Untangled

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.

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.

grant greater privacy to our sons than to our daughters.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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 an

Girls want questions driven by genuine interest.