Untangled

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.

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.

your teenage daughter is a swimmer, you are the pool in which she swims, and the water is the broader world.

far, here’s the picture I’ve painted of adolescent girls: aloof, withdrawn, and, sometimes, surprisingly mean.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.

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.