What No One Tells You About Parenting an Adolescent

The angst and attitude are challenging, yes. But here's the bigger challenge we don't talk about.

Photo by Monstera/Pexels

I expected the raging hormone cocktail. I didn’t expect it quite so soon, but the mood swings and eye rolls and furrowed brows didn’t come as a huge surprise.

My partner and I have always known we’d be in for it. Our daughter’s natural intensity and ironclad will have made every “normal” parenting challenge that much more pronounced. Other mothers struggled with their babies latching while breastfeeding; my daughter gummed a hole through my nipple. Other parents carried on semi-coherent conversations while following their toddlers around the playground; if I rummaged in the diaper bag for half a second, I’d look up to find my daughter scaling the playground fence.

My daughter has always liked to do things her way on her schedule, and she has long thought that the boundaries her hapless parents tried to impose on her were cute. When she was four, I found her at the dining room table looking thoroughly engrossed in page 128 of a recently and desperately purchased book called Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child.

Apparently, she was tired of our lame limit-setting attempts and was going to take matters into her own hands.

The book, by the way, was not at all helpful. If my child did not willingly go to her room for timeouts, it instructed me, I should pick her up and deposit her there myself. But by the time she was four, I was not physically capable of picking up my daughter against her will. She was tall, dense, and muscular and could flail her way out of most any situation.

I haven’t tried to pick my daughter up in years. At age 12, she can now look me straight in the eyes and would probably beat me in arm wrestling. She still finds my boundary-setting capabilities laughable, though every boundary I now try to set is no longer cute, it’s SO UNFAIR, OMG ARE YOU JOKING RIGHT NOW?

As a group, adolescents are not known for their kindness and tact, particularly where their parents are involved. And, for whatever reason, particularly when that parent is the mother.

Dealing with the constant sighs, jabs, and negativity has been harder on me than I’d like to admit. I made a pact with myself that I’d let this stuff roll off my back because engaging with it only magnifies its impact and am I really going to let my feelings get hurt by indulging in some silly argument with a 12 year old?

It was a sound plan, but turns out, my feelings wanted no part of it. They seemed to prefer to flop around and let themselves get bruised. Just this past weekend, when my daughter still appeared to be sleeping at 11:30 a.m. and a few raps on her door yielded only silence, I took a deep breath and ventured inside to do a pulse check. She opened her eyes as I approached her bed and said, WHAT!?

I said, “Oh good, you’re alive.” My voice may or may not have contained just a hint of sarcasm.

She said, “Has anyone in this family ever heard of knocking?”

I said, “I did knock.”

She said, “Whatever. Can you go now?”

I said, “It’s a beautiful day!”

She said, “I hate this family.”

At which point I sighed very loudly and exited the room, perhaps letting my feet make contact with the ground a bit more forcefully than was necessary and while not exactly slamming the door, definitely shutting it with a little extra oomph.

I am not a religious person, but every morning these days I find myself muttering the same prayer: God, please grant me the strength to not get into it with my 12 year old today.

And there I was, three minutes into my first exchange of the day with my daughter, and God had already failed me.

//

I thought that sharing a home with a moody know-it-all whose brain wasn’t yet fully developed would be the challenge of parenting an adolescent. But it’s not.

I should already know this. My stepson, now 24, lived with us full-time when he was 15 and 16. He was generally polite to me, and though he certainly had his moments of know-it-all assholery, I did not start my mornings bargaining with a higher power I wasn’t quite sure I believed in.

During that year, our daughter was deep in the throes of threenagehood and our son was not yet walking. I realized very quickly that parenting children, particularly young children, and parenting adolescents were two very different things. Though my daughter pushed limits daily, we were still in control of what she consumed and how she spent her time.

My stepson, not so much. Our ability to carefully orchestrate our children’s lives slips away gradually over the course of many years, but when adolescence hits, the director’s chair is violently wrenched out from under us. We lose control of the plotline, fade into the background of the story we thought we were creating.

This is the natural progression of things. I get that. As our children mature, they become more independent and their friends begin to take center stage. I’ve even quite enjoyed their burgeoning independence, particularly their ability to get themselves to and from school.

What I don’t enjoy is watching them succumb to broader forces of socialization beyond my control. I’m as worried about peer pressure and fentanyl and social media as the next parent, but my concerns go far beyond risky behavior. As I’ve watched my children assert their growing independence — first my stepson, now my daughter, and all too soon, her younger brother — I’ve also watched their sense of self become defined by a broader culture that is inherently toxic. It’s a culture rife with racism and misogyny, a culture driven by dominance and disconnection.

Over a recent dinner, during which my daughter kept sighing dramatically and clinking her silverware with unnecessary force, I finally turned to her asked her why she was acting so mad. 

She said: “Why shouldn’t I be mad? Everything sucks. The world might end, people are racist, men think they’re better than women, and there are people addicted to drugs sleeping on the streets!”

Well, she has a point there.

As parents, we bring our children into this world and therefore feel a certain sense of obligation to convince them it’s a world worth living in. No one puts it better than poet Maggie Smith in her poem, Good Bones:

… Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

What my daughter is learning is that there is at least as much ugliness in the world as there is beauty (a “conservative estimate,” says Maggie Smith in the same poem), and she’s rightfully pissed off about it. As she’s questioning everything she thought she knew, she is also questioning her own worth. 

She’s finding the world doesn’t stack up, and neither does she.

//

For my stepson, adolescence was a time of slow hardening. He built walls, clenched his vulnerabilities like fists. For my daughter, adolescence has manifested in a slow taming, a shedding of confidence that began right on schedule at age nine and continues its grim march forward. It’s difficult for me to watch, particularly as a 43–year-old woman who is finally reclaiming my own sense of self-worth after decades of never quite feeling good enough.

I see my daughter starting to internalize all the things I’ve spent the last few years trying to unlearn — all the messages about what a female should be interested in, how a female should behave, and how a female should present herself. As I’m gleefully shedding high heels, skirts, eyeliner, and all the frivolous fucks I once gave about what other people think, my daughter is accumulating product after product in a frantic and unrelenting quest to fix all the flaws she now perceives in herself.

Two years ago, she wore her tightly coiled ringlets in a beautiful halo around her head. Now she slathers them in hair wax and coerces them into a low ponytail. Boys don’t like her, she says, because she doesn’t have hair she can flip over her shoulder.

I try, though often fail, to walk the delicate line between respecting her choices and critiquing the messages the broader world is sending her. I don’t want to tell her her hair looks bad in a ponytail (it doesn’t), but I miss her assertive curls and the ferocity they embodied.

She is not only a female but a biracial female whom the world perceives as Black, and I feel slightly heartsick at the prospect of having to release her into this world. It’s a better world, in some ways, than the world that awaited me. But in other ways, too many other ways, it’s undoubtedly worse.

I didn’t wholly anticipate this. When my daughter was born, Obama was president and I thought we’d reached a turning point.

My daughter is pissed, and she has every right to be. The world is at least half terrible, and she will experience its terribleness disproportionately simply by virtue of her gender and skin color, and not only that, she is the only 12 year old in the entire world — scratch that, universe — who is forced to go on hikes and is not allowed to post on TikTok.

The rage is there, simmering if not boiling, and she doesn’t always know what to do with it. Rage is for men, after all. Anger doesn’t become the gentler sex.

Right now, I bear the brunt of this rage because I’m an easy target, and hey, maybe I deserve it sometimes. If nothing else, I brought her into a world that I knew was at least half terrible. I thought maybe we could make it beautiful. Maybe we still can.