ONE

Parting with Childhood

In the waiting room of my private practice, I met Maya 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-year-old 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 seventh grade, 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 folks 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 goofballs 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 ninth-grade flashbulb memory of watching a group of twelfth-grade 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 snuck 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 everyone 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 questions 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 help with carpooling 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 help with carpooling will come at the cost of your time, gas budget, 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 honors algebra was giving her fits ask (in a tone that makes it clear that you don’t have an agenda), “How’s it going in algebra? 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 holster your carefully crafted, genuine question if your daughter offers a topic of her own. Should she volunteer that her band 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 snitty 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?” Alternately, 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 and 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 mac and 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 graduation 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 graduation ceremony brimming with tearful nostalgia for her high 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 graduation clothes. Only twenty minutes later did the mother realize that the girl had left for a friend’s graduation party without so much as a good-bye.

Anyone raising a teenage daughter can attest to the unevenness of her development. Like the high school graduate, 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-year-old 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—develops 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

Laurel, the all-girls school where I consult for part of each week, is an amazing place, but I’ve decided that it would not be fair to anyone to send my own girls there. My daughters deserve a school where their mother doesn’t know as much as they do about the daily happenings, and the girls at Laurel should be able to check in with a psychologist who isn’t a classmate’s mom. Instead, my girls are students in Shaker Heights’s terrific public school system, which means that at the end of fourth grade, my daughter and I walk to our neighborhood elementary school to attend the Ladies Night Out for the rising fifth-grade girls and an accompanying adult female relative. The evening, led by a friendly local pediatrician, introduces the facts of puberty. The mood in the room could not be more divided. While I exchange cheerful, “Wow! Are we here already?” greetings with the other moms, the girls slump into the beige metal folding chairs arranged in careful rows in the gymnasium. As the pediatrician begins her spiel, the girls slide even lower in their seats. They look at the floor, shoot “Can you believe this?” glances at one another, and broadcast that they want, more than anything, to go home.

While adults may be convinced by our own sales talk—we often introduce puberty as a joyous blossoming of womanhood—most tween girls don’t buy it. And why should they? However we choose to describe the facts of puberty, many girls actually hear: “Get ready, ladies, because that body of yours that has hardly given you any trouble up till now is about to gain smelly armpits that you’ll need to deodorize, sprout hair that you may choose to shave, erupt pimples right on your face, and develop breasts that will inevitably be compared to those of your female classmates. Oh, and did we mention that your vagina will bleed?” In fact, it’s surprising to me that adults routinely put such a cheerful gloss on the facts of puberty. Have you ever, in all your life, heard a woman say, “Puberty? I feel that it came at the exact right moment and the whole thing was wonderful!”

Many girls experience the physical changes of puberty as simply gross. On top of that, girls’ bodies part with childhood at a moment girls don’t select and may not like. To make matters even worse, puberty advances at a speed girls can’t control. Given that girls are striving to part with childhood, you’d think that they’d all welcome the biological shift to womanhood. But they often don’t. Here’s why: girls like to part with childhood on their own schedule. You may have noticed that one minute your daughter lobbies to download songs with raunchy lyrics, and the next, she curls up on the couch in the exact same position she adopted at age six to read a book she enjoyed at age eight. Her seemingly paradoxical behavior is actually brilliant. She’s parting with childhood while regulating the process. She’s sending developmental troops forward to conquer new ground (such as flirting, or considering philosophical questions) and then letting her troops fall back to safe, established base camps (playing with dolls, reading childhood books) when they need to rest and regroup. But then here come the physical realities of puberty! These troops disregard their leader and march ahead on their own. What adults advertise as a joyous blossoming feels to some girls like an all-too-public mutiny.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Maya called me to set up another appointment. She had found it useful to regard Camille’s cold shoulder as part of the developmental strand of leaving childhood behind and, though Maya agreed that her daughter was on track developmentally, she wanted to keep meeting because she was a fairly private person who was glad to have a place to talk frankly about Camille’s path through adolescence. Actually, some of my favorite work in my practice involves serving as a confidential sounding board for parents of girls who, in many ways, are thriving. When our kids are little, we stand around on the playground and discuss who’s moving out of diapers, but when they’re teenagers, we don’t always feel that we can ask our friends how their daughters are coming along with managing their periods, getting along with their friends, or navigating the college process. Personal discretion, respect for our daughters’ privacy, or even competitive feelings within tight communities make it hard for parents to talk with one another about the garden-variety challenges that come with raising teenagers.

