Moms, Take Heart

A New Outlook

“Somehow my daughter seems to be slipping away. I know she's growing up, but I'm still her mother. I don't want to wake up one day and think, 'What happened to her?' or 'Who is she?' And yet I'm not sure what I can do. There don't seem to be any road maps for bringing up girls today. I always wonder about what is going on in my daughter's life, but I don't seem to get any real answers. I just want to know that my daughter will be okay. I want to know that she'll make the right decisions when I'm not around. When I get nervous about all this and try to talk to her, she just gets angry, but I can't help it. I find that parenting is so much harder now that she's a teenager. Maybe this comes more naturally to other mothers, because nobody else seems to be as confused as I am. On especially awful days, I think, 'You're completely lost; you have no idea what you're doing.'”

—Mary, thirty-four

“My daughter is only ten, but she's acting like a teenager. I guess I expected these sorts of problems when she was in middle school or high school, but I'm not ready for this now. In fact, I'm already at the end of my rope, and she's not even driving yet! My two older children were never like this. Sure, some of their friends weren't my favorites, but they were never consumed with all this social stuff like my youngest is. She's talking about issues that her siblings didn't mention until they were in their midteens. Even her language seems way too advanced for her age. Other than stopping the clock for a while, there doesn't really seem to be anything else I can do. Maybe I could use some help. My head is spinning!”

—Francesca, fifty

“I had no idea that being a mother could be this hard! I guess I thought that if my daughter and I were always close, if I taught her the right values and spent lots of time with her, that we would basically see eye to eye as she grew up. But she and I couldn't be less alike. In fact, sometimes I wonder where she's come from. Among other things, I've always stressed how important it is for her to be an individual, to think for herself. But she's completely swayed by what's in and, especially by what her friends do and say. We also have very different ideas about what's appropriate for girls her age. It really amazes me-and scares me-to think of how focused she is on boys, how eager she is to please them. How could this have happened? And how are we going to get through the next few years?”

—Gerri, forty-five

Nearly every time my telephone rings lately, it's the mother of a teenage girl who is confused, upset, or absolutely frantic about the state of her daughter's social life-her friends, her attitude, her boyfriend, her secrecy, her nightlife. Without exception, mothers are concerned about what exactly their adolescent daughters are doing, who they're doing it with and, especially, if they are safe. Whether your daughter is approaching or well into the teenage years, you too may question the quality of her friendships, worry about substances and sex, and have reservations about her romantic choices. Maybe you panic whenever you see a red flag that may signal trouble, making you wonder if you are completely crazy at times. If so, be assured that you are in good company. These days, no mother seems immune.

Perhaps because we have considered ourselves a more aware and progressive generation of mothers, we expected that our daughters would somehow make smarter decisions in their lives and bypass the typical teenage troubles. Unfortunately this turned out to be a fallacy. Mothers today share a nearly universal perception: Even girls who were once rational, reasonable, and levelheaded suddenly seem to be making stupid, frightening, or potentially dangerous choices.

These girls are not all troubled; these are difficult times. Since the publication of my first book, I'm Not Mad, I Just Hate You!, which dealt with conflict in the mother-daughter relationship, women have increasingly told me that their teenagers' social lives have become their number one concern. In fact, countless mothers have confided that they never could have imagined, much less predicted, their daughters' behavior. For example, some girls were caught using alcohol or drugs, sneaking out of their homes, and lying about their whereabouts. Others were found to have diaries or e-mail peppered with vulgar words or explicit sexual references. A few were even taken to emergency rooms or picked up by police or suspended from school.

These aren't evil girls from awful families but typical teenagers, some of whom are struggling, many with remarkable talents, who are nonetheless making worrisome choices. It may be difficult or even unthinkable to accept that your daughter, if she has not already done so, may soon join their ranks. Yet it is important to acknowledge from the outset that poor decisions, rash actions, and risk taking are as fundamental to adolescence as acne, braces, and the first kiss. It is just that you probably never thought you would have to deal with them.

