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.