When we next met, Maya shared that puberty was now well under way for her daughter, but that Camille would quickly change the subject if she broached the topics of menstruation, wearing deodorant, and so on. Clearly, Camille was one of those girls who felt that her troops were defying their leader, and her solution was to try to avoid the issue altogether. Maya knew that puberty was addressed in health class at school but doubted that Camille ever spoke up, even if she had a pressing question. Maya didn’t want Camille to feel awkward or embarrassed and didn’t want her to harbor unanswered questions, but she could not find a way to have a successful conversation with Camille about her changing body.

Not all girls feel uncomfortable about the onset of puberty. Some are excited about it and are happy to seek or accept advice on how to manage their new self-care demands. But if, like Camille, your daughter seems to feel awkward discussing her new personal hygiene routines, consider giving her an age-appropriate book about puberty (several good options are listed in the Recommended Resources). Don’t make a big deal about the book and don’t ask her to report back to you about whether she’s read it; just know that you’ve given her a way to educate herself about the facts of life on her own schedule. At my suggestion, Maya bought some books for Camille, put them in her room with a note reading, “Found these while browsing at the bookstore. Love, Mom,” and left it at that. Even if your daughter readily seeks or takes your advice about managing puberty, she may enjoy having books that allow her to read up on the topics she’s interested in and that she can use to initiate conversations with you when she wants further details.

Shortly after leaving the books for Camille, Maya was surprised (and heartened!) one evening when Camille asked Maya how old she was when she got her period and when she had started using tampons. Maya answered the questions in a matter-of-fact way and did not try to strike up a broader conversation on the subject. By this point Maya had aptly intuited something I’ve come to learn over my years of practice, which is that having a delicate conversation with a teenager is like trying to talk with someone on the other side of a door. Camille opened the door a little bit and Maya wisely worked within the small space she’d been given. Had Maya barged through with all sorts of uninvited information, Camille would have slammed the door, locked it tight, and hesitated to ever open it again.

You will hear from many girls and their parents throughout this book, but in almost every chapter, we’ll be checking back in with Maya and Camille (whose names, like all of the others in this book, have been changed). The more I got to know Maya, the more I admired her wisdom and appreciated her openness to collaborating with me as we thought about her daughter. And, as much as any girl, Camille’s path through her teenage years highlights how different developmental strands become salient at different points on the journey through adolescence.

Girls who feel uncomfortable opening the door to get help from their mothers about the physical changes that come with puberty may welcome the support of a neutral third party. I know an enterprising mom who made a reconnaissance mission to the lingerie department of our local department store where she learned the hours of a friendly, professional bra fitter. With her daughter’s agreement, they returned to the store and the mother did her own shopping while the saleswoman sized her daughter for a bra. Along similar lines, if your daughter rejects your advice about how to manage her acne, consider making an advance call to her pediatrician or family doctor before her next routine visit and ask her doctor to address skin care as part of that appointment. In other words, if your daughter wants to have privacy from you around her changing body, respect her wishes while connecting her with the information and resources she needs to take good care of herself.

Occasionally, girls will feel so overwhelmed by the onset of puberty that they pretend it isn’t happening. They minimize or deny their need for a bra, deodorant, regular showers, acne control, or even supplies for managing menstruation. If your daughter hopes that by ignoring puberty it will go away, you’ll need to address her denial while honoring the signals she’s sending that she’s not looking for a long conversation on the topic. Try something such as, “It used to be my job to help you take care of your body, but it’s now time for you to take over that work. Clearly, you’re not happy that things just got a lot more complicated. I know that it’s a hassle to deal with pimples, your period, and stuff like that, but I think you’ll feel better about the whole thing when you address it head-on and take better care of yourself.”

Looking around the gym at my daughter’s elementary school, it’s clear that the puberty talk is overdue for many of the nine- and ten-year-old girls in the room. New results from a massive study conducted by experts from around the country show that the first signs of puberty, usually the beginnings of breast development, now arrive earlier than ever. By age seven, breast buds appear in 24 percent of African-American girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls, 10 percent of Caucasian girls, and 2 percent of Asian girls, and those numbers jump to 43 percent, 31 percent, 18 percent, and 13 percent, respectively, by age eight. The age at which girls first start menstruating is also dropping, but not as precipitously: one hundred years ago, periods arrived around age fourteen, not twelve as is now common.

