Untangled E-Book

Lisa Damour

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 513

Beschreibung

Leading clinical psychologist Lisa Damour identifies the seven key phases marking the journey from girlhood to womanhood, and offers practical advice for those raising teenage girls. We expect an enormous amount from our teenage girls in a world where they are bombarded with messages about how they should look, behave, succeed. Yet we also speak as though adolescence is a nightmare rollercoaster ride for both parent and child, to be endured rather than enjoyed. In Untangled, world authority and clinical psychologist Lisa Damour provides an accessible, detailed, comprehensive guide to parenting teenage girls. She believes there is a predictable blueprint for how girls grow; seven easily recognisable 'strands' of transition from childhood through adolescence and on to adulthood. Girls naturally develop at different rates, typically on more than one front, and the transition will be unique to every girl. Each chapter describes a phase, such as 'contending with adult authority' and 'entering the romantic world', with hints and tips for parents and daughters, and a 'when to worry' section. Damour writes sympathetically and clearly, providing a practical and helpful guide for any parent, and for teenage girls too.

Leseprobe

In loving memory of Jim Hansell,whose brilliant mind was guided by the kindest heart

While an adolescent remains inconsistent and unpredictable in her behavior, she may suffer, but she does not seem to me to be in need of treatment. I think that she should be given time and scope to work out her own solution. Rather, it may be her parents who need help and guidance so as to be able to bear with her. 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.

—ANNA FREUD (1958), “Adolescence”*

* Here and elsewhere, I’ve taken the liberty of revising the 1958-style default to male pronouns by placing “her” and “she” where Ms. Freud had “his” and “he.”

Contents

Introduction

ONE Parting with Childhood

The Cold Shoulder

Allergic to Questions

Surprisingly Mean

The Swimming Pool

Totally Competent, Except for When She’s Not

Blooming, Reluctantly

Smoke Without Fire

Parting with Childhood: When to Worry

The Female Peter Pan

Rushing into Adulthood

TWO Joining a New Tribe

The Pull of Popular

Tribal Warfare

Frenemies

If Your Tribe Jumped Off a Bridge . . .

When Tribes Need Elders

Social (Media) Skills

Joining a New Tribe: When to Worry

Social Isolation

Being Bullied

Being a Bully

THREE Harnessing Emotions

You: The Emotional Dumping Ground

I’m Upset, Now You’re Upset

Befriending Distress

Catalytic Reactions

Coping by Posting

How to Become an Accidental Helicopter Parent

Harnessing Emotions: When to Worry

Recognizing Adolescent Mood and Anxiety Disorders

Self-Destructive Coping

FOUR Contending with Adult Authority

Seeing Behind the Curtain

The End of “Because I Said So”

Framing Danger

Rupture and Repair

Crazy Spots

Adults with Faults

Holding the Line

Contending with Adult Authority: When to Worry

Too Good to Be True

Constantly Contending

Adults Contending with Each Other

FIVE Planning for the Future

Impulses, Meet the Internet

The Road to the Future: Who Drives?

Making the Grade

Tense About Tests

Planning for Next Week

Dealing with Disappointment

Planning for the Future: When to Worry

All Plan and No Play

No Plan in Sight

SIX Entering the Romantic World

A Dream Deferred

A Match Made in a Marketing Meeting

Offering Some Perspective

The Inner Compass

Dating for Credit

Being Gay: The Slur and the Reality

Entering the Romantic World: When to Worry

The Tributaries and the Lake

April–June Romances

SEVEN Caring for Herself

Nodding Without Listening

Girls, Food, and Weight

Sleep vs. Technology

Getting Real About Drinking

Straight Talk About Drugs

Sex and Its Risks

Caring for Herself: When to Worry

Eating Disorders

Not Ready to Launch

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Recommended Resources

Index

Introduction

WE NEED A NEW WAY TO TALK ABOUT TEENAGE GIRLS, BECAUSE the way people do it now isn’t fair to girls or helpful to their parents. If you’re reading this book, someone has probably already remarked about your daughter, “Oh, just wait till she’s a teenager!” (And parents who say this never mean it in a good way.) If you’ve read other books about teenage girls, you may have noticed that they tilt toward the dark side of adolescence— how girls suffer or cause suffering in their parents and peers. It’s certainly true that girls can be hard on themselves and others, and even when they are at their best, they’re often unpredictable and intense. But too often we talk about adolescence as if it’s bound to be a harrowing, turbulent time for teenagers and their parents. We make raising a teenage girl sound like a roller-coaster ride: the whole family hops on, white-knuckles their way through, and the parents hope that after all the ups and downs their daughter steps off at the end as a healthy, happy adult.

I’m here to tell you that life with your teenage daughter doesn’t have to feel like a tangled mess. There is a predictable pattern to teenage development, a blueprint for how girls grow. When you understand what makes your daughter tick, she suddenly makes a lot more sense. When you have a map of adolescent development, it’s a lot easier to guide your daughter toward becoming the grounded young woman you want her to be.

To give us a new and helpful way to talk about teenage girls, I’ve taken the journey through adolescence and organized it into seven distinct developmental strands that I introduce, one per chapter, in this book. These developmental strands make plain the specific achievements that transform girls into thriving adults and help parents appreciate that much of their daughter’s behavior—however strange or challenging it may seem—is not only normal but evidence of her excellent forward progress.

