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MOUTH AND LIP DISORDERS OF EARLY ADOLESCENCE

 

 

ABOUT THE SPLIT SECOND YOUR CHILD TURNS 12 (OR possibly 11, if you’re the lucky parent of an early achiever), you’ll start experiencing a lot of attitude within the four walls of your formerly peaceful abode. This may take you completely by surprise, as it often manifests itself in response to . . . absolutely nothing.

You will be driving home from church, for instance, and all of a sudden your sweet daughter will scream, “Can you stop jerking the brake every time we come to a light?? Jesus Christ!!” If you make the colossal blunder of commenting that it’s not nice to take the Lord’s name in vain on the way home from a religious ceremony, you will doubtless be subjected to another verbal assault dissecting:

a. your own tendency to swear and use the J.C. words in vain.

b. your heartless cruelty in making her go to church in the first place when you know she’s completely exhausted and this was her one and only day to sleep in, and how Christian is that?

c. your idiotic driving style, which is making her feel completely nauseous and ready to throw up.

 

Once at home she flees up to her room, only to bound down two minutes later with a sunny smile, begging for waffles. Huh? You chalk it up to a hormone-fueled brain malfunction and assume that everything is okay.

Everything is not okay.

In fact, it’s going to get exponentially worse, with exchanges like this occurring on a daily if not hourly basis, until you want to hurl yourself in front of a truck. Now, it’s a given that at this stage your child is going to want to fight with you about anything and everything. It’s your job to figure what’s worth fighting about; otherwise, you simply will not be able to outlast your kid in this battle of wills. Teens are young and fresh and aching to mix it up over any issue at all. You are old and stale and aching to mix up nothing but a cocktail. The odds are seriously against you. So when an outburst starts, take a huge breath and stop and listen to what is actually being said, rather than reacting to the extreme prejudice with which your teen is saying it.

For instance, in the previous example, your daughter’s not talking about anything. She’s venting. Your particular driving style has not proven to be an assault on her senses for the previous twelve years; it’s unlikely that it now constitutes virtual child abuse. There is no reason to respond to this diatribe. Let it go.

Many parents feel that when their kids get vicious, they are duty-bound to respond and shut down that nasty attitude. Good luck with that. In my experience, you are duty-bound to protect the sanctity of your household—a task that is going to be infinitely easier if you ignore about 95 percent of the provocative posturing of your teen. Now, I know it’s hard to walk away from a cavalcade of insults. But if you value your sanity, you must.

Pretend you’re in my beloved Philadelphia, where they boo Santa Claus and pelt referees from the stands. Develop your own bit of atty-tude.

THE NO-FEAR FACTOR

You’ve probably seen the “No Fear” bumper stickers on the back of cars and wondered what that phrase means, much as I’m bewildered by the “One day at a time” message. (What’s the alternative? Two days at a time? A half-day at a time?) “No Fear,” I’m convinced, is an underground code for what teens experience when they look at us, their parents. It’s why they feel free to be defiant, sassy, and insolent—because they have No Fear that we’re going to whack them.

“No Fear” is something brand new in parenting. When we were growing up, you knew intuitively, if not experientially, that your dad was perfectly capable of knocking you into next week if you talked back to him. My dad had a deeply worn old razor strop and whenever one of the eight of us got a bit fresh, he would head for the bathroom, unclasp the strop from his towel rack, loop it in half, and walk back into the room, smacking it crisply against his palm. (He never once used it on us, but never once did I believe that it was out of the realm of possibility.) My mom didn’t have the heart

 

 

or heft to be threatening but she was prone to administering a searing snip to the skull to get our attention, dispensing a dozen little rapid-fire smacks to our mouths if we got too sassy with her, or pulling us by our ears to move us somewhere we were resisting going. Back in the day, parents didn’t feel bad about using corporal punishment to keep you in line, and they couldn’t get arrested for it, either. They knew—and you knew—that you’d asked for it and were very likely to get it.