In their fascinating book The New Puberty, physician Louise Greenspan and psychologist Julianna Deardorff summarize the known factors that, alone or in combination, may be triggering early puberty: childhood obesity, exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals, and social and psychological stressors. They note that these risk factors are especially common in impoverished communities, which largely accounts for the high rates of early puberty in minority American girls.

The schools in Shaker Heights are well integrated, but the district’s racial and economic lines overlap and the minority students are disproportionately among the poorest. Though it’s impossible to know what accounts for the timing of puberty in any one girl, the broad demographic trends hit me over the head at every middle school program I attend. A striking percentage of fully developed African-American fifth-grade girls perform for the audience of parents and relatives alongside Caucasian classmates who, for the most part, still look like children. Watching the programs I always find myself worrying and wondering, “What must it feel like to have the body of an eighteen-year-old when you’re only eleven?”

Here’s what I know: for girls whose physical development rushes far ahead of their psychological development, it feels pretty weird. At best. If you suspect that your daughter sees the changes in her body as too much, too soon, help her keep things in perspective. You can say, “Your body has decided that it’s time to start acting older, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of you needs to be on the same schedule. Feel free to keep doing kid stuff for as long as you’d like. It will all even out eventually.”

Smoke Without Fire

During our junior year of high school, my best friend and I became obsessed with Marvin Gaye’s now classic song “Sexual Healing.” For an entire swim season, we listened to nothing else during our fifteen-minute ride to and from practice. While Nancy drove, I manned the tape deck—whirring the tape backward when the song ended and hoping to release the rewind button somewhere near the song’s beginning. In Nancy’s white Volkswagen Beetle with its maroon leather interior, we grooved and sang along: “If you don’t know the thing you’re dealing, oh I can tell you, darling, that it’s sexual healing.” And I can tell you that there was no correlation between our passion for the song and our interest in actually pursuing sex. The only steam in our loveless lives was coming off our wet hair as we drove home from practice in the Denver winter. But thanks to Marvin, we were dabbling in sexual (and melodic) sophistication and getting on with the work of parting with childhood.

Girls who are eager to leave their childhood behind often equate being older with taking an interest in sex and, like Nancy and me, they can do an alarmingly good job of mimicking adult sexuality. If they aren’t singing provocative songs, they may be trying out risqué outfits, heavy makeup, or seductive dance moves. It’s not uncommon for parents to complain to me about the racy dresses their daughters want to wear to school dances and even parents who succeed in sending their daughter off to the dance in an age-appropriate outfit often suspect that she hiked up her skirt, ditched her tasteful shrug, and changed into hobbling stilettos as soon as she was out of their sight. But when teenage girls succeed in looking like sexy adults (a distinctly female form of parting with childhood), I don’t think that grown-ups should assume that the girls fully comprehend the messages they are sending. In my experience, girls often don’t get it. They fail to draw a connection between looking sexy and being sexual. Just as little girls who try on lipstick to look grown-up have no interest in actually acting like an adult, the teenager dressed in revealing clothes may have no intention of backing up her appearance with action. The terms have changed, but the aim is the same: both the child and the teen are playing at looking older.

You might feel shocked, or even angry, if your daughter presents a vulgar or sexualized persona, but hold off on a strong response until you’ve asked yourself, “Is this all smoke, or might there be fire?” If you’ve got reason to worry that something’s on fire, know that this book contains plenty of advice on handling risky behavior. If you think it’s all smoke remember Ashley, the door closer, and her father, the overreactor, when planning your next move. Ashley’s dad hurt their relationship by investing her door closing with much more meaning than it actually had, and if your daughter does a world-class job of looking trashy, you might feel a powerful impulse to make the same mistake by telling her that she looks cheap or like a tramp.

While you may mean these comments to provide helpful feedback, most girls won’t hear them this way. Your daughter may have assembled an outfit that she believes projects an air of adult sophistication, perhaps even successfully copying a look that she saw in a magazine or online. However tacky or tawdry her styling might be, when you call it cheap, she hears, “Your carefully crafted attempt to appear more mature has failed and you actually look ridiculous.” If you say that she looks like a tramp, your daughter will not hear you saying, “You are presenting yourself in a way that our culture often associates with promiscuity.” She’ll hear, “I think you’re a tramp.” Instead, consider something such as: “Honey, you have captured a look meant for adults—it’s not appropriate at thirteen.” Should you run into (all but guaranteed) resistance, you might need to follow up with, “That outfit will draw sexual attention your way that, frankly, no one in this family is ready for.”

