When your kids are little, they get into a lot of trouble. Scribbling on the pages of books, scattering cereal all over the carpet, squeezing out the one tube of expensive lotion you bought at Sephora instead of Walmart, peeing in a water gun and leaving it in their closet to get rancid and disgusting (oh, just my kids then? Hmm).
Nevertheless, there’s a much-needed balance when they’re small. Because for everything your kids do that makes you want to pull your hair out, they do something that melts your heart: twirling a strand of your hair during bedtime snuggles, or placing their chubby hands on your cheeks and saying, “I love you, Mommy!” And just like that, all is forgiven. They’re so sweet, these little house-wrecking demons. You know without a doubt that at the end of each exhausting day, you are the center of their universe. You will never be this loved or this needed again. And all those things they do, they do because they’re still learning what’s acceptable — learning how to be people.
Teenagers, though. They mess up, too, but those messes are less carpet-wrecking, wall-scribbling mess, more situation. Failing classes, smashing Xbox controllers, making poor choices, acting how you know you raised them not to act, testing boundaries in a big way. The messes teens make are not as easy to clean up as finger paints or muddy footprints. And that’s not the only difference.
When they’re little, at least you know that they love you. But when they’re teens, there are days when you’re pretty sure they don’t even like you. And you know you’re no longer the center of their universe — you’ve been summarily replaced with a phone and a social life.
When they’re little, and they have to accept the consequences for their actions, they’re usually sorry (or at least absolutely wrecked that you’re disappointed in them); but when they’re teens with consequences, they’re seething, and it feels like your fault. There’s not much “Yeah, I was acting stupid, and I accept full responsibility for doing this stupid thing.” Admission of fault would mean their parents were right, and heaven forbid! There are are just huffs and eye rolls and slammed doors and silent treatments as they sulk because you dared to do your job as a parent. And even though you know deep down that you’ve done the right thing, their angry reaction sets off that little voice of self-doubt inside you. Are you overreacting? Are you picking the wrong battles? Did you handle it the way you should’ve?
But even worse are the messages we send ourselves. When they’re little, you can tell yourself that maybe they just don’t know better. But when they’re teens, you worry that they do know better and just don’t care — and that you’ve made them like this somehow. Like somewhere along the way, you failed to complete some kind of critical parenting task, and now instead of being the obedient, respectful, motivated kids you’ve spent years trying to raise, they’re these surly, petulant beings who do things and say things you would have once been appalled to think they’d do and say. You know, back in those halcyon days when you so confidently (and naively) thought, “My kid would never.”
When they’re little and they mess up, you tell yourself, “They’re learning.” When they’re teens, you tell yourself, “You’re failing.”
But as a fellow parent of teenagers, I’m here to issue an important reminder (to myself as much as anyone else!): You’re not alone, and comparing your teens to what you think other people’s teens are like isn’t doing any good. Because your friends aren’t posting about their big kids’ meltdowns or bad attitudes on social media. They’re posting the highlights — the championship wins, the honor society inductions. They’re posting the smiling photos before the school dance, not the 1 a.m. ride home where they ripped into their kid for having a couple of drinks at an unsupervised afterparty. For every photo you see, there are a hundred other snapshots of life you don’t. No one is sailing breezily through parenting teens without dealing with — at the very minimum— moments of major, out-of-nowhere, what-did-you-just-say-to-me? attitude. (And if they say they are, they’re lying.) It’s just that nobody wants to be open about it, because we’re all so caught up in that mindset of “if my teenage kids are acting out, it must be the result of a failure on my part.”
Don’t hold your own teenager — or, more importantly, your own parenting — up to a standard of unrealistic perfection. Because in this case, it really isn’t you; it’s them. Those lessons you’ve spent their whole life trying to impart aren’t lost. They’re just overridden sometimes by that pesky underdeveloped rational brain. And you don’t even have to take my word for it.
“Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part,” says the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Health Encyclopedia. “In teens’ brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing — and not always at the same rate. That’s why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.”
See? It isn’t you, it’s just their brains working the way teenage brains work. And let’s add some salt to the wound: While the rational part is still far from developed at this point in their lives, another part is working in overdrive, which can further complicate things.
“[T]here is another part of the brain that is fully active in adolescents, and that’s the limbic system. And that is the seat of risk, reward, impulsivity, sexual behavior and emotion,” neurobiologist Dr. Frances Jensen said in an interview with broadcaster Michael Krasny. “So they are built to be novelty-seeking at this point in their lives. Their frontal lobe isn’t able to say, ‘That’s a bad idea, don’t do that.’ That’s not happening to the extent it will in adulthood.”
To top it off, you’re both grappling with the swiftly-changing dynamics of your relationship — because you’re not 100% responsible for their basic needs any more, but you’re still their mom, and figuring out the push-and-pull of autonomy is hard. It’s a dance you’re both doing, but neither of you know the moves.
So cut yourself some much-needed slack, Mama. Because while the teenage years may be easier in that you no longer have butts to wipe or hotdogs to cut up, they’re harder in that you have much bigger things than butts and hotdogs to worry about now. But those appalling lapses in judgment and nasty attitudes are not a matter of a parenting fail; they’re a result of a brain that’s still developing, even when they look like they’re old enough to know better. Just like when they were toddlers. And just like back then, their missteps don’t indicate your failures. They’re still learning. It just looks different now.
When it feels like you’re in the weeds, remember all that. But, more importantly, remember this: some day they’ll likely be the parents of teens. And you’ll laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
These celebrity parents are sharing the struggle — and sweetness — of raising teenagers.
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