Until now, it was always other teenagers who wove elaborate cover stories to elude parents who forbade them from certain peers and situations. You were sure that the open communication and trusting relationship you worked so hard all these years to establish with your daughter would eliminate her need for such subterfuge as a teen. The first time you discover that she has manipulated, deliberately misled, or outwardly lied to you, your whole foundation may be shaken. Is it possible that your daughter is being evasive, telling half-truths, or blithely ignoring your rules?

Similarly, some of you may gasp in shock and dismay when you discover that your daughters have not been victims but perpetrators of unkindness. Was it really your girl who started the vicious rumor, excluded the “loser” from the lunch table, or mercilessly used that lovely boy who had a crush on her? After discovering her thirteen-year-old's efforts to bad-mouth and ostracize a longtime pal, one mother maintained, “I never would have dreamed she would do anything like that. I thought my daughter would know better-and act better!”

Many of your daughters may make other, less serious but still self-defeating choices. While traveling across the country to speak to groups of parents, for example, I am frequently asked for advice about girls who develop unhealthy friendships and demeaning romantic relationships. Mira, mother to fourteen-year-old Phillippa, says, “I watch my daughter being excluded by her two so-called best friends, over and over, and yet she still lets them hurt her. Why can't she defend herself or, better yet, make more loyal friends?” Similarly, fifteen-year-old Loren's mother describes her daughter's pattern of “longing to be friends with girls in the popular crowd, who not only rebuff her but are often mean to her. It's heartbreaking.” Norma, mother to seventeen-year-old Randy, is aghast at “the way her boyfriend seems to control her with his criticism, his emotional threats, and that awful pager.”

Whether your daughter is placing herself in danger, tolerating harmful relationships, or engaging in behavior that makes your hair stand on end, you have probably found yourself, at various times, worried, frustrated, shocked, or disgusted. Confronted with her particularly bad decisions, you may even feel angry. As one mother put it, “After staying up half the night waiting for her to come home, I thought if she was still alive I was going to kill her!” You may have reacted similarly when your daughter was a little girl and wandered away from you. As you finally located her or pulled her from the street, your initial relief may have turned to rage as the enormity of what could have happened sunk in.

Even if your daughter is proceeding through adolescence in the slow lane, cautiously staying within the lines, you may be concerned because some of her friends appear reckless in their great rush to grow up. Or your daughter's shyness and preference for sticking close to home may make you concerned not about excessive socializing or harmful relationships, but loneliness and social inexperience. It is also possible that despite your own daughter's apparently good adjustment, you can't help but become alarmed as you look all around you. You may want to learn as much as you can about teenagers' social lives to avoid problems in the future.

It is the rare mother of a teenage girl, therefore, who feels she doesn't need help.

Skyrocketing Worries

These days the topic of your daughter's social life is likely to ignite instant contention between you two, along with a smoldering sensation in the pit of your stomach. Why is this happening? you might ask. It hasn't always been this way.

Since your daughter was a young girl, you have probably invested considerable thought and effort in teaching her to follow her heart while learning to get along with others. Still, despite your mindfulness, probably neither your daughter nor her life has been perfect. Perhaps her chattiness, possessiveness, or flair for melodrama has occasionally alienated others. Teased or disappointed by a close friend, she may have become furious, inconsolable, or vengeful. If your daughter acted without thinking, you may have helped her deal with the fallout of blurted nastiness or regretted self-disclosure.

Back then, however, the biggest social dilemmas were how she would handle a bossy friend, whether or not she should quit Girl Scouts, or whom she invited to (and could exclude from) her next birthday party. Sure, you may have been taken aback by the passion of her second-grade crush, but today the issues are far more serious, the stakes infinitely higher. You may be fearful about where she is headed, and worried that if she picks the wrong friends, she will be led astray or cave in to peer pressures with irrevocable consequences.

There are perfectly valid reasons for these fears. Though you may feel crazy, you are actually responding reasonably to a number of issues that are complicating your daughter's social life and therefore, your relationship with her. You may find it comforting that other mothers are struggling with these same concerns.

A Scarier World

If you have the sense that your daughter is growing up in a world different from the one in which you were raised, you are correct. Of course, the worries of undesirable friendships, traffic accidents, and teenage pregnancy have been around for generations. Similarly, despite the strong warnings you have issued, probably ad nauseam, your daughter could be one of the 52 percent of teenagers who admits to using an illegal substance by senior year of high school. But, without question, there are additional worries, wider choices, scarier dangers, and more intense pressures faced by contemporary teenagers, with fewer cultural protections in place.