Girls also use online environments to try on personas that don’t really match their actual personalities. By posting risqué comments or images that suggest sophistication, girls sometimes conduct digital experiments in parting with childhood. I’m most likely to hear about a girl’s online behavior when parents come across content that has nothing in common with the girl they know. It sometimes happens that utterly charming girls post digital language that would put a foulmouthed truck driver to shame. And I’ve helped parents try to make sense of a girl’s online claims—that she has been getting drunk or running around with older boys—that they know cannot be true.

If your daughter’s posts don’t jibe with the girl you know, don’t assume that she’s doing every wild-child thing she boasts about, but don’t be naïve either. Have a conversation with her about what you’ve found online and ask her to explain what’s going on. If you sense, or know, that your daughter’s engaging in false advertising, try to figure out what she was hoping to accomplish with her inappropriate postings and have a conversation about that.

Smoke and fire aside, girls often present themselves online in ways their parents would not approve of in person. If this happens with your daughter, take the opportunity to invoke or create an agreement about what’s acceptable for digital posting. Teens have a hard time appreciating the potential impact of what they post and often need rules spelling out what they can and can’t do online, as well as effective consequences for breaking them. Consider the “Grandma” rule: if your daughter wouldn’t feel comfortable with Grandma seeing it, she shouldn’t post it. If she goes ahead and posts it anyway, your daughter should be prepared to live without her phone, or at least her data plan, for a while.

Even if your daughter doesn’t push the boundaries of adult behavior in her appearance or digital postings, some of her peers will. Capitalize on these prime opportunities to weigh in about when and where the outward signs of adulthood should kick in. If you pick your daughter up from a dance and see girls wearing high heels, ovarian-length skirts, and spilling out of their tops, feel free to say, “Man, those girls are looking pretty sexy. You and your friends will have decades to be adults and dress like that if you want. Now’s your big chance to go to these dances and have fun wearing comfortable clothes that look good.”

If you happen to notice that one of your daughter’s friends seems to be engaged in an online marketing campaign to seem twenty-five when she’s really fifteen, go ahead and comment: “If Megan is hooking up with lots of boys—and I doubt that she really is—I wonder if she’s okay. And I worry about her impulse to announce that online.” Don’t expect that your daughter will want to have a long conversation about what’s going on with Megan, but don’t miss the opportunity to let your daughter know that your position is one of concern, not judgment. Doing so will help keep channels of communication open between you and your daughter about the many conversation-worthy things her peers will do.

Any parent of a teenager knows that digital technology plays a critical role in the lives of adolescents and makes raising teenagers as complex as it has ever been. Not surprisingly, today’s technology impacts every developmental strand of adolescence, so we’ll continue to address its role in your daughter’s life, and the part you play as her parent, as we consider the six remaining strands.

Parting with Childhood: When to Worry

Given how unusual normal behavior can be in teenagers, it’s sometimes hard for parents to know when something’s truly wrong. If an adult were to suddenly become very private, cling to loved ones then reject them, refuse to acknowledge the need for personal hygiene, or constantly experiment with new looks or identities, we’d have grounds for concern. Yet I’ve offered all of these behaviors as typical examples of how teenage girls go about the crucial work of parting with childhood.

So how do we know when it’s time to worry?

Paradoxically, it’s often time to worry when a teenager’s behavior isn’t all over the map—when she hangs out at one extreme or the other. In terms of parting with childhood, I worry about teenagers who seem overly reluctant to grow up and about teenagers who want nothing to do with being a kid.

The Female Peter Pan

Some girls seem to be committed to a never-ending childhood. They are sweet and forthcoming, embedded in the bosom of their family, and quite easy on their parents. In my private practice, they use euphemisms like “Sugar!” instead of actually swearing, or they say that they tell their mothers everything, leading me to think, “Really? You do? Why?” The answer to that “Why?” comes in many forms. Some live with troubled parents who cannot withstand rejection. Some serve as the chief confidante for a single or unhappily married parent, and loyalty to that parent trumps the impulse to give him or her a developmentally appropriate cold shoulder. At the furthest extreme are girls whose parents cannot stand the idea of their daughter growing up. These parents actively cultivate dependence and insist on caring for their daughter as if she were a child even well into her teenage years. I’ve seen parents in this category go so far as to generously redecorate their daughter’s childhood bedroom to better suit her tastes as a college graduation gift.