The early chapters in this book describe the developmental strands that tend to be most salient in Years 7 to 9 (ages eleven to thirteen for most girls) and the later chapters address the strands that usually become prominent as girls move through Years 10 to 13. Normally developing teenagers move along each of these strands at different rates, and girls are always growing on several fronts at once, a fact that helps us appreciate why the teenage years can be so stressful for girls and the adults who love them.

I’m one of those adults who care deeply about teenage girls and I have built my professional life around them. Every week I meet with girls and their parents in my private psychotherapy practice, instruct graduate students in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University as they learn to work with teenagers, and advise students in my office at Laurel School, an independent all-girls school that runs from a toddler program to Year 13, where I work as a consulting psychologist and direct the school’s Center for Research on Girls. And, as the proud mother of two daughters, I’m lucky enough to have girls at the heart of my personal life, too.

Seeing girls through so many different lenses inspired me to appreciate that the work of becoming an adult sorted itself into meaningful categories and I realized that we could use those categories—those strands—to measure how girls were coming along in their growth. The concept of developmental strands isn’t new; it was first proposed in 1965 by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter and an esteemed psychoanalyst in her own right, as a way to organize the normal turmoil of childhood development. She pointed out that children advance on multiple fronts—from dependency to self-reliance, from play to work, from egocentricity to companionship—and noted that we can accurately assess a child’s development in terms of maturation along these and other strands.

Anna Freud was one of many thinkers to propose a framework for healthy psychological growth. In 1950, Erik Erikson articulated a developmental model spanning from infancy to old age, marked by existential challenges to be mastered at each step along the way. Modern psychologists maintain the tradition of studying development in terms of its component parts. Today, we typically consider aging in terms of its physical, emotional, cognitive, and social facets. In other words, scholarly approaches to human growth broken down into discernible phases now constitute a rich theoretical tradition and a robust body of research; 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.

Once I had this model in mind and found that it illuminated so much of what I observed, I introduced it to my graduate students to help them shed light on the complex adolescent cases that come their way. 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.

Thinking about girls in terms of the strands of teenage development is practical for professionals, but much more important, it allows parents to pinpoint the specific achievements that turn girls into grown-ups and makes sense of familiar, but confusing, teenage behavior. Last year your daughter may have happily participated in the children’s games at your street party, but this year, she insists on hanging out with the adults while complaining that she’s bored. What accounts for the shift? It might be that she has begun the work of parting with childhood (chapter 1). And how do you understand the girl who is equally excited to buy a copy of The Economist for her Model UN research paper and three copies of an Us Weekly magazine featuring her favorite boy band? Well, you’re likely looking at her foray into entering the romantic world (chapter 6). When you understand the important developmental work your daughter is doing, you’ll fret less about some of her puzzling behaviors.

Thinking in terms of developmental strands helps us to focus our energy where it’s needed most. For example, your daughter may enjoy a loyal group of friends and have succeeded in happily joining a new tribe (chapter 2), but she might neglect her schoolwork and need help planning for the future (chapter 5). Perhaps she’s aiming to play softball in college but ignores the advice of her coaches. She may be committed to her goal, but that doesn’t cancel out her trouble contending with adult authority (chapter 4). Attending to the many domains of your daughter’s development will keep you from letting her success in some areas distract you from her difficulty in others.

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. Should you be worried about your daughter’s meltdown when she loses a student council race? That will depend on whether she’s usually pretty resilient or instead she’s having a lot of trouble harnessing emotions (chapter 3). Should you ignore her decision to go without a coat on a cold day, or is her disregard for her well-being part of an alarming pattern of difficulties with caring for herself (chapter 7)? Given that teenage girls routinely do things their parents don’t understand, it’s helpful to have a way to know when it’s okay to hang back and when you should step in.

But if teenagers typically do things that would be considered abnormal at any other time of life, how do you know when something’s really wrong? To clarify the difference between normal teenage behavior and that which is truly concerning, every chapter ends with a “When to Worry” section that will help you know if your daughter has moved to a level where a dramatic shift in approach or a professional consultation might be in order. In other words, we’ll consider both the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers and gain new insight into why some teenage girls collapse in on themselves or act out in destructive ways.

There’s a universal quality to the developmental strands introduced in this book: they capture the timeless aspects of adolescence for girls and boys, and for teenagers from many backgrounds. Though you and I developed along these strands, growing up today differs from what we remember now that we’re raising children in a high-speed culture of intense competitive pressure and 24/7 digital connection. We’ll address the enduring aspects of adolescence and how our current culture shapes the realities of being a teenager—and the parent of one—today.

Fundamentally, girls and boys are more alike than they are different, so don’t be surprised to discover that some of the stories and advice that follow speak to your experience of knowing or raising a teenage boy. But girls face unique challenges as teenagers and this book takes a deep dive into the cutting-edge research that parents raising daughters need to know. The developmental strands presented here apply across racial and economic lines, and those contextual factors with regard to teenagers will also be addressed. That said, the internal, psychological nuances of adolescent development will be our central focus.

I’ll share stories to illustrate the strands of teenage development, but they aren’t the specific details of any one girl or family. Rather, they are amalgams of the many, many interactions I’ve had over the years with teenagers and their parents. At times, the particular events of an interaction are so critical to its telling that I’ve removed any identifying information while maintaining the emotional integrity and educational value of what occurred.