As but one example, your daughter's use of PCs, cell phones, pagers, e-mail, and instant messaging makes it that much harder for you to monitor her social life, as well as to anticipate and resolve any difficulties that arise. In fact, you may be scrambling even to keep up with your daughter's knowledge of this technology, much less to establish guidelines that can limit or prevent its hazards. Similarly, unlike your own mother, you have to think about guns on playgrounds; angry, sexist lyrics inciting aggression toward girls at rock concerts; and the routine sex and violence in movies, television shows, and CDs. Even more alarming, there are the unthinkable possibilities: your daughter planning a rendezvous with a young man she met in a chat room, being raped after drinking a Roofie-laced soda, or contracting the fatal HIV infection. This new world requires a new approach, with new rules.

It may surprise you that it is not only mothers who perceive the world as scarier; daughters do too. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that over 43 percent of teenagers surveyed believed they were having a harder time growing up than their parents had. These teens cited, among other causes, a faster pace of life, worries about a more dangerous world, and greatly increased peer pressure to use alcohol, drink excessively, and do other new drugs such as laced marijuana, ecstasy, and inhalants.

These data are consistent with a disturbing trend; although I have treated adolescents in psychotherapy for over twenty years, it is only during the past five years or so that girls have reported markedly higher levels of distress-and their mothers have dealt with correspondingly more distressing teen behavior. Interestingly, as I was finishing this book I came across a new study that corroborates this change. Psychologist Jean Twenge of Case Western Reserve University found that today's children feel significantly more anxious than did children in the 1950s. In fact, normal children ages nine to seventeen display more anxiety today than those who were treated for psychiatric disorders fifty years ago.

It is hardly surprising that your own apprehension slips so easily into overdrive. Perhaps on occasion you have extrapolated from your daughter's single bad decision to extreme or dire consequences. For example, the mother of a sixteen-year-old described that “after getting the inconceivable news that my daughter spent an evening at an unsupervised home with a boy generally regarded as trouble, I instantly became convinced that date rape, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, and AIDS were just around the corner.” Similarly, even the glimpse of a beer can or whiff of alcohol on her breath may result in panicky predictions of overdoses, addictions, and accidental deaths. Your memories of reading about tragedies involving teenagers and thinking, “That could be my daughter” are never far from consciousness.

Is it any wonder that whenever you are confronted with your daughter's poor judgment and risky behavior, you may think, “Has she lost her mind?”

Or just as likely, you fear you will lose your own.

She's Not Fully Mature

Because your daughter is still developing, you may have doubts that she is ready to handle a more dangerous world. It's not that she lost her mind, it's just not full grown yet. Techniques such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron-emission tomography) scanning have proven that your daughter's brain is still maturing through the teenage years and even beyond. Although this information may not reassure you that she is ready to take care of herself, it does clarify why the adolescent stage of development is, by definition, a minefield of impediments to good decision making.

For example, the corpus callosum, a structure that connects the left and right sides of the brain and is responsible for self-awareness, is not fully developed until the twenties. The temporal lobes, which facilitate emotional control and language, do not reach maximum maturity until age sixteen. Perhaps most important, the frontal lobes-the center of executive functions such as organization, planning, judgment, and the regulation of behavior and emotions-hit their peak growth spurt between puberty and young adulthood. Not only is the immature adolescent brain more vulnerable to trauma and drugs, but it also cannot manage stresses such as social pressures and sexual or aggressive urges as well as the adult brain. No wonder your daughter's tenuous impulse control has you worried!

There are other valid reasons for teenagers' poor judgment. Some have not yet developed sufficient abstract thinking to generalize from their experiences and benefit from their mistakes. Many have not learned good problem-solving skills. For example, teenagers' occasionally rigid, black-or-white thinking (“If I can't do it now, I'll never do it!”) prevents them from considering several solutions to their problems. When one approach fails, they tend to give up (“Forget it, there's no way!”). Or often their adolescent veil of invincibility and immortality (“I'll be fine, nothing will happen”) allows them to make choices without even considering the possible consequences of their behavior.

