Getting Ready for Adolescence

My daughter is becoming a pre-teen, and I’m worried! She has big emotional upsets now and then, but is fine with us other times. How do I ride this roller coaster with her, rather than be upset with her for being on it. I know this is a hard time for kids!
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Dear Parent:

Good for you for thinking ahead! Adolescence is a stage that gets very bad press, which is unfortunate for teens, and for parents as well. It is a growth stage that is full of promise! The perils get much more attention than the excitement of seeing your child grow, learn, and explore her expanding world.

The fact that your daughter has occasional passionate emotional upsets is a good sign, not a bad one. Children who feel safest with their parents are the ones who tend to have open upsets. Your daughter’s explosions are a sign that she is using her instinct to offload emotional tension, whenever she feels overloaded and can’t march forward one more step.

Here are some ideas about building a safe, secure relationship with a child who is entering adolescence. There’s not room here to cover everything, but these ideas may be helpful.

Find a listener! Parenting an adolescent is a big deal!

First, find a good listener (not someone who will judge you, analyze you, tell you what to do, or tell every story about their life that they feel relates to yours). After ten or so years of parenting, you will benefit from a chance to look at the background noise in your mind that will be accompanying you and your child from here on in. The things to talk about are, “What happened to you when you were ten, eleven, and twelve years old (or the exact age of your child)?” “Who did you feel close to then? Did you feel safe and valued?” “What did you love to do? Hate to do?” “How was school for you during these years?” “What did you worry about then? What helped?”

We parents may already have a dim awareness of how heavily our own history tints our experience with our child. Memories of adolescence, both the good and the hard, send up emotional smoke that has a strong effect on our relationships with our children. For instance, if you felt lonely and out of place during those years, then when you look at your child’s unhappy face, you’re sure that your child feels that very same way. This projection from the past blurs your ability to understand your child, who may indeed be unhappy, but for entirely different reasons. Having a chance to talk at length about your own adolescence with someone who will be interested but not judgmental will help you see what emotional landmines were planted in you as you grew. It will help you tiptoe around them as you try to support your fresh new teen.

The second set of things to talk about has to do with your ten- to twelve-year relationship with your child. By now, there are things that go well in that relationship, and interactions that always follow the same unfruitful pattern. With a listener, ask yourself these questions; “What do you remember thinking and feeling when you realized that you would be having this child?” “How was pregnancy? How was birth?” (These are important questions for fathers, too!) Often, dynamics get set up in a relationship between parent and child in the first days or weeks of the baby’s life, if not before. It’s good to remember back to those early days, and to go over your history with your child in detail. We all have memories of times we wish hadn’t happened, and of times we wish we could have had more often. Talk about them. Notice what feelings you have about them. And if your feelings happen to spill out into tears or laughter, that’s wonderful. Your story as a parent is important, and it’s right and good that your feelings are close by. You love. You care. You have worked so hard. Of course you have feelings. Let them show!�

Often, a parents’ patience for and “feel” for his or her teen is vastly improved by talking about the above subjects, and by the emotional release that can come with telling your story to a good listener.

Nurture the good times by offering Special Time
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The second initiative I think makes a big difference is to begin to do Special Time with your child. Offer an amount of time you can manage, set it up ahead of time, and tell your child that you’ll do whatever he or she wants to do during that time, short of things that are illegal or unsafe. And you’ll need to put monetary restrictions out there on the table. “Yes, we can spend up to $4,” or “No, we won’t have any spending money, but you can figure out what else would be fun to do.” Then, give your delighted and undivided attention to your child. Be pleased with him or her, no matter what. Use whatever activity he or she chooses as a vehicle for your delight in your child. Offer more eye contact, more affection, more energy and more closeness. And do not bring up even one sore subject. Not one!

Set up a tradition of doing Special Time now, so that it can carry through adolescence. Make it a priority. Make it happen. It’s going to be the recurring place that your child can count on for feeling your approval and your efforts to listen and to love. Don’t tie it to doing chores or to getting homework finished: this is a parent/child given, like brushing teeth every day is a given. It helps keep your relationship with your child healthy.

