from a social event, say yes, and—if you want a real snapshot of what’s happening in your daughter’s life—offer to be the one who picks the girls up at the end of the night.
“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.”
Specifically, 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.
You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she’s watching to help her build those skills.
If your daughter mentions that a girl is popular, ask, “Is she popular or just powerful? Do kids like her, or are they scared of her?” Give your daughter a good reason to take popularity off of its pedestal.
The more you bite your tongue, the more she may be willing to share and the more impact your advice will have when you give it.
If anything keeps parents of teenagers up at night, it’s fears about safety. But in the attempt to keep their daughters safe, some parents go to extremes that don’t account for the importance of being cool in the eyes of her pack and may actually place girls in greater danger.
Today’s girl must build and maintain her friendships while connecting in both real and virtual ways.
If your daughter already has a phone and social media accounts, you might implement some rules if you haven’t already. To do so, you’ll need to say something like, “I know that I’ve given you total privacy with your phone and social media until now, but I’m thinking that was a mistake. If the whole world can know what you’re doing digitally, I should have access too. So I’m going to start checking your phone and social media accounts from time to time.” Should your daughter balk (a likely response), there are a couple of routes to consider.
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 friends, the worse she will feel and the harder it will be for her to build new connections.
new research also suggests that verbal harassment from peers can make a lasting imprint on the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that coordinates the functioning of the brain’s left and right hemispheres.
As a side note, I also discourage parents from calling one another about girls who are in conflict. I have never seen situations made better by such calls, and they are often made worse.
Should another parent call you about a friendship issue, feel free to say, “Thanks so much for letting me know. I am really confident that the girls will find a way to come to their own resolution.”
Experts on bullying counsel against having the bully and victim meet to sort things out. In a true bullying situation, doing so seriously risks exposing the victim to future mistreatment. The students who targeted Lucy were required to perform community service at the school, and they and their parents were warned that any evidence of further harassment would be grounds for expulsion.
Such fluctuations and extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they may signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge, that the individual in question does not cease to experiment and is in no hurry to close down on possibilities.
the changes in your daughter’s brain and the events that occur around her are more likely to shape her mood than the hormonal shifts occurring inside of her.
Complaining to you allows your daughter to bring the best of herself to school.
Better for her to do a little less complaining about such realities and a little more venting. In doing so, she moves away from the childlike idea that the world should bend to her wishes to the adult idea that life comes with many unavoidable bumps.
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 is a profound form of empathy. It goes beyond feeling with your daughter to the point of actually feeling something on her behalf.
It’s the difference between “Mom, I want to tell you how uncomfortable this very hot potato I’m holding is and see if you’ve got any good ideas for how I might manage it” and “Mom, take this hot potato, I don’t want to hold it anymore. And hang on to it for a while.”
(If I were a teen today, I would have simply sent my mom a distressing text message, then refused to acknowledge her response or answer my phone.)
What becomes of an externalized feeling? Well, now it’s yours to manage, and many parents feel compelled to leap into action. Samantha’s dad was ready to upend her summer plans. My mom seriously considered throwing some sandwiches in the car and driving across the plains to rescue me from my plight. If you find yourself compelled into radical action after a brief but painful encounter with your daughter, I’ve got two words for you: do nothing.
So what’s a parent to do? When you are on the receiving end of an externalization, avoid taking urgent action.
Camille would have resisted any immediate effort on Maya’s part to talk about why she was left out of the party. Camille was in pain about her relationship with Sara but really wanted her mother to be in pain about it instead. Ideally, Maya might have called me or looked to her husband or a discreet friend for support. Talking with a trustworthy adult about what’s happening with your teenager is usually the perfect salve to the discomfort of being on the receiving end of an externalization. By sharing the situation with someone who isn’t holding an emotional hot potato, most parents start to
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When you can, help your daughter to look upon a hard feeling as a really useful piece of information. If she pays attention to it and learns from it, she can expect to have fewer hard feelings going forward.
Emotional pain can be a good thing, but we have to account for the fact that teenagers often have the right feeling on the wrong scale. They sometimes become swamped by their emotions, and no one can learn and grow when she feels as if she’s drowning.
As with emotional hot potatoes, you can help by making sure that your response matches the actual size of the problem.
Try, “I know how much you wanted to be on varsity and that you are really disappointed. The outcome hurts.” Using specific words to describe the cause of her tears (“disappointed” and “hurts”) helps to contain her uncomfortable feelings. For this tactic to work, your tune must match your lyrics. Regardless of the accuracy of your words, they’re only useful if delivered in a tone that expresses warmth and your total confidence that your daughter will find a way to bounce back. If you’re obviously alarmed while offering verbal comfort, only the alarm comes through.
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?”
To be sure, focusing on problems, putting them into words, and learning from distress can be useful to a point, but many girls continue to discuss problems well past the helpful mark. If you see that happening, encourage your daughter to take a page out of the boys’ book and find a distraction.
Teenage girls can forget that taking a break from a problem might be part of the solution.
Many girls turn to the things they loved when they were younger because the touchstones of childhood connect them with simpler, less emotional times.
For your sake and your daughter’s, 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.
Rumination isn’t the only emotional challenge that favors girls. Studies find that girls, more than boys, experience vicarious social stress.
As already suggested, hold off on giving your daughter ready access to social media for as long as you can. The longer she goes without knowing the drug-like buzz of connecting to peers digitally, the more internal resources she’ll build up for managing hard feelings and solving problems. Next, also as already suggested, set some boundaries around where and when your daughter can access social media. Consider limiting or banning digital activity (for you and your daughter) while out and about together, at meals, and in the hour or so before bedtime—prime times when you might be able to have a
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When teens are trapped with parents who would rather flaunt their power than negotiate on even minor points, it doesn’t always end so well. These parents don’t just damage their relationships with their daughters, they can also provoke girls into proving that they will not be controlled. Under such conditions I’ve seen girls sneak around to do things that are frighteningly out of control.
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.
“I’m a mother too!” mode. All I could think was, “Forget your confidentiality, kiddo, I am so calling your mom.”
I should note here that many excellent therapists refuse to work with teenagers because they don’t want to deal with the challenges that come up when teens talk about risky behavior in therapy. As clinicians, it’s our job to protect our clients’ confidentiality. But it’s also our job to keep teenagers safe, so we must break confidentiality if we think a teenager might do something truly dangerous.
A lot of what teens talk about in therapy falls into a tricky gray area that requires us to make a judgment call about whether we should alert parents to potentially harmful behavior, even if that ...
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“Well, you will get into rough times with each other, what matters is how you get out of them. We both want to help our girls build their emotional intelligence, and having healthy fights with you will help your daughter grow that intelligence.”
When you tune in to your teenager’s mental states and help her tune in to yours, you send a strong message. 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.
Or I empathize with the girl’s position without allowing it to become an excuse for her difficulties.
“I’ll take you at your word that your parents aren’t fit for the job—but then you’ve got to help me understand why you are setting yourself up to live with them indefinitely.”