As if all this weren't enough to override teenagers' logic, the added ingredients of raging hormones and intense, unpredictable emotions are a surefire recipe for girls' unfortunate decisions. Adolescent daughters are all but infamous for mood swings. If your daughter is among the girls today who are experiencing the earliest signs of physical maturation by age eight or nine, this probably won't mean full-blown puberty or imminent menstruation. But she may be experiencing hormonal pulses long before her brain-not to mention her coping skills-are mature enough to handle them.

Of course, these developmental factors are not completely to blame; there are times when your daughter simply forgets to use her head. Caught up in the moment, she doesn't think. Or she deliberately chooses to ignore the wisdom you know she is capable of in favor of an appealing peer's influence or a tantalizing social experience. Among themselves, the teenage mantra seems to be, “Yeah, I know it was stupid, but I had fun.” No wonder your fears have skyrocketed!

Yet it is important to remember that your daughter's unfortunate behavior, detrimental relationships, and even lapses of judgment do not suggest that she is a bad seed or terrible person. She has merely made unfortunate decisions. Although you might wish she would always use her head, you know this is hardly realistic. It also may be comforting to learn that your daughter and her friends are not unique in this regard. Not only are poor choices common during adolescence, but a survey by Who's Who Among American High School Students found that even academic superstars are not immune. For example, more than 75 percent of honor students nationwide have cheated, only half of sexually active teens use condoms, and 10 percent have driven a car while drunk. Obviously, being book smart doesn't make teenagers act smart.

Secret Social Lives

Just as the perils threatening your daughter appear to multiply, you probably feel it is harder to supervise her, let alone to protect her. The powerful developmental push to establish peer relationships-and ease away from intense emotional ties at home-is responsible for teen girls' developing private, almost secret, social lives. These days it is hard to miss the hints that your daughter prefers the company of her friends-if not the solitude of her room-to being with you. As Peggy, mother of fifteen-year-old Martha, put it, “She used to hang around and chat with me while I got dinner on the table, and sometimes we watched our favorite TV shows together. That's a distant memory now.”

Other than to make requests, your daughter may be eager to communicate only one thing: that she is her own person and, therefore, no longer needs to rely on your opinions or advice. To make clear her independence, your daughter may adopt a perpetually bored demeanor around you, appearing so listless and apathetic that her typical response to your remarks or queries is a dismissive “whatever,” or a barely audible, whispered syllable that sounds like “mumblemumble.”

Until the phone rings, that is. Then you hear the delighted shrieks and peals of giggles reminiscent of her younger years. And if a boy happens to call, you may hardly recognize the charming, dulcet voice that answers the phone. With that all-too-familiar sinking sensation in your gut, it dawns on you that you no longer have the power to elicit this reaction from your daughter.

Even if your daughter is forthcoming about her social life, it is an illusion to believe you have all the information. Ask any mother who has wisely pretended to be invisible while driving a carload of her daughter's friends. When girls get caught up in conversation and forget to be guarded, mothers can overhear snippets of experiences they have had, names of people they know, and memories they share-none of which are remotely familiar. Once again, it may hit you that your daughter has her own social life, with its unique history separate from yours.

Your daughter may now be guarding this social life with a passion. Maybe she used to burst in the door from her elementary school bus, animatedly describing how Kendall's secret got spilled, why Dora and Marie got in a fight during recess, and what she is planning for tomorrow night's sleepover. But now you may find it difficult to obtain any particulars about what she and her friends are up to. She probably responds to even the gentlest of inquiries about her social life with retorts such as “What do you want to know?” or “Please, leave me alone!” Your more direct questions-should you have the nerve to ask any-are experienced as intrusions tantamount to brain surgery.

And heaven forbid you doubt her peers! Despite any misgivings your daughter herself may have, she will feel compelled to defend or even champion her friends to you or any adult who has the temerity to question them.

Although you may know full well that it is normal for teenage girls to prize their privacy, this developmental shift enormously affects your mothering. Needless to say, if your daughter classifies her thoughts, feelings, and activities as top secret, parenting her will be all the more challenging. Plus, if you cannot find out reassur- ing information, your maternal anxiety can run away with your imagination.