Parenting an Adolescent: A Primer

Adolescence. Remembering your own—how it seemed impossible that one day your feelings about yourself and everything else wouldn’t ricochet wildly between ecstatic and miserable—doesn’t help you shepherd your daughter through hers.

Brain development happens unevenly during adolescence. Unevenly is perhaps a euphemism.

Chemical changes target the amygdala and make powerful sensations compelling, like the feelings associated with risk, rebellion, and relationship rollercoasters.

Dopamine in the limbic system makes adolescents emotional, sensitive to stress, and unable to tolerate boredom (or what non-adolescents might experience as calm).

Emotional outbursts might include slamming doors, like the hallway door in the house designed with interior flush doors that direct eyes to double-heighted windows, framing the bucolic world outside.

Frontal lobes of the brain support impulse control, future planning, empathy. They develop after other parts of the brain, are seriously undeveloped in 12-year-olds. Still, you can’t help wishing she would, for even a few seconds, consider the impact of her actions on someone else, especially you.

Grace. Give yourself and your daughter as much as you can even, especially, when you can’t.

Hinges break with repeated slamming. The door no longer closes, fractures the architect’s vision, distracts from the winter light reflecting off the frozen lake, the trees weighted with snow, the stillest sky.

It’s okay to make her use her birthday money to have the door fixed.

Judicious. Sending her photos of her younger (easier! sweeter!) self may make her think you wish she were still that person. Acknowledge (to yourself) that sometimes you do.

Know that every few months, the phase will shift. Sometimes for the worse like when you realize it has been weeks since she said Hi when she got in the car after school. But sometimes for the better.

Like last night when she chatted happily at dinner, declared the Vietnamese rice noodle salad tasty, complimented your dress, laughed as she reported the funny thing her math teacher said.

Melatonin levels rise later for teens, making your daughter, already a night owl, prone to staying awake until 3 in the morning. Melatonin gummies might give you pause, but everything is better when she falls asleep at 9:15.

Notice every good moment, every glimmer of connection. Hold them lightly but hold them.

Outbursts. Recognize them as expressions of stress, anxiety, dysregulation, fear. Recognize the stress, anxiety, dysregulation, fear in yourself, too. Use your developed frontal lobes to jump off the cycle when you can.

Pandemic. Go ahead and blame everything on the virus and its disastrous timing. Exactly when she no longer wanted to spend time with you, you were the only people she could spend time with. But also, know that adolescence would have happened no matter what.

Questioning every parenting choice over the past 12 years isn’t helpful.

Resilience. Focus on yours. Take walks with friends. Read good books. Listen to affirming podcasts. Eat delicious food.

Snapchat is terrible but enjoy playing with the filters together anytime she wants to.

Take her phone at night even if all her friends have far better parents who let them keep their phones all night long and you clearly understand nothing about what she needs.

Understand that her phone is her connection to the world, that her connection to technology is different than yours. Take it anyway.

Vanilla milkshakes are almost never turned down. When you need an easy win, offer one.

Wondrous. Don’t forget to tell her that she is. Just keep the wonder out of your voice. When she performs seven new TikTok dances, when she brings home a 97 on her science test, when she cuddles up to the puppy and plucks the tick off his left hind leg that you’ve failed to remove for hours, just give her a half-smile, a nod, say nice.

eXacting as she becomes, mirror back ease.

Yes, And is your best tool but you have to mean the yes and the and. Yes she can stay up all night on Friday and she has to finish all her homework beforehand.

Zenith. Allow that the depths of her adolescence might drag you to the heights of your parenting. Allow that these heights might register as subtle shifts, the kind the adolescent brain barely recognizes, like understanding that you cannot know more than you know, that worrying can interfere with seeing what she needs. Allow that you are exactly what she needs and precisely what she does not need, both, at the same time, for a long while longer.

Tanya E. Friedman teaches, writes and mothers in Brooklyn. She's been published in the Atticus Review, Motherwell, Porcupine Literary among others. Her memoir about antiracist teaching is almost done. You can find her at tanyaefriedman.com

Not Wrong

It has to be bad, for me to turn to him for assurance. He often both-sides me and I’m in no mood to have my words slammed back across the room with his own spin on them. He never very-fine-people-on-both-sides me, thank God, but he’s hair-trigger-ready with examples of both sides as hypocritical, corrupt, controlled by money.

The news today was too awful to deal with alone in my echo chamber. Acid tweets scorching holes in my feed, sizzling with outrage. They only amplify my anger and I need to temper it in order to breathe.

I want his opinion on what this means. His position dead center (“I can’t stand either side”) holds the promise of impartiality.

Alarm bells are screaming in my head. I want to yell, “THIS! This is what we’ve been warning would happen! It’s no longer maybe—it’s so much worse!”

Instead, I tell him, “I am extremely upset and need to talk about this. This is bad.”

“You’re not wrong,” he says.

He doesn’t say, “You are right.” You’re not wrong is a concession, a nod. He is trying to do better at hearing me, at understanding what I need. I know he wants to be able to have discussions without me shutting him down. I’m trying, too.
“It’s not illegal everywhere,” he says. “But I agree with you. I’m with you. I get it.”

“You can’t possibly get it. This is about power and subordination and it won’t stop here,” I say, willing my voice to be calm.

“I know. You’re not wrong.”

I figured out recently that tamping down my emotions helps prevent our talks from breaking down. If we can stay in conversation long enough, wade clumsily beyond the churning surf to deeper water, our bodies will eventually soften and float together. The last few times it happened, we emerged feeling closer, as if we’d survived something.

Much more makes sense now that I understand our personality types. I took a quiz and recognized myself as someone whose behavior is motivated by a need for safety. I don’t like my worries dismissed, am undone by uncertainty and injustice. Hate being spoken down to.

He, on the other hand, is driven by curiosity, a compulsive need to be knowledgeable. He hates assumptions, decisions based on emotions.

I feel sometimes like I am missing a layer, like I’m wearing my insides on the surface of my skin. I try to protect myself from exposure to harshness and conflict, while he finds these fascinating to explore—an armchair anthropologist.

He dives into all kinds of pools: freshwater, salty, swampy. Holds his breath, looks around, comes up dripping with other people’s thoughts. Some slide away; others coat his skin with an oily film.

“Is that your opinion or did you pick it up on Reddit?” I said one time, the edge of something sharp poking the inside of my throat.

“I learn from reading all kinds of comments,” he said. He isn’t wrong.

“Things will swing back,” he tells me now. “The media likes to focus only on the bad.”

As he speaks, a piece of me snaps off, floats to the ceiling and hovers like a balloon, observing. Up here, I am untouchable. The quiet is a revelation. My alarm bells continue to shriek but are muted now, a vibration I sense in my belly as I wait and watch—detached, curious—to see what unfolds.

I think: Okay, then. Let’s see how bad it gets. Perversely, this comforts me.

I will either be overreacting and happy to be wrong, or this is the beginning of the end. I feel a smug satisfaction knowing one day he will no longer be able to ignore or explain away what’s happening in front of us. He will have to admit I was right.

Abby Alten Schwartz is a Philadelphia writer whose work has appeared in Many Nice Donkeys, HAD, Brevity Blog and elsewhere. She works in healthcare communications and is writing a memoir. Find her on Twitter @abbys480 or visit abbyaltenschwartz.com.