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Parenting: Our teenagers are supposed to have intense emotions

 


I was speaking to a friend this week and she was talking about the focus on mental health and wellbeing in her daughter’s new school.  Like most parents she was pleased to see the school shift in this direction but she had also observed a change in her daughter’s choice of words.  Words like worry and sad were being replaced with words like stressed, anxious or depressed.   And while more sophisticated use of language is part of the normal developmental trajectory it got me wondering about how our young people are making sense of their feelings within this new world of embracing mental health.   

Mood swings are a defining feature of adolescence.  During this period of development our kids will experience their emotions more intensely than any other time in their lives.  This happens because their brains are under construction – they are getting faster and more specialised, ultimately supporting our kids move into adulthood.  This reconstruction project happens from the bottom to the top. Our kids will start to experience super charged feelings from about the age of 10, well before they have a fully developed prefrontal cortex to help them manage these feelings. 

When big feelings hijack the thinking part of the brain this can feel very disconcerting, particularly with our tweens (10 – 12) who often abruptly go from a relatively neutral state to what some parents describe as emotional chaos. 

This is often when I meet with families.  They are concerned about the abrupt change in both emotionality and behaviour.  And while there are circumstances, when these changes are signalling a more significant difficulty, in most cases the young person in front of me is exactly where they are meant to be - in the wildly chaotic, wonderful world of adolescence.

This hijack can happen in all sorts of situations, the pony tail that doesn’t look quite right, the birthday party they are not invited to, the bad grade they get on one of their school tests.  Every one of these moments can instigate a tidal wave of emotions which burst out in all sorts of different guises, tears, uproar, withdrawal.    Dr Lisa Damour once described adolescence as a garden of mirrors where the ability to get an accurate perspective on what is happening is massively curtailed.   This is the garden our kids inhabit during a hijack and there is no possibility of a clearer perspective until the siege is over.    

Our job is these circumstances is to provide a steady presence.  We do this by viewing the behaviour in front of us through the lens of adolescence and normalising the intensity of their reaction even when, or maybe especially when, it makes absolutely no sense to us.

In these moments the story we tell ourselves and the story we tell our teens matters.  They are going to experience significant sadness, they are going to experience significant worry, they are going to experience significant anger and frustration. This is not something that needs to be fixed, this is not something that needs to be pathologized.  It is something that needs to be understood and normalised.  Our focus on mental health and wellbeing is a good thing, it has reduced stigma, it has increased inclusivity, it has created space for struggle.  Our challenge, in this newly informed context, is to hold space for normal adolescent development, where our kids have permission to experience intense emotions without their mental health being called into question.

I have written a much more detailed account of the teenage brain if you wish to read it here 

https://resilienceandwellbeing.blogspot.com/2021/05/understanding-amazing-teenage-brain.html 


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