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.
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.