This book aims to be more descriptive than prescriptive—to offer you a new way to understand your daughter, not tell you how to raise her. Throughout, I offer suggestions for how you might respond to the many normal but perplexing challenges you will face as her parent, but don’t feel bound by my advice. I believe that when it comes to parenting, there are many ways to get it right. What works for one family won’t work for another. You know your daughter and the dynamic within your family best. My hope is that you’ll marry that knowledge to the framework offered here and use the examples I provide to consider your daughter’s teenage behavior in terms of the growth she’s trying (or should be trying) to achieve.

By providing you with a blueprint for the work of adolescence, this book will help you to understand your daughter better, worry about her less, offer her useful assistance on her journey through adolescence, and recognize—in fact, stand in awe of—just how much developmental ground she will cover as a teenager. This book won’t, and couldn’t, address every challenge you will face as your daughter grows, and in trying to describe teenage girls in general, I will certainly fail to describe anyone’s daughter perfectly. But girls act in patterns, and their guides (I’m looking at you) benefit from knowing what those patterns are. I admire the parents of teenagers at least as much as I admire their daughters, and I have written this book to support you so that you can do an even better job of supporting your girl.

UNTANGLED

ONE

Parting with Childhood

IN THE WAITING ROOM OF MY PRIVATE PRACTICE, IMETMAYA FOR the first time. With an easy air, long limbs, and dark hair showing the beginnings of gray, she stood to greet me, then gracefully pivoted to return the magazine she’d been reading to its place on a low table, next to a lamp. She followed me to my office and took the far end of my couch. It’s not the closest spot to the armchair where I sit, but not so far away as a chair preferred by clients who want more distance. She kept her light jacket on—we were meeting on a crisp, sunny day in late October—and crossed her legs, clasped her hands, and leaned forward as we talked.

Over the phone, Maya told me that she was worried about the sudden change in her relationship with her twelve-yearold daughter, Camille. In my office, she told a familiar story— one that we’ll consider in a totally new light.

Maya explained that until two months ago, Camille had been her funny, joyful companion who was almost always up for a trip to the library, grocery store, or mall. Yet at the start of Year 8, Camille abruptly transformed. She came home from school and headed straight to her bedroom, where she closed the door and held marathon texting sessions with friends until required to join the family for dinner. Bewildered, Maya described how Camille sat sullenly at the dinner table and gave one-word answers to questions about her day. Even while saying so little, Camille managed to express that her parents were asking the dumbest questions she had ever heard and that sitting with them was the last thing she wanted to do.

Occasionally, the old Camille made a brief appearance; Maya’s eyes brimmed with tears as she described these savored moments. Most of the time, though, Maya felt angry with Camille for being so prickly, missed her warm relationship with her beloved girl, or experienced a wearying mix of both feelings at once. Maya’s friends reassured her that Camille was “normal” and that “girls break up with their parents when they become teenagers,” but Maya had called me anyway. She worried that something just wasn’t right.

Maya’s friends weren’t wrong, but their scope was too narrow and their viewpoint far too personal. They were missing the bigger picture. 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 and, as Maya was learning the hard way, a girl’s pleasant relationship with her family is usually one of the first casualties. Parting with childhood isn’t always the first developmental strand that girls tackle during adolescence, but it’s a strand that parents can’t miss. When girls distance themselves from their mom and dad they all but announce, “In case you guys hadn’t noticed, I’m a teenager now!”

If we step back from what feels like a highly personal rejection, we can appreciate that, when it comes to parting with childhood, our daughters have a lot of developmental ground to cover in a short time. They have to get from point A, where they happily hold our hands and act like total morons in public, to point B, where they claim the independence and self-determination that come with being young women and trade their goofiness for relatively mature behavior (at least when strangers are around). To progress along this strand, girls stop telling us their secrets, bristle when we use pet names, and make it clear that they’re doing us a favor by agreeing to join the family holiday picture. But a girl’s journey away from childhood isn’t all about her relationship with her parents. She might also experiment with makeup, suddenly insist that riding the school bus is for babies, and curse when with her friends.

Girls’ efforts to part with childhood are both conscious and not. Young teens admire older teens and fervently wish to be like them. I have my own Year 10 flashbulb memory of watching a group of Year 13 girls, dressed in Madonna’s mid-’80s style, as they danced and lip-synced to “Borderline” during a talent show. They were beyond cool, and I remember resolving, in that moment, to close the gap between their lace-gloved sophistication and my newly realized dorkiness. But a lot goes on behind the scenes in the unconscious mind, too. Even though they might not be aware of it, twelve-year-olds do the math and realize that, if all goes according to plan, they will be leaving home in five or six years. They suddenly feel pressed to prepare for adult independence by ridding themselves of the marks of childhood.

Maya had come to my office because she was worried that something was really wrong, and it’s my job to take parents’ concerns seriously. So I began to ask the questions that help me to know what was normal about Camille’s behavior, and what wasn’t: Was she rude to all adults, or just to her mom and dad? How were things at school and with her friends? Did she have interests, sleep well, and talk about what she wanted to do over the summer or next year?

Maya filled in the picture.