These girls come to my practice for at least one of three reasons: they are anxious, depressed, or lonely. If they’re anxious, it’s usually because unconsciously, they’re furious. They are being robbed of their adolescence and they know it. These girls appear to be frightened of the outside world, but it soon becomes clear that they are frightened of their inner worlds. They are terrified of their own impulses to be saucy and rejecting because they can’t act on those impulses and maintain their parents’ love. If they are depressed, it’s usually because they have directed their anger inward. Not having the latitude to be unpleasant with their parents, they become unpleasant with themselves. “My parents are struggling” morphs into “I am struggling,” a depressive distortion that is safer than reality.

And they are sad because they know that they are missing out. Girls engaged in a perpetual childhood often have few friends during adolescence because they strike peers as being both too babyish and too mature. Age-mates who are eagerly parting with childhood want nothing to do with girls who seem childlike. Further, I have found that girls who are too closely allied with their parents tend to take a rigid view of their peers’ behavior and can come across as stodgy. They look down on drinking and are totally freaked out by any form of teenage sexuality. Needless to say, the party invites don’t come rolling in.

If you recognize your daughter as you read this, step back to consider why she may be clinging to her childhood. Healthy adolescent development requires certain conditions—one being parents who can handle rejection. You don’t have to be as tough as a concrete pool, but it’s best if you can be durable; you may need to build your adult support network in order to give your daughter permission to really grow up. If you are relying on your daughter for emotional support, look for adults you can count on, including, perhaps, a good psychotherapist. Given how tuned in girls are to their parents, your daughter will likely sense that you’ve found yourself some needed reinforcement and start to lean away.

If you suspect that your daughter thinks you need her to depend on you, take steps to change her mind. Celebrate any move she makes toward independence or ask why she’s not branching out. You may have to acknowledge that you’ve had a hard time with the fact that she’s growing up but that you don’t expect her to sacrifice herself to take care of you. If your daughter won’t loosen her grip on you, find a seasoned psychotherapist to help her learn to let go.

Throughout this book you’ll notice that the “When to Worry” section at the end of each chapter offers a few explanations to consider and some suggestions for addressing concerning behavior, then often directs you to seek further resources (in addition to those suggested in the Recommended Resources at the back of this book). In the spirit of Tolstoy’s apt line that “happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” girls who are truly struggling usually need, and certainly deserve, guidance tailored to their specific circumstances. Indeed, every troubled girl I have ever worked with has a complex story that, once known, explains her difficulties. But those stories are as unique as the girls who live them, and their telling goes beyond the scope of what this book aims to offer. There are shelves of books about girls whose adolescence has taken an alarming or dark turn; this book centers on the normal developmental challenges navigated by the majority of teenage girls and their families.

Rushing into Adulthood

We should also worry about girls who race too far ahead. I’m not talking about girls who are mature in the real sense of the word—running babysitting businesses and becoming impressively self-sufficient. I’m talking about thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds having sex or experimenting with drinking or drugs. Unfortunately, some social cachet comes with dabbling in what experts call “pseudomature” behavior because teens focused on leaving childhood behind can be dazzled by peers on the fast track. But research finds that teens who push the limits early tend not to fare well down the line. Over time, they are more likely to have trouble with relationships, substances, and the law than their slow-lane peers.

Who is most likely to experiment with sex, drugs, or drinking at an early age? Psychological science consistently points to two factors: disproportionately, girls on the fast track come from disrupted families or lack a close relationship with at least one parent. The link between having a difficult family life and early risky behavior often comes down to low levels of supervision. Parents contending with poverty, personal difficulties, or other major stressors can’t always fill their daughter’s time with structured extracurricular activities or be around after school. Left alone (and often becoming lonesome), girls sometimes go looking for trouble.

Ava, an eighth grader, was the epitome of a disconnected, pseudomature girl. Her mom and dad hauled her into my office shortly after they came home late one weeknight to find her vomiting into the toilet while her friend lay passed out on the bathroom floor. Ava had taken advantage of her parents’ long hours at work to mix samples from every bottle in their liquor cabinet before inviting a friend over to share the concoction.

In our first meeting, Ava sat apart from her parents in the extra chair at my private practice while her parents, wordless with fury, shared my couch. They glared at their daughter, a beautiful girl with carefully tweezed, arched eyebrows. Ava removed the designer sunglasses that served as her headband and chewed indifferently on the end of one arm of the glasses while glaring right back.