AGONIZING EXAMPLE

When she got to be about 13, Cecily became so mouthy and defiant, her mom decided to remove all the CDs and DVDs from her room while she was at school. That night, Cecily discovered her stuff was gone. Outraged, she screamed at her mom, “You can’t just come in my room and go through all my stuff!”

 

“I certainly can!” her mom retorted furiously. “This is my house!”

 

“We don’t even own this house—it’s a rental!” Cecily screamed back. “Now stay out of my room!”

 

At this point, her mom marched in the room and started to take away Cecily’s cell phone. Cecily reached out and shoved her mom, her mom shoved her back, and a wild pushing/wrestling/arm-squeezing fracas ensued. Cecily’s dad marched in and separated the two panting, sobbing combatants. Cecily fled out the front door and disappeared, barefoot, into the wintry night. Twenty minutes later, Cecily’s mom was frantic with worry, pacing around the porch, peering into the darkness, hoarse from shouting Cecily’s name. Cecily’s dad wasn’t panicked because the house is in a small country town and he knew she couldn’t have gone far.

 

“She’ll get cold and come in,” he said logically.

 

Cecily’s mom walked around the yard for the tenth time, looked up in the apple tree, and saw Cecily crouching high in the branches, mad as a hornet and cold as ice. She pleaded with her to come down, then begged her husband (continues) (continued) to go out and make her come down, but he said Cecily would come in when she was good and ready. A couple minutes later, a frosty but no less infuriated Cecily stomped in the front door and fled up to her room without a word. Cecily’s mom broke down in tears and spent the rest of the night in bed with a massive headache. Cecily’s dad poured himself a big scotch and wondered how the hell he was going to make it through the next five years.

Today, we don’t hit our kids. And I’m sure that’s a step in the correct, nonviolent direction. It’s also a step right off the cliff of contempt because, let’s face it: Fear is a great motivator. If you don’t believe it, enlist in the Army and see how fast a drill sergeant will use fear to change your snotty, entitled, sorry-ass attitude.

But I’m compelled to say that if you haven’t been smacking your child all along, it’s too late to start now. Teens will react very, very badly—and because they’re big enough to fight back, things can quickly escalate to a full-scale brawl. In fact, it’s probably not a good idea to use any form of physical discipline with your teen. For one thing, you’re likely to get your ass kicked. For another, in our modern age, all physical touch can be perceived as an assault.

TALES FROM POST-TEENS

I got caught drinking in high school and was suspended from school for a week. They were going to prosecute me, but my father is a lawyer and he challenged the school board and got the entire policy changed so kids could go to an alcohol awareness class and do about a million hours of community service rather than getting a permanent felony on their record. A couple months later, I got drunk again: I was walking home and the cops arrested me for underage drinking. My father came to the police station, bailed me out, and was so furious at me after everything he’d gone through for me the first time, he punched me right in the chest. He’d never hit me before and he never hit me again, but I have to admit, I earned that one.

 

 

 

Yes, our kids have “No Fear.” That’s probably a great leap forward in parenting, although in my research, many teens can recount a once-in-extreme-circumstances-swat that really got their attention. In any event, it’s important that you model a hands-to-yourself attitude. Use your words (remember, as few of them as possible) and learn the underrated pleasure of strategic retreat.

HOW CAN I MISS YOU IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY?

In early adolescence, it’s entirely possible that you have no perspective on your teen; he just seems like a mutant form of

 

 

 

your beloved child. This is a normal development—after all, it’s hard to see the forest when all the trees are falling on you. Indeed, some days it almost seems as if your teen is purposely picking fights with you. That’s because he or she is.

AND MORE

If there were one thing I regret from my teen years, it would be telling my mom to “shut the hell up.” She slapped me in the face, which I absolutely deserved, and I never spoke to her like that again.

