I'm teaching a workshop on the secret to connecting with your preTeen and Teen this Thursday. Thinking back to my own painful experiences at this age helped. When I was 13 I spent so much time and energy trying to fit in. It was critical to get my hair fanned just right, my bell bottom jeans and blazers with shoulder pads, my mannerisms. It was crucial to be seen as acceptable and appropriate, cool. I anticipated what other's needed and did it without being asked. Or I'd censor myself, what I said, X-ing out parts I feared would be judged. I did, and still do almost anything to avoid being judged and found lacking. This would be hard evidence that I wasn't enough. Both then and now I'm vigilante and work hard to be good at all things I do so I stay beyond criticism.
I've come to learn almost everything I do is to be emotionally safe. I learned this in my childhood and cemented it during my teen years.
The teen times are excruciating as Dan Siegel writes about in Brainstorm, the Power and Purpose of the Teenaged Brain. He wrote this for his own teenaged children as a way for them and their friends to understand themselves. It is very helpful for me as a parent to understand my own kids. When I heard Dan speak in Nov. 2016 it was after he'd written this book to address a series of teen suicides in Palo Alto. The focus was how challenging this time in their lives is. They push parents away, developmentally to learn independence and move towards peers, yet they yearn for reassurance and love, so are conflicted.
In the class I teach I emphasize the extreme changes they are experiencing, and that our teens need our attention, our acceptance and our support most when their behavior pushes us to least want to give it to them. The key question is, "What is underneath this 'bad' behavior of defiance, eye rolling, lack of communication and extreme risk taking?"
Dan mentioned the teen years being a time of huge brain development, highlighting the following areas:
Time of transition
Parents/Family to Friends as main source of safety and belonging
Body, becoming sexually aware and able, hormones, physical changes
New expectation, life transitions, moving away from home
Extreme, intense emotions, large mood swings, big reactions