Ava’s father broke the silence by describing the incident that triggered their visit. Before he finished, he indignantly added, “Ava just doesn’t get it. Her friend could have died.”

Her mother finally spoke. “We work so hard to give her a good life—and this is how she acts.”

Adopting the brand of irrational, egocentric logic that tarnishes the name of teenage girls everywhere, Ava retorted, “If you actually cared about me, you’d let me do what I want.”

With a mixture of anger and incredulity, her father turned to me. “She wants us to drive her to high school parties!”

Saying nothing, Ava’s mother gave her daughter a look that told the whole story: both parents worked demanding jobs with long hours to keep the family afloat and it pained her to watch Ava ruin sunglasses that almost certainly cost more than what her parents could comfortably afford. Ava gnawed away while seeming to relish the knowledge that her mother wouldn’t bark at her to get the glasses out of her mouth while they were still in my company.

Watching the scene that played out before me, I strongly suspected that the fury burning in my office was actually kindled by the pain of Ava’s lonesome isolation and her parents’ fears for her safety. I hoped that if I could get the family to work with me in therapy, they would come to see this too.

Even in families that are intact, or provide supervision, girls are more likely to find trouble if their relationships at home are corroded by parental stress. There’s ample evidence showing that the parent-child relationship can be strained by the hardships of poverty, but, until recently, affluent families were relatively neglected by psychological research. As Suniya Luthar, the prolific psychologist who led my favorite family dinner study, notes, “If a lack of income implies poor parenting, the logical corollary would be that ample income will imply generally good parenting.” But that’s not what the research shows. Recent studies find that wealth can isolate girls, both physically and emotionally, from their parents. Affluent parents may trade time at home for lucrative jobs and exercise the option of hiring a brigade of nannies, tutors, or housekeepers to help raise their daughters. In these cases, parental absence seems to contribute to a girl’s emotional distress and drug use. Put another way, compared to wealthy teens, lower- and middle-class teenagers are, to their benefit, more likely to spend more time hanging around the house with their parents.

Lacking a close parental relationship, girls shop elsewhere for connection. They gravitate to older teens or other unsupervised peers. Or they turn to the media for cues about how to grow up. Psychologist Monique Ward, a leading researcher on how popular media shapes what adolescents believe, has found that teens who watch television for the purpose of companionship are more likely to see women as sexual objects, and the more time teens spend watching sexualized television, the more likely they are to engage in sexual behavior themselves. In sum, if parents aren’t present to raise their daughters, our sex-saturated media (which happens to profit from marketing racy content to tweens) will gladly do the job for them.

If what you’re reading has you worried, start by asking yourself: Do I usually know where my daughter is and what she’s doing? Are we connected? Are we eating dinner together more nights a week than not? If you can’t say yes to these questions, take steps to spend more time with your daughter and to deepen your relationship with her. If your daughter has already attached herself in a peer group of much older teens, find ways to connect her with age-mates and wise, supportive adults. Volunteer programs, after-school jobs, or church and synagogue youth programs can be good places to start. If your efforts to reconnect with your daughter fail, or if you can’t pry her away from a crowd that is rushing too far ahead, seek help from her pediatrician or your family doctor, the guidance counselor at her school, or a trusted psychotherapist (physicians who work with teens are often a reliable source for suitable mental health referrals).

Should you ban sexualized media? Good luck. Even if you succeed in keeping it out of your house, your daughter will come across it on her own time. Do what you can to keep your daughter from being exposed to highly explicit content, and consider treating the rest as a useful conversation starter. You want your daughter to become a critical consumer of the media, so use what she’s watching to help her build those skills. Swing by the couch or lean over her laptop and say, “I’m all for mindless entertainment, but you know that I’m not a big fan of shows that celebrate women for being sexy and stupid.” Your daughter may roll her eyes, but do it anyway. Girls can listen and roll their eyes at the same time.

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Some parents see development as a race to be won and encourage their girls to adopt the trimmings of adulthood. They promote their daughter’s worldly appearance or provide her with items (handbags, jewelry) generally reserved for women, not young girls. But that’s not how it works. Normal development is a powerful, internal force that propels girls forward along the strands of adolescence. Most teenage girls don’t need to be encouraged to grow up—they push ahead at a healthy pace and sometimes ask for more freedom or privilege than makes sense. When they want to grow up too fast, it’s our job as parents to slow them down by pulling back. If you’re familiar with this tension, be reassured—it means your daughter is doing her job and you are doing yours as she undertakes the work of parting with childhood.