Your pre-teen might want to have you listen to his favorite music. Or to show you his skateboard moves. He might want to teach you a video game, and then win over and over again, while you lose badly. She might want to bake. She might want a backrub. She might want to be taken somewhere special. Let your child experiment with what to do.

This kind of time ensures that your child will see you as a resource, as someone who is interested in them, someone who wants them to have fun. And whatever other difficulties the two of you might face, they’ll be able to count on Special Time, during which you don’t try to tackle those difficulties directly. You’ll see that Special Time can play a big role in resolving difficulties, simple as it is. It gives parent and child a time for things to go well, so that when you make your appointment with your child to discuss her falling grades or her rising cell phone charges, she can remember that you love her. The hard things will go better.

Find the “grooves” for closeness that you and your child have developed.
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There are things you and your child have done together that were lots of fun in childhood. Maybe it was letting her jump on the beds when she was three and four. Maybe it was making cookies together. Maybe it was playing catch in the park. Maybe it was romping together with the dog.

Never let go of one of these grooves. If you have had the habit of spending some time lying with your child before sleep, don’t stop because he or she has become ten or eleven or twelve years old! School is getting tougher. Adult attention there is becoming more dilute. The chances to play are being stolen away year by year. Keep that cuddling going!

If you have let the children cuddle in bed with you on Saturday mornings, call for them, or wait until they finally wake up, and pile into their beds instead!

If you have a child who loves his back rubbed or scratched, spend time doing this whenever you can.

If you have had sock fights, with “warring” camps on either side of the living room sofa as a family when the children were small, get them started again. Gather all those big-sized socks. Have another family “battle.” Lose, but not too quickly.

If your child now wants to talk with you at midnight on Saturday night, arrange for a nap on Saturday, so you can listen well while he or she pours out thoughts and experiences that are important to hear.

Here’s one mother’s experience of keeping a groove of play and closeness open into teen years.

“My son is 15 now, and he’s much bigger than I am. When he was younger, he used to chase me, and get me down and tickle me. And he just loves that, absolutely loves that. He laughs and laughs. Now, he’ll take a stinky shoe or a stinky sock, and chase me around, or pick his toenails and try to gross me out with what he found. Of course, I am VERY grossed out, playfully! My yelping and running gets him laughing and playing hard. This kind of play is really good, because he’s so big and strong; it’s a way we can have fun without me being too overpowered.”
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Don’t worry that other families don’t seem to be doing what you are doing. It’s your family. It’s your relationship with your child. And every relationship, like a thumbprint, is different, lovely in its intricacy, and reflective of just you, and just your child. You’re not supposed to be like anyone else! Neither is your child!

And finally,

When your child begins to cry or rage, listen. Don’t argue or teach. Just listen.
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We’ll say the least about this, but it might be the most important idea. Crying and being angry and upset are signs that your child is doing the healthiest thing possible to get rid of bad feelings and tension. They are our natural safety valve for an overload of feelings. If you’ve set a limit and this is what set your child off, relax and just stick with your limit, or your expectation. Your child will be totally unreasonable for the period of time that he or she is scrubbing out the upset. Then, sweet reason will return, especially if you don’t get angry or insulted in return. Just listen. It’s pain coming out. It’s pain your child doesn’t want to hold in any longer. It’s a messy, hot-button process. But it works to clear your child’s mind and heart of sadness, anger, and distance. If you listen, you’ll be helping in a way that most of us never experienced.

I wish you well in your journey into this exciting stage of parenting! Hold on to your hat, and expect to learn a lot from and with your child.

Hand in Hand is a parent education non-profit that has been helping families to build the super-protective factor of parent-child connectedness for twenty years.� You can learn more by reading the Listening to Children booklet series by Patty Wipfler or by signing up for our free monthly newsletter, Connecting!
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