It’s an unpleasant truth that living with a teen means your daily exposure to hostility is going to skyrocket. Right now, two opposing forces are locked in a war for supremacy over your teen’s brain, smacking his psyche back and forth like a pinball. On the one hand, he wants to be left utterly alone, which accounts for the doors slammed in your face, the lockjaw that sets in when you ask an intrusive question like “How are you doing, honey?” and the shuddering rejection of any physical sign of affection you’re naive enough to attempt. And yet, the minute you slump away as vociferously requested, she will go out of her way to engage you in a screaming contest over whether she may stay up until midnight to watch the Law & Order marathon. You can’t believe this topic is even under discussion, since you’ve outlawed TV on school nights for years, and she goes to bed at 10 P.M. Yet earlier in the evening, she picked a similar fight over your abusive choice of dinner entrée: “You made BEEF strips? Why don’t you just serve me FRESH BLOOD!!!” Then she went ballistic when you asked her to turn down her music so the ceiling didn’t vibrate from the bass tones.

TALES FROM POST-TEENS

We have three girls in our family and of course, we used to fight a lot. My dad had this unbelievable ability to completely ignore us and read the paper in the midst of all our screaming and fighting. Even if we started yelling directly at him, he would just rattle the paper and pull it up higher over his face. I hated that! My sisters and I used to complain about how emotionally unavailable he was and we felt super-sorry for ourselves for having such a remote, distancing father. But now that I’m grown, my dad and I have these amazing conversations and I realize he’s very easy to engage. He just couldn’t handle our screaming blitzes and protected himself by refusing to participate in the hysteria. My mom should have tried that.

 

 

 

Your son, on the other hand, will likely resort to the time-honored guerrilla tactics of subversion. He won’t pitch a fit when you ask him to turn the music down; he’ll just slowwwwly keep turning his music up, day after day, until it’s once again a deafening roar from the third floor. He won’t argue with you about homework; he will simply forget to bring it home. He won’t plead and scream about going out when he’s grounded; he’ll slyly slip out the back door. My stepson became so devious when he was about 13 (and 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18), my husband had to literally sit on him to prevent him from stealing out of the house at night. Boys at this age have a very difficult time articulating their feelings; instead, they act out and sneak out.

Girls are hysterical and in your face; boys are subtle and unabashedly defiant. Both are utterly confounding for parents, at least at this stage of denial. If she wants to be left alone, why does she keep engaging you in these epic show-downs over idiotic battles she knows she can’t win? If he wants to be trusted, why does he keep breaking every treaty you’ve both agreed to? Who does he think he is—Iran?

The answer to these questions is that teenagers are a walking, talking contradiction in terms. They want to be exactly like the kids in Real World, free of you and all your insanely protective restrictions. But they are also saddled with annoying emotions of deep love and attachment to you that they wholeheartedly wish would disappear. And so, teens act out a primal battle between the different parts of themselves: the little child and the emerging adult. You are merely the unfortunate target in the middle of a psychological tug-of-war.

Keep this in mind the next time the floodgates open and you’re bathed in animosity for the crime of trying to put dinner on the table. Try to maintain some empathy for what your child is working her way through, even when it appears to be your last nerve ending. When in pointless conflict with your teen, establish some distance.* Take a long walk, or lock yourself in the bathroom and turn on sports talk radio to blank out all brain activity (my husband’s methodology). Don’t come out until the shelling has stopped.

*This is generally easier for fathers than for mothers. Mothers tend to be the ones tending to the nitty-gritty details of a teenager’s life, which means there are many more points of contact—and opportunities for conflict. When things heat up, dads need to quickly step in to neutralize the situation (always take Mom’s side, Pop) so mothers aren’t buried alive in teen defiance and can disengage.

THE BUCKWHEAT STOPS HERE

Remember when you were growing up and you ate whatever your mom served for dinner? Banish that image from your mind; it will only torment you. We’ve given our kids far too much control over what they eat since birth and hence produced a generation of finicky, overfed, picky eaters. Research has proven that if you don’t introduce children to certain foods by the time they are 5, they will never develop a taste for them. (This theory holds true until they are in college and some hottie introduces them to shitake mushrooms and wasabi. Before you know it, your picky eater will be tossing back oyster shots like Pez in a frenzy to impress. But under your mundane influence? Never.)