Teachers went out of their way to comment on Camille’s kind and conscientious nature. Camille dog-sat for the neighbors, and Maya heard the same about her from them. Maya explained that her daughter did well in school, had solid friendships, and spent hours each weekend on the family’s unfinished third floor, which she had turned into an elaborate apartment for her dolls. And though Maya suspected that she sometimes sneaked her phone into her room for nighttime use, Camille usually slept well. She looked forward to going to camp each summer and also talked about her faraway goals to become a teacher or a scientist.

I reassured Maya that her friends were probably right—that her daughter’s prickly behavior was normal. Then I encouraged her to see the change in Camille from a new perspective: there were seven transitions she would be making as she journeyed toward adulthood, and parting with childhood was one of them. Camille was doing exactly what we expect—even want—teenagers to do. And she was doing what they have done at least since 1958, when Anna Freud noted that the typical teenager lives “in the home in the attitude of a boarder, usually a very inconsiderate one so far as the older and younger family members are concerned.” Despite the fact that it has long been normal for teenagers to hold their parents at arm’s length, most of us feel rocked by the seismic shift in our relationship with our daughter.

You’ll notice that Anna Freud’s wisdom appears throughout this book; there are two reasons for this. First, she holds a special place in the history of psychology for being among the first to articulate, and normalize, many of the predictable challenges that unfold during adolescence. Needless to say, this book aims to build upon that fine tradition. Second, she holds a special place in my heart because she played a small role in my decision to become a psychologist.

When I was six years old, my father’s work for an American bank transferred us from Denver to London for a few years and, by coincidence, a family friend made the same move in the same week. Carla, a reedy graduate student with a mane of wavy red hair, was headed to London to study with Anna Freud. My parents essentially adopted Carla, and she looked after me, their only child, over long weekends when they traveled together. Carla lived in north London, near Anna Freud’s training clinic, in a tiny flat consisting of a living room, a miniature mid-1970s British kitchen, a cramped bathroom, and a bedroom that was overwhelmed by the queen-sized bed we shared when I stayed over. The radiator in the kitchen ran on coins, and it soon became part of our weekend routine. Carla would save up pence between my visits and let me drop them into the radiator’s slot when I arrived. Then we’d sit in her kitchen and I’d start with my questions: “What brings the children to therapy? What do you say to them? What do they say to you? How does all that talking help them get better?” Carla was incredibly patient and generous with me. Replaying our conversations in my mind, I can hear how fully she addressed my curiosity about her work, even as she pitched her answers to a six-year-old.

I was hooked. Shortly after I turned seven, I walked into our London flat and announced to my mother, “I want to do what Carla does.” Nearly forty years later, Carla remains a close friend and mentor, and I remain grateful that she introduced me to a career that I have found deeply gratifying, both professionally and personally.

The Cold Shoulder

From your perspective, five or six years gives your daughter plenty of time to ease into being an independent young adult. But from her perspective, an abrupt withdrawal (like Camille’s) provides a perfect solution: she gets to practice leaving her childhood relationship with you behind for several years before she actually has to strike out on her own. She can pretend to live alone, or in her bedroom turned practice dormitory, while still enjoying the comfort of your home and the safety net you provide. It’s the psychological equivalent of putting training wheels on a bike. She learns how to ride on two wheels while knowing that they are there to catch her if she loses her balance.

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 sympathize. Though the comparison is a silly one, it’s actually deeply painful to become a Brussels sprout.

I had been working as a psychologist for several years before I appreciated the similarity between scorned vegetables and parents of teenagers because, like many clinicians, I started helping parents before I had children myself. There are certain advantages to this (you don’t compare your kids to those of your clients) and some distinct disadvantages (no one can tell you what it’s like to wake to a vomiting child at 2:00 a.m.— you’ve just got to live it).

At the time when my older daughter was three, I was having my last session of the day with the parents of Erin, a charismatic sixteen-year-old girl. I connected easily with her father around our shared perspective—we both enjoyed his daughter and were worried about her brittle relationship with her mother. I had a harder time feeling empathy for Erin’s mom; she was harshly critical of her daughter’s appearance and affronted by her daughter’s “ingratitude” for her years of personal sacrifice.

As Erin’s mother detailed her disappointment in her daughter, an image popped into my head: that of my darling pigtailed girl who would be flinging herself at me when I got home. I thought, “Hold on! This is what parents of teenagers are talking about when they stop me in the grocery store, look wistfully at my toddler, and tell me to ‘enjoy this time.’ They don’t mean that I should get a kick out of cleaning applesauce off the ceiling. They mean that I’m really going to miss it when my daughter no longer thinks I’m awesome and wants as much of me as she can get.”

With some overdue empathy on board, I said to Erin’s parents, “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.” Therapists hope for some outward sign that we’ve hit the mark with our comments, and my sign was suddenly right there, flowing down the mother’s cheeks. The father put his arm around his tearful wife, and together, the three of us could see that as long as Erin’s mother focused on feeling angry with her daughter, she didn’t have to do the work of mourning the affectionate, happy relationship they used to share. Once we could talk about how much both parents missed the past, we could find new ways for them to feel connected to their daughter in the present.

