Untangled

most teenage girls close their doors to do the exact same things they used to do with the door wide open.

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.

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

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.”

I’ve given a lot of thought to what it means to encourage girls to be polite.

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.

girls are “exquisitely attuned” to the adults they know well. And at times, they use their insider’s knowledge to be surprisingly mean.

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.

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.

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.