Expanding your kids’ palate when they are teens is well-nigh impossible. They will scream bloody murder if you insist they “just try it”; you stand a better chance of getting them to yodel or tidy up their closets. The more extreme fantasy that you can somehow get teens to choose healthy foods on their own is deep-fat-fried pie in the sky.

Kids love junk food. Salty, sweet, greasy, carbonated, loaded with preservatives, and in colors not found anywhere in the natural world—yeah, baby! That doesn’t mean you have to have junk food in your house, but don’t expect your teen to abstain when he or she is not around you and presented with the opportunity to gorge. You can only do what you can do: Present a healthy model for good eating choices (“Put down that French fry and back away slowly from the nacho bar, dude”) and stock your refrigerator with fresh fruits and vegetables. If you avoid processed foods in all their many, many disguises (what the hell happened to yogurt, for instance?), you’ll be on the road to recovery from revolting food choices. Of course, there is a school of thought that proposes the more you deny kids all forms of junk, the more intense their cravings for junk become. That’s the theory Lulu is constantly trying to sell me, but I’m not buying it.

Of course, once you lay down the food law, you will have to contend with being the no-fun household, the nutritious one to be avoided at all costs. That was my household growing up, although with eight kids my mom was probably thrilled not to have a single extra child underfoot. My best friend Nancy lived in a paradise of potato chips, Popsicles, and peppermint patties and we hung out at her house all the time. Of course, I want my daughter’s friends to hang out at our house but I have a genetic predisposition toward eschewing salt- and sweet-laden snacks and that makes for less than ideal hanging-out conditions. I’m trying to find some kind of middle ground, like stockpiling snacks on days of visitation only.

In truth, I’m not very flexible around food issues; the best I can do is try to foreshorten my lectures and ditch all my enlightening statistics on weight, calories, trans fats, and additives. Unfortunately, I’m burdened by the belief that one’s job as a parent is to make sure your children eat properly and develop healthy habits. Isn’t it? Yet certainly as they grow older, most teens’ response to any counsel on what to eat is likely to be: Shove it. And with each passing Twinkie, the food struggle becomes increasingly less productive. When it comes to dispensing an open buffet of unwanted dietary advice, we overinvested parents probably should just shove it.

THE EXCRUCIATING EMBARRASSMENT OF YOU

If you’re going to make it through the next six or seven years of adolescence, you need to understand a few more things about this new relationship you’re entering with your teen. Here’s a useful metaphor: Living with a teenager is like being in a seven-year audition with Simon Cowell on American Idol. The only difference is, Simon has moments when he is almost kind, or not purposely cruel. Teenagers, however, are loath to break character and show you they love you because they can’t afford to. If they let you know how much they care, they’d be giving you a leg up in this hideous struggle called growing up. It would underscore the reality that they still depend on you for transportation, Doritos, Air Force Ones, unconditional love—and, oh yeah, cash. That dependence (both emotional and financial) is what they do not want to admit because then they might be tempted to spend time with you, which would be hugely pathetic.

TALES FROM POST-TEENS

My biggest fights with my parents were about food. My mom was a psycho food fanatic, wanting me to eat healthy—no sweets, nothing I actually liked. She sent me to school with disgusting food that I immediately threw out and replaced with other stuff I bought at the school’s cafeteria. We had to drink milk at every meal. Needless to say, it was terrible. We sometimes refused to eat for a while, especially when she made disgusting meat loaf. Every mealtime was a battle.

Thus, they must distance themselves in every way. Mostly, that means criticizing everything about you. From the way you part your hair to the way you chew your food. (Parental mastication somehow becomes both mesmerizing and mortifying the minute a kid hits 13.) From the style of jeans you are uncool enough to wear to the fact that an old fart like you is even wearing jeans at all. Literally everything about you becomes a supreme embarrassment to your children. This agony is only compounded by the indisputable fact that you share the same genetic material. Thus, there is a chance, no matter how infinitesimal, that way out there in the future they may turn out to be like you in some completely grotesque way. Deep down, they realize that you have (sneakily, when they were far too young to resist) infected them with all kinds of habits, beliefs, and values that are in there, waiting to come seeping out and turn them into . . . YOU!