Well-meaning reassurances from friends (or psychologists!) that it’s all normal don’t take the sting out of losing the friendly bond that many parents had with their preteen girl. Even if your daughter enjoys your company much of the time, it still feels awful when she freezes you out or halts conversations with her friends until you walk away. On top of that, girls distance themselves from their parents just when they are facing new risks and making decisions of greater consequence than ever before. It’s bad enough to be rebuffed by your daughter—it’s worse that it happens right when you feel that she needs you most.

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. Interestingly, findings from a research study that examined how much parents seek to know about their teenagers—and how much teenagers choose to share— suggest that we grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters. We are more likely to ask girls what they’re up to behind closed doors, and our daughters, more than our sons, answer our questions. This research finding certainly fits with the conversations I have with parents who expect their teenage sons to be sphinxlike (as in, “You know, he’s a boy—he just doesn’t talk to us”) but express grave concern when teenage daughters withdraw. In the name of blocking double standards at our doorsteps, it’s helpful to remember that teenage girls, like teenage boys, often want privacy for its own sake. Some parents wrongly suspect that if their daughter is closing her door, she must be up to something, but most teenage girls close their doors to do the exact same things they used to do with the door wide open.

Here I’m reminded of fourteen-year-old Ashley, whose parents came to me concerned about their daughter’s “sneaky” behavior. When I asked about the evidence of Ashley’s alleged sneakiness, I learned that her dad became instantly suspicious when she started closing her bedroom door at age twelve. Ashley had never closed her door as a child, so her father figured that she was hiding something—illicit behavior or drugs—in her room. Based on his suspicions, he insisted that Ashley keep her door open, at least partially, at all times. When Ashley was away on a sleepover, he made a sweep of her bedroom and discovered a small, locked safe—clearly a secret purchase— in the back of his daughter’s closet. When she returned from her sleepover, he demanded that she open the safe, which she refused to do. That’s when they called me.

Ashley’s father could only imagine the contraband hidden in his daughter’s safe and was now convinced that he had a full-blown delinquent on his hands. It turned out that the safe contained nothing but a diary where Ashley kept an intensely personal, but PG-rated, record of her first year of high school. Ashley knew that her father would not respect her privacy and that she needed to go to extreme measures to secure it. In failing to grant his daughter even the refuge of her bedroom, Ashley’s father managed to alienate and insult his well-meaning girl.

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. This might be a game night, movie night, dinner-out-as-a-family night, or any other “night” that fits your tastes. Needless to say, it is easier to enforce attendance at the designated night if this tradition begins before your daughter is a teenager and isn’t sprung on her as some sort of punishment when you haven’t seen her for more than five consecutive minutes in three weeks. You can enhance the appeal of the family night by having everyone take turns selecting the evening’s game, movie, or restaurant and by scheduling the evening to end with plenty of time for an older teenager to head out for a night with her friends.

If your daughter complains about your compulsory family get-togethers, or if you didn’t put a family night in place before she became a teenager, you’ve still got options. Older adolescent girls can be surprisingly amenable to having one-on-one time with their parents. A meal or outing with just one parent can have an air of sophistication that’s missing from family-wide events, especially if the family includes rowdy younger siblings. And being with only one parent can tweak tricky family dynamics. As one girl explained to me, “When I’m with both of my parents, my dad asks a bunch of annoying questions and I look to my mom to tell him to back off. But when it’s just me and my dad, somehow we get along better.”

Whether or not you’ve designated a family night, aim to eat meals with your daughter throughout the week. You’ve probably heard about research showing that family meals contribute to girls’ health, academic achievement, and overall sense of well-being. While those results are important, my favorite study on family dinners found a way to address a critical “Yeah, but . . .” question: What if teens benefit from family dinner not because of what happens at the table, but because they have a strong relationship with their parents that happens to include lots of family meals?

To tackle this question, psychologists Suniya Luthar and Shawn Latendresse measured relationship variables, such as how close teens felt to their parents and how much teens felt their parents criticized them (in addition to asking how often the family ate dinner together). Surprisingly, when the research team stripped the relationship data from the family dinner equation, they still found that eating together as a family improved teens’ grades and psychological health. 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.

There’s a lot of research out there about family dinners, but this study stands out to me for two reasons, one professional, one personal. As a psychologist, I welcome evidence that girls should join the family dinner even if they feel disconnected from their folks. Any parent whose daughter brings hostile silence to the table is bound to question the value of making family dinner happen—Maya certainly felt that way when eating with Camille. To me, 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.

As a mother, I am grateful that the researchers were flexible in their definition of a family dinner. Given the busy schedules that many parents and kids maintain, I know I’m not the only one for whom a nightly, full-family dinner seems nearly impossible. This study heartens me on evenings when my husband or I eat alone with our daughters and makes me feel as if I’ve won the lottery when we’re all there. (Here are some ques tions I’m hoping future research will address: Must the meal be hot? Must it last more than ten minutes to achieve its magical benefits? And how often can I freak out about table manners and still have a positive influence on my daughters? Obviously, important work waits to be done.)

If you really want to connect with your daughter, car time can be your most valuable ally. The conditions of riding in a car—not having to look directly at the parent who is driving, the assurance that the conversation will end when the ride ends—are just what some girls need to open up. This effect can be multiplied by the number of girls in the car. The next time a parent asks you to share a lift 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. Girls and their friends seem to forget that the chauffeur is actually someone’s mom or dad and will chatter quite openly with one another when being transported in groups. Offering to share a lift will come at the cost of your time, petrol, and likely your sleep, but you will learn more about what is going on in your daughter’s personal life in the time it takes to drop off her friends and get back to your home than you will in three weeks of asking about how things are going. Wise chauffeurs know it’s best to really play the part; trying to join the conversation or ask questions usually breaks the spell and ends the chatter or—even worse—gets the girls to take the conversation to their phones.

As a final option, be willing to exchange some of your favorite traditions for more grown-up ways to connect with your daughter. You may long to recapture a tender moment from your daughter’s childhood—decorating the Christmas tree while singing Bing Crosby songs together—but your daughter might sprain her eye-rolling muscles at the suggestion. If you want to have some quality time with your girl, consider making some popcorn and joining her on the couch to rewatch your fourth-choice holiday movie.

Allergic to Questions

In the middle of a family night, over dinner at home, or even in the car, you’ve likely discovered that your teenage daughter has developed an allergy—intermittent or chronic—to being asked questions. Last year she might have welcomed your curiosity, but now that she’s parting with childhood, she may be downright offended by it. You don’t always have to play the role of the furtive chauffeur; there are times when you should step forward with questions. But when I invite teenage girls to explain to me why they are so bothered by their parents’ questions, the girls invariably shake their heads, exhale heavily, and say, “Ugh, their questions are so annoying!”

So I ask: What makes them annoying? Can parents pose questions that aren’t annoying? If your parents want to start a conversation with you, how should they go about it? When asked honest questions, I always find that girls produce honest answers.

Here’s what they tell me.

A girl will bristle when her parents ask questions at the wrong time—when she’s deeply engaged in her work, already halfway out the door, or closing her eyes to catch a little extra rest on the couch on a quiet afternoon. A girl will reject a question if she suspects the parent doesn’t really care about the answer and has asked just to try to connect. And girls don’t like questions designed to pry. You can ask about how the party went, but not if you’re pursuing an angle. And the worst? When a parent doggedly follows a preplanned line of questioning and won’t allow the course of the conversation to be shaped by the girl’s answers.

So what works?

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, so shelve your carefully crafted, genuine question if your daughter offers a topic of her own. Should she volunteer that her music teacher seems to have gotten crankier try, “Really? What kind of cranky?” or “Huh, any idea what’s going on?” And girls appreciate not being asked questions at all. More than a few girls have told me that they’d enjoy spending time in the car with any parent who would drop the chitchat and turn over the control of the sound system.

What if you’re playing by the rules—picking your moments, asking genuine questions, following her lead—and still getting a withering stare in response to your friendly inquiries? What if your daughter doesn’t even respond to you or gives answers that are curt at best? 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.

I’ve given a lot of thought to what it means to encourage girls to be polite. On the one hand, the word smacks of a saccharine nicey-nice quality that I’m loath to encourage in girls. On the other, it works well because it’s concrete. Girls know what it means to be polite or impolite. So, I’ve come to prefer “be polite” over injunctions, such as “be respectful,” that are too abstract to be readily enforced and, to my mind, set an unfairly high bar. Put another way, I can be polite to people who don’t earn my respect, and I think this is as much as we should ask girls to do. 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.” Of course, this request can only be made if you model the kind of decency you are asking of her.

As a general rule, I don’t think parents should allow their daughters to treat them in any way that is objectively disrespectful. You may be reluctant to do anything that might push away an already distant girl—especially one who seems to be a talkative delight with every adult except you—but teenagers know when they are misbehaving, and they feel uncomfortable when they get away with it. When your daughter is being rude, find a way to call her on it.

Bear in mind that you have the right to make the many optional good deeds you do for your daughter contingent on her decent treatment of you. She should not expect you to take her to the mall on a moment’s notice if her day-to-day interactions with you are consistently unpleasant. Is this emotional blackmail? Absolutely not. It’s how the world works. People don’t do nice things for people who are mean to them. Better for your daughter to learn this lesson before she leaves your home than after she is out on her own. If, after a stretch of treating you like a nosy landlord or a meddling chauffeur, your daughter asks you to run an errand on her behalf, invite her to address the difficulty she’s created. You might say, “I feel really torn. I love you and want to help you out in any way I can, but you’ve been snarky for days and I don’t want to give you the impression that you can treat people poorly and expect them to go out of their way for you. Got any suggestions for how we can make this right?” Alternatively, and depending on the mood of the moment, you could say, “No way, sister! Not with how you’ve been acting. Warm it up several degrees and try again later.”

Surprisingly Mean

Cathy was early to our appointment, so we chatted while waiting for her husband to join us. We were meeting to talk about Kirsten, her fifteen-year-old daughter who had been struggling with anxiety. “Kirsten really got to me this week,” said Cathy, who went on to explain that she had spent the last month carefully preparing for a major presentation at work. On the day of the presentation, Cathy—a good-looking woman who kept herself physically fit—put on her favorite knit dress and was about to leave for the office when Kirsten came downstairs. Cathy reminded Kirsten that it was the big day and asked if she looked all right. Cathy then imitated Kirsten’s response for me. She tilted her head, cocked an eyebrow, and said, “Yeah, you look okay . . . if you don’t mind looking like a lumpy librarian.” Cathy laughed, and so did I, but it was clear that she had been really hurt by the comment.

In the words of my wise colleague, psychologist Renée Spencer, girls are “exquisitely attuned” to the adults they know well. And at times, they use their insider’s knowledge to be surprisingly mean. Your daughter may already give you the cold shoulder as part of moving on from her generally pleasant but, as far as she’s concerned, childish relationship with you. 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.

Like Kirsten’s comment, a girl’s meanness toward her parents usually has two impressive qualities. First, it’s carefully aimed at their vulnerabilities; a girl knows how to be mean in just the way that will hurt or reject her parents. One girl I know insisted that only her father, a lawyer and former athlete, could examine her sprained ankle, not her mother—an esteemed radiologist. Another declared that her mother’s Thanksgiving food was “weird” (her mother was a dedicated and talented cook) and made herself some packaged macaroni cheese to eat at the Thanksgiving table. Girls often aim their most severe meanness at their mothers—especially if they have had a particularly close relationship in the past—but dads can be targets too. I think here of a girl who mused aloud that her intensely devoted father “was sort of like a robot . . . just some TV-watching machine who lives with us” as he made himself late to work so that he could drive her to school.

Second, girls’ meanness can be astonishingly unpunishable because most adolescent girls avoid pedestrian tactics like name-calling. Instead, they operate in a retaliation-proof margin that’s aggressive but hard to prevent, pin down, or penalize. Like Kirsten, they make observations about their parents that are as witty as they are wounding. While maintaining an air of innocence—or even offering what she considers to be helpful feedback about your haircut, tastes, or deeply held values—your daughter might casually toss off a comment that ruins your whole day, especially if, like Cathy, you were feeling vulnerable to start.

And not all of their meanness is straight-up mean. Sometimes girls tease their parents in order to pull them close and push them away at the same time. I watched this dynamic unfold between Andy, a dear friend from high school, and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Grace, during a summer visit to my hometown of Denver. Andy, his wife, Sharon, and I were catching up in their backyard when Grace, a talented violinist, joined us. Grace sat silently, legs folded beneath her on the outdoor furniture, and followed the conversation.

We were discussing the fact that Andy’s work took him to Indonesia and Ghana when I asked if his family ever had the chance to join him on his adventures. He explained that the travel occurred on short notice, making a family trip impossible, but that his accrued flight miles were put toward their family vacations. Grace chimed in, “Wow, Dad, you’re a lot more useful to us when you’re gone than when you’re here. And the house smells better too.” Andy, chuckled, said, “Gee, thanks, Grace,” and the conversation carried on. Andy wasn’t hurt. I think he knew that Grace was making it clear that she was no longer Daddy’s little girl, but that they were still close. (Truly, it takes a certain amount of intimacy to tease someone about how he smells.) At another moment, in a different mood, or with a testier tone, Grace’s teasing might have crossed a line. But that night I got to watch Andy’s amusement at Grace’s clever jab and the playful way she claimed her connection with him.

Should your daughter cross a line with you, or catch you feeling vulnerable and unable to take her teasing in stride, you don’t just have to sit back and take it. If you can gather your wits in the moment, you might respond with “Ouch” or “Wow, that’s mean” or “That’s not how we talk to one another in this family.” If she gets defensive, looks at you blankly, or stomps off in a huff, commend yourself for doing your job. What job is this? The one where you remind your daughter that no self-respecting person will enjoy her company when she treats people the way she just treated you.

You may need a while to absorb a given blow and let some time pass to cool off before you say your piece. Ultimately, you might share with your daughter something along the lines of, “I need to let you know that I was really hurt by what you said. You may have been joking around, but that was hard to hear.” Other times, you might jump in to defend your partner if he or she is the one under attack. Words such as, “Your mom made us a terrific Thanksgiving dinner and you are being rude—put away the macaroni cheese” will do. Believe me, girls know when they’re stepping over a boundary and find it strange when adults seem not to notice.

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 a way that is both petty and painful (“Please tell me you didn’t actually wear those shoes with that skirt today”). While you could have hummed Paul Simon all day long, your daughter needs to hurry back to the depths as soon as she feels restored. Why can’t she linger? Because, to her, lingering feels babyish, which is just about the last thing that any normal teenager who is parting with childhood wants to feel. Clinging to you quickly becomes as uncomfortable for your daughter as it is pleasantly nostalgic for you. She rushes back to the work of parting with childhood with an abrupt—sometimes painful—shove.

It hurts when warm moments with your daughter so quickly turn cold. There is no way to prevent these stinging interactions altogether, and there are many real benefits for your daughter in having them. That said, there are some things that you can do to lessen the pain of a rejection that comes on the heels of overdue closeness. To begin, anticipate the push-off. When your daughter swims to you, enjoy it, but don’t get your hopes up that she has rediscovered the value of your wisdom and affection and will never again forget it. When she shoves off, don’t allow your daughter to mistreat you. If her push-off is rude, tell her so. She may or may not apologize, but you need to say—and she needs to hear you say—“That’s hurtful.”

Next, stand strong. Your daughter needs a wall to swim to, and she needs you to be a wall that can withstand her comings and goings. Some parents feel too hurt by their swimmers, take too personally their daughter’s rejections, and choose to make themselves unavailable to avoid going through it again. Of course, in some ways it does feel better to avoid certain emotional whiplash. But being unavailable comes at a cost. Unavailable parents miss out on some wonderful, if brief, moments with their daughters. Worse, their daughters are left without a wall to swim to and must navigate choppy—and sometimes dangerous—waters all on their own.

Finally, rally your supports. In the opening pages of this book I included one of my favorite quotes from Anna Freud and it is as true today as it was when she wrote it in 1958: “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.” Raising teenagers is not for the fragile, and that’s true even when everything is going just as it should. Parents of teenagers need supportive partners and friends to prop them up when they feel that they just can’t take one more push-off. Knowing that you can serve as a reliable, safe base allows your daughter to venture out into the world; having the strength to stay in place when your daughter clings to and rejects you in short order usually requires the loving support of adult allies.

I’ve used my swimming pool metaphor for years. It’s a more elaborate metaphor than I typically go for, but too many parents have sought me out over the years to say, “That swimming pool bit really got us through our daughter’s teenage years” for me to give it up. Once, at a school leaving party, a mother told me she had been swimming-pooled that very afternoon. She went on to explain that her daughter— whom I knew to be particularly reserved, especially at home— had returned from the leaving ceremony brimming with tearful nostalgia for her school years. The girl hurried to show her mother her yearbook and sat close on the couch as she shared her favorite pictures and told funny stories that her mother had never heard before. The mother, still basking in the glow of the yearbook tour, waited on the couch while her daughter went to her room to change out of her formal clothes. Only twenty minutes later did the mother realize that the girl had left for a friend’s party without so much as a good-bye.

Anyone raising a teenage daughter can attest to the unevenness of her development. Like the school leaver, she can range from clinging to rejecting, and many parents find that their daughters are incredibly competent in some areas but not so much in others.

Totally Competent, Except for When She’s Not

Over lunch a friend said to me, “Here’s one for you. Tracy refuses to put in her own contacts.” Tracy is her thirteen-yearold daughter, a terrific girl who gamely navigates public transportation to get to school, afternoon art classes, and friends’ houses on the weekend. She writes catchy songs for her guitar and is auditioning drummers and singers to help her round out an all-girl band. When her parents work late, Tracy finishes her homework, makes sure that her younger brother gets started on his, and sets the table for dinner. In other words, she is a very competent girl.

My friend went on, “We’ve gotten into this horrible morning routine where I tell her to try to put them in, she insists she can’t, we haggle back and forth for a while, and then I finally give in because she’s getting upset about running late for school. She’s decided that she’s too cool for glasses, which I understand, but I never expected that managing her contacts would turn out to be so hard.”

My friend isn’t alone. Many parents of a teenage girl are as awed by their daughter’s incredible capabilities as they are stunned by the things that she claims she cannot do. The same girl who organizes a fundraiser for a classmate with a rare disease will refuse to return overdue books to the local library because she doesn’t want to face the librarian. The girl who uses power tools to build elaborate wooden models will also insist that she cannot start dinner because she’s scared of the stove. In most families, the parents’ certainty that their daughter can manage the task at hand meets its match in their daughter’s steadfast belief that she absolutely cannot.

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. Looked at logically, it seems that any girl who can develop a computer simulation of how proteins fold can figure out how to wrap a present. But try telling that to the girl. In my experience, 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. For example, some girls become paralyzed when they are expected to manage payment at a salon or call to reschedule an orthodontic appointment. Other girls freeze up if they need to confront or disappoint an adult and will turn themselves inside out to avoid talking to a teacher about a grading mistake or telling the neighbors that they’re not available to babysit.

There are lots of ways to support your daughter, and there’s one way to respond that’s not helpful at all: becoming exasperated when your reasoning fails to convince your daughter that if she can work a table saw she can work a stove. Instead, you might recall your daughter’s toddler years, the other phase of her life that, like adolescence, involved rapid but uneven development. Back then, you never would have thrown your hands in the air and cried, “If you can figure out how to work the remote control you can certainly tie your shoes!” So you don’t want to do the equivalent now. Instead, consider the advice we psychologists give to parents of toddlers and break the work of handing tasks over to your daughter into stages. 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.

I suggested that my friend could set aside time on the weekend to move from putting Tracy’s contacts in for her to putting the contacts in with her. She could narrate her technique, then have Tracy attempt one step of the process while she does the others. They might proceed slowly or speed along to the subsequent steps, but they will only make progress if Tracy’s mom withholds judgment and accepts that handing the job off to her daughter will be a gradual process.

If your teenager refuses to call her pediatrician to make an appointment, have her stand nearby while you make an appointment for a far-off physical, then offer to stand by while she makes hers. Again, leave the judgment out of it. I have found that girls can be surprisingly reluctant to speak to adults on the phone. Unlike those of us who spent hours holding the handset to our ear when we were teenagers, many of our daughters rarely use the phone these days for actually speaking, and they may have few opportunities to learn phone etiquette by overhearing adults, since so many parents have also come to prefer texting or emailing to making calls.

Don’t assume that your daughter’s insistence that you’re the only one who can make her a proper sandwich means that she will be living with you until she’s forty. If she’s independent, if she’s rejecting your help in other areas, don’t worry. Chances are that she’ll be moving out on time. Accept that girls part with childhood gradually and embrace opportunities to do things for her, with her, and to stand by to admire her when she’s doing more and more for herself.

Blooming, Reluctantly