Aaaaauuuuugghhhhhhh!

Faced with that possibility, they have to reject you. Otherwise, how will they ever be able to be themselves?

It’s not pleasant to anticipate, but if you can achieve a modicum of understanding of what your children are trying to achieve with their wholesale repudiation of you, it may make it a tad less painful. In other words, it’s not personal. It’s the process of differentiation. Take comfort in the fact that you are in their genetic material, you are that voice inside their head they detest, and in your sneaky way, you have made your mark on your child. So unlike Simon, they can’t kick you off the show, no matter how badly they may want to.

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

Get out your hankies. Because of all the changes adolescence brings, this aspect is the most heartrending.

Your child is going to break up with you.

She’s not going to crawl into your lap or cuddle up with you. He’s not going to tunnel under your covers in the morning or throw himself into your arms when he comes home from school. You are about to embark on an affection starvation diet. And since this is nothing you agreed to when you brought their adorable little butts into the world, you may find yourself struggling to accept the deprivation.

Think of it this way: It’s like a great relationship that is morphing from an overwhelmingly intense love affair to a mutually beneficial friendship in which you care a lot about the other person but don’t feel responsible for his daily routines, sniffly nose, or poor posture. You are not grieved or panicked when that person isn’t around, nor afflicted with the kind of longing that makes you feel like half your heart is missing when the beloved is gone.

TALES FROM POST-TEENS

I think talking back was my form of rebellion, my way to assert my own independence. Or maybe it was that I was (and continue to be) so much like my mom. When she did something that annoyed me, I realized it was probably something I did myself. And if I didn’t like it when she did it, then I wasn’t going to like it when I did it. I felt like I had to fight like hell not to become her in any way. (Or maybe I was just a snot and karma is going to kick my ass when my own daughter turns 15.)

That change is starting to happen now. So over the next few years, you are going to have to learn not to stalk your child. You’re going to have to give him his space, and allow her to experiment with ridiculous hairdos and appalling makeup without saying a word. Your child’s withdrawal from a physical relationship with you is natural, but of course the pain is exacerbated since he doesn’t want to walk, talk, or live like you, either. Needless to say, it’s painful to be with somebody who finds you repulsive. When you feel like your teen is trying to negate everything about you, mimic something you do that you know drives him or her crazy. Making fun of yourself is an oddly powerful tactic, and it’ll completely disarm your little critic. It might even make him laugh.

As you back out of the fray, do continue to seek out any opportunity you can for closeness. I am queen of the surreptitious sofa snuggle and will gladly sit through one lame sitcom after another merely to have Lulu tucked in beside me. My husband loves to play basketball with his boys, if only for the chance to sling an arm over their shoulders for a brief, manly hug afterward.

If you’re not too busy fighting over parenting, you might even consider reaching out to your mate for the comfort and affection you’re not getting from your kid anymore. Research shows that empty-nesters are far less stressed, more content, and have a lot more sex than parents of teens, who lead the pack of the sexually deprived. Things are looking up!

AGONIZING EXAMPLE

Jackie is a single mom, and her son’s dad is such a deadbeat she has had to bring Alex up entirely on her own. When her son was small, she learned to do all the boy things; she played with dinosaurs, trucks, and Star Wars characters, collected bugs and lizards, made mud pies, and became adept at video games. She went to every one of Alex’s soccer, basketball, and football games; learned how to pitch a tent; and earned multiple Scout badges. She was awesome.

 

But when Alex turned 14, he began to block her out of his life and shut himself up in his room. She called me on the verge of hysteria.” What’s wrong with him? He can’t stand to be around me! He hates me!” Working herself into a total panic, she was sure he was going through some kind of mental illness or giant depression. Finally, she went to a family counselor—who told her that Alex was acting normally and gently suggested that perhaps she should get out more and develop a life that didn’t entirely